Porter’s Pensées

I’ve always had it in for golf, even before Trump, for reasons I explained here last year: https://bernardjporter.com/2024/09/22/golf/. Trump’s obsession with the game is probably quite low down among my reasons for disliking both it and him, but it does look quite apposite: a game where you are (in his case, I think) mainly playing against yourself, get carried from hole to hole in a buggy, and with plenty of opportunities to cheat. Today of course he’s in Scotland visiting his golf courses there, one of them at least highly controversial, with him trying to eject an old crofter who is spoiling the view for his rich clients; and followed – I hear – by a trail of little golf buggies, like ducklings following their Mum. That must be a sight! He’ll also be meeting Starmer, which I would have liked to hope goes badly (à la Love Actually): except of course that a trade treaty might depend on it. Humiliating for Sir Keir, I imagine, and for most of the rest of us; but maybe it has to be done. ‘Lie back and think of England…’

Britain once had a prime minister who was mad about golf, AJ Balfour (of Balfour Declaration fame). He wasn’t very good.

One little ray of light at a time when universities, especially in America, are being traduced and threatened with huge financial penalties on purely political and ideological grounds, by far Right governments like that of Donald Trump. (I see that Columbia is the latest to capitulate. Harvard, I think, is fighting, through the courts.) Often the excuse given for targeting universities is Faculty or student ‘anti-semitism’; but I wonder whether this isn’t deliberately conflating that sickening prejudice with opposition to Israeli army atrocities in Gaza? Can anyone tell me of any significant genuine anti-semitism, at Columbia, Harvard or anywhere else? We know how that false accusation has been very effectively ‘weaponised’ in Britain.

My ‘ray of light’ is a message I received this morning from my old university, Cambridge, informing me that a new Chancellor has been appointed, after a vote of members (like me). He is (Lord) Chris Smith; a former Labour minister, and a thoroughly good (by which I mean liberal) egg. He is also openly gay; not especially significant in itself, but it may indicate that we Cambridge graduate voters are mainly liberal too.

Incidentally: ‘Chancellor’ in this context seem to be a merely ceremonial role, the real work being done by the Vice-Chancellor. But it must give Lord Smith some influence, and even ‘pull’.

Returning to my own vomit this morning – checking the 6^th edn of The Lion’s Share in order to respond to a request for permission to quote passages from it in an exam paper – I was struck by how well it reads. Pleased, yes; but also depressed.

Depressed, firstly because I know that I’ll never be able to write anything as good again, at 84, and with my memory and concentration spent; but also, secondly, because I despair of The Lion’s Share’s influence. One reason I wrote the book originally was to persuade readers of the complexities and nuances of a subject – ‘British imperialism’ – which was usually regarded simplistically, and exploited politically, by both Left and Right, in highly misleading ways. It was for this reason that from the very beginning (the 1970s) I conceived of it as a book for a ‘general’ readership – to be displayed for example in bookshop windows and at airports: a bit like Niall Ferguson’s later Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World – and not as a school or college textbook, which was how my publisher eventually marketed it. I think they tried to ride both horses, with an eye-catching jacket design for example (discarded in later editions); but by then Longmans had morphed into a predominantly ‘educational’ publisher – later called ‘Pearson Education’. And I have to admit that the book was well reviewed, sold very well under their imprint – hence the six editions – and made me a bit of money, as a textbook. But that’s not what I wanted.

Maybe it wasn’t opinionated or one-sided enough, as Ferguson’s book is. (That was presented – not altogether fairly – as pro-empire, against the contemporary anti-imperial trend.) Perhaps I was simply not so famous – or as pushy – as him. (I’m not good at self-advertisement.) Maybe I haven’t got the ‘common’ literary touch; although one of the comments I treasured most dearly was a postcard from one who had, the famous travel-writer Jan Morris, telling me that she had been ‘reading it in the bath and was unable to stop until the water was cold’. (Could I have used that in the ‘blurb’?) Perhaps the subtlety of my interpretation will have filtered through eventually, to people who were given it to read as a textbook at school or university. (Or in exam papers like the one I’m supposed to be checking now.) That’s what I cling on to. But how can I know?

All I can know is that it doesn’t seem to have affected at all the wider discussion of British imperialism, or of other topics where the idea of ‘empire’ is reckoned to be pertinent. The subject is still mainly seen in simplistic terms. You’re either ‘for’ or ‘against’ it: which in my view is not a very fruitful approach, if you want to understand anything. I was – and am – neither for nor against the British empire as such: although I joined anti-imperial groups when they were protesting against particular colonial ills – apartheid, for example, Rhodesia, and the Kenya camp atrocities. But the history of the empire overall is nowhere near as straightforward. It may be the moral complexity of my analysis that deprived me of the attention I sought.

But isn’t this the fate of most scholars and academics: to be ignored by the general public even when they are telling them useful – albeit complicated – things? 

Here’s the blessed Naomi Klein on what she calls ‘End-Times Fascism’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtYSyb6fCxo.

The connexion between MAGA and the religious notion of the ‘Rapture’ hadn’t occurred to me before. It makes sense; in particular of the relationship between Trump and Netanyahu, who is visiting Washington currently. Is this the way capitalism and the world end (see my last post)? And is it what the ‘Christian’ Zionists want?

America seems to be going mad. Or at least, the minority of Americans (taking account of abstainers) who voted him in do. For the rest of us, all around the world: be afraid. Be very afraid. We know from historical experience how evil and destructive religions can be.

Well, here it comes, perhaps: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/03/jeremy-corbyn-hints-at-launch-of-new-party-as-leftwing-alternative-to-labour?

The idea of a new and avowedly socialist party (in the UK) is obviously attractive to an old Leftie like me. I’d even welcome Jeremy Corbyn back, in a leading (if not necessarily the leading) role. It could steal some of Reform’s thunder simply by presenting itself as new, and as more convincingly anti-establishment: replacing Reform’s scapegoats with another kind of ‘boat people’ – rich yacht-owners rather than poor refugees in dinghies, for example, and Etonian toffs rather than welfare cheats; convincingly addressing issues that actually matter to people, homes especially, both ownership and rental; taxing the ultra-rich rather than reducing welfare benefits; cultivating an image of honesty, which is perceived to be in short supply in the other parties (that would require some discipline); cultivating a different kind of ‘patriotism’ from Reform’s: based on pride in the NHS, for example, rather than in the Royal family and the Flag (see my Britain’s Contested History, 2014); abjuring ‘wokery’, or the silliest bits of it; and possibly (if this is popular) supporting the Palestinian cause more genuinely. (Corbyn would see to that.) In other words: it could flourish by distancing itself from the ‘they’re all the same’ image that so harms the established parties today (perhaps unfairly), and which Reform plays on so effectively. It could even come out for proportional representation in elections, which would work to a small party’s benefit (see https://bernardjporter.com/2016/09/15/electoral-reform/); and might even (no promises) campaign for re-entry to the EU. Such a party could be popular, without being populist; and preferable, I think, to the cautious Labour government we in the UK have now.

But then we hit the problem of the forces that would be ranged against any such party: the right-wing popular press magnates, the Israel lobby that did so much harm to Corbyn, the power of money, the influence of the USA… and so on. I can’t see a new independent socialist party pushing its way through all that; at least until the time is absolutely ripe for late-stage capitalism to collapse, as is sometimes predicted, under the weight of its own contradictions – aided, perhaps, by the ultra-capitalist Trump. So I’ll stick with Starmer’s Labour Party for the time being; or at least until the new party – if it ever happens – proves its resilience.

Incidentally, I’ve been reading Trump’s recent campaign speeches – rambling, self-glorifying, ignorant, mostly fabricated, and stupid almost beyond belief. Is this the way capitalism ends, I wonder: not with a bang or a whimper (to adapt TS Eliot), but with a mad man’s ravings to his deluded followers?

I heartily dislike the sort of music that ‘Bob Vylan’ produces: a combination of ‘punk, hip hop, grime, and hardcore’ according to Wikipedia; and I don’t approve of anyone wishing ‘death’ on anyone else. So I too am pretty appalled by Bob Vylan’s performance at Glastonbury the other day – chanting ‘death to the IDF’ – that has provoked criticism in many quarters overnight. That is even though many of the reported current – and literally deadly – actions of the Israel Defence Force in Gaza and elsewhere might be said to justify strong opinions from, for example, supporters of the Palestinians, and in any case must be regarded as more reprehensible than a crude lyric blurted out to a few thousand young fans in a field in Somerset (or is it Gloucestershire?), UK.

What it wasn’t, however – or wasn’t necessarily – is anti-semitic: ‘the airing of vile Jew-hate’, as the British Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis characterised it yesterday. When will the Jewish community recognise – as a very large proportion of it does: e.g. https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/ – that opposition to Israeli policies and actions in the occupied territories is not always a sign of Judenhetze, any more than criticism of Nazi atrocities in World War II was necessarily evidence of anti-Germanism? And that the powers-that-be in Israel, and their defenders in the diaspora, should not use that ‘vile’ accusation as a cover for Israel’s rulers’ misdeeds; which would still be misdeeds whoever was responsible for them.

The authorities – not only the Chief Rabbi – seem to be over-reacting here. Officially recategorising ‘Palestine Action’ as a ‘terrorist group’ is another current example. Spraying red paint over a fighter jet is not a ‘terrorist’ act. ‘Direct Action’ doesn’t usually kill people. – It’s really very simple. (Or have I missed something?)

For some reason I receive Daily Telegraph headlines every morning on the internet. I don’t remember ever ordering them; perhaps a data mining company somewhere thought I was the sort of bloke to welcome them. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica. Incidentally: isn’t it interesting that so many of the Cambridge Analytica gang were Old Etonians?) I’m also getting daily – even hourly – US stock market tips from somewhere – a sort of investors’ club, I think – which don’t interest me either.

Except that both are giving me an insight into the minds of the middling members of the Tory and Republican parties; not necessarily the leaders, or the lumpenproletariat, but the bourgeoisie which is the parties’ solidest base. With all that’s going on in the world, the Telegraph chooses nearly every day to headline (or is this just in the electronic version?) money issues, and especially house prices, interest rates, private school fees, and personal  tax. (These, and its ‘Puzzle’ section, of which it seems inordinately proud.) In other words, Tories seem to be interested only in their pockets; as obviously do all those middle-class Americans eager to make money for nothing, and seeking investment tips on line. (Many of them, by the way, are more worried than you might think about Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’, which is beginning to feature on my stock market site.)

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In Britain’s case, of course, this was encouraged by Margaret Thatcher’s great reforming government of the ’80s, which encouraged people to think only in ‘market’ terms. One of her most fervent disciples was Eric (now Lord) Pickles: a Tory city councillor for Bradford during Thatcher’s premiership, then MP for Brentwood from 1992, and a cabinet minister in various roles from 2007-on; in all these roles concerned mainly to save government or council money. Pickles is stereotypically Yorkshire, of the ‘plain-speaking’ ‘Yorkshire and proud of it’ type; and very – shall we say – chubby. (There’s a pic of him here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Pickles.) He was probably chosen as a minister by David Cameron because of these attributes; fat plain-speaking plebs who haven’t been to Public School or Oxbridge are in short supply in the upper levels of the parliamentary Conservative Party. (Pickles was educated at Leeds Polytechnic.) I, as a Yorkshire denizen – but not, thank God, West Yorkshire – know the sort. They can be a pain in the proverbial *rse. – (Incidentally: the Tories go on a lot about ‘wokery’; but if ‘woke’ meant saving money, I bet they’d go for it.)

Pickles’ name has come up recently in connexion with the horrendous Grenfell fire of June 2017 in North Kensington, which was largely blamed on cost-cutting under his aegis as Minister for Local Government prior to that. (The scale of the fire was due to its cheap cladding: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire.) At a recent Government Inquiry into the fire he showed his true colours – or priorities – by testily complaining that he was missing a dinner date. (It can be seen on Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAKGEYuvBzo – 1 minute in.) Yet it was after this that he was elevated to the Lords.

It’s not difficult to see evidence of intelligent design in nature. Blue sky, fluffy clouds, warm sun, flowers, birdsong, bees going about their business, the wonderful and complex mechanics of evolution: I’m sitting outside in the garden just now, happily drinking all of this in. (Albeit – I have to confess – on opium-derived painkillers.) Surely none of this could have come about by chance? There must, surely, be a benevolent God of some kind.

But then we come on to human and political affairs. Imperfection all around, wars, my broken ankle, other horrors scarcely imaginable, disease, stupidity, selfishness, Trump, even ‘God’s chosen people’ (some of them) turning into monsters, people everywhere with none of the cravings for ‘freedom’ or ‘justice’ that are often attributed to them by liberals, but who just want to be fed and led; and the most dreadful – I nearly wrote ‘un-Christian’: see my previous post – immorality governing them.

I suppose that what reconciles this with a wise and benevolent God is the idea of free thought. After all, it wouldn’t really be much credit to us, would it, or to God, if we had no other choice than to be good. That at any rate was what I was taught in ‘RE’ (Religious Education) at school, and in church. I can see that. But still….

All this reminds me of a poem I discovered while I was doing research on the ‘Boer War’ (1899-1902), in a little book issued to (British) soldiers to boost their morale. I can’t remember it completely now, or even Google it (it will be in my notes back in Hull); so I’ve made some of it up. But it finishes like this (roughly):

And when I see how nobly natures form

Under the war’s red rain; I [wonder]

That He who made [the flowers and the birds],

Perchance made battles too.

That must have gee’d the Tommies up. Almost as much as Vitai Lampada. (Look it up.)

Anyway: so much for my cod theology. It’s not really my subject.

What gets my goat about many public Christians, and Christian churches and denominations, is how un-Christian they appear – to me. This may have something to do with the sort of Christian environment I was brought up in, by my Methodist parents at a little Wesleyan Methodist church, where everyone was friendly and – more to the point – tolerant and non-judgmental. We had a minister who gave good cerebral sermons, and hymns I delighted in singing (many of them written by John Wesley’s brother Charles). The sermons of course were always prefaced with little biblical texts (‘For my brother Esau was an hairy man, but I am a smooth man’, if you recall Alan Bennett’s faux sermon in Beyond the Fringe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPCm6pRCSmQ; starting at about 1.1.38); but it was only a few years later that I realised that the preacher invariably chose these texts only from a certain part of the Bible: namely, the four Gospels.  For me these were the only bits that mattered; and which consequently have informed my own view of ‘true’ Christianity, through to the present day.

But of course the Bible consists of much more than this. That’s the problem. The first third of it, the Old Testament, which I understood it was Jesus’s mission to replace, is often too horrible to be a reputable moral guide, as well as being unreliable and even ludicrous in its history; so that I’m surprised that the Jews still stick with it. (I’m assuming that the Torah is basically the OT. Is that right?)

Then – after the Gospels – we have the ‘Epistles’ (letters) of the awful St Paul: Lenin to Marx’s Christ, and distorting the original message in much the same way; with the whole thing capped off by ‘The Book of Revelations’, which would not look out of place in a collection of supernatural horror stories. Why these very different elements could have been brought together in a single volume which Christians are supposed to swear by – often quite literally – beats me. We surely should only need the middle bit. Which is what was preached to me in my little Wesleyan chapel; and is what I still take to comprise the essence of the religion.

Well, I do know – roughly – how it happened. The present-day Bible was compiled towards the end of the fourth century CE by a number of church elders, all male, who brought together some – but not all – of the old ‘books’ which were thought to be most crucial to the (relatively) new religion. Their process of selection omitted some accounts, like a ‘Gospel of St Thomas’, and possibly a gospel written by Mary, Jesus’s mother; for what reasons I don’t know. (Contemporary misogyny may have been one of them.)  The four Gospels that we have seem pretty kosher; but that too must be questionable, in view of the relative illiteracy of their supposed authors, and possible editorial interventions afterwards. For me that would account for what I regard as the un-Christian bits that remain.

This of course is a critical historian’s way of approaching the texts which are our main source of information about early Christianity. I imagine that it must be the approach of reputable theologians to it too. (I don’t know. I’ve not read their stuff.) So why do certain self-styled ‘Christians’ stray so far from the essential message of the Gospels; which nowhere – so far as I can remember – mention, for example, homosexuality or same-sex marriage or abortion, or many of the other concerns and doctrines that have been added to ‘Christianity’ by popes, Evangelicals and leaders simply wishing to keep their followers in line; and certainly don’t sanction the hostility towards other belief systems, whether religious or secular, that these modern cultish ‘Christians’ display.

Of course, in all these cases what has happened is that the secular world has simply swallowed the Gospels and spewed them out in forms that suit the prevailing ethoses (ethoi?) of the dominant classes of the day; much as Lenin and Stalin and Mao did with Marxism, and now the veritable anti-Christs Donald Trump and JD Vance (a Catholic convert) are doing with the ‘gentle Jesus’ I was brought up with as a boy.

There’s a bloke on the internet who is very good at revealing the detritus that has built up around the original form of Christianity: see https://medium.com/@tanner_79717. This could well reconcile me with the religion I long ago abandoned; – if it weren’t for the ‘faith’ thing, which I’ve written about before (https://bernardjporter.com/2025/03/11/christianity-weaponised/).

Whenever Trump mentions one of America’s states, it’s always a ‘great’ State:  ‘Senator X from the great State of Minnesota’, for example. Why? Are Minnesotans flattered by this? What is it in particular that makes Minnesota great? Its northerliness? All the ex-Swedes living there? The common loon (its ‘State bird’)? And what is this thing about ‘greatness’ in general – as in ‘Make America Great Again’? What renders a country – or a state – ‘great’?  Its size? Military power? Conquests? Material prosperity? Social progress? Education? Art? (Probably not those last three, if it’s the US you have in mind.)

And is any of this what the inhabitants of any country really want or need? Quite frankly I could list a couple of dozen other things I’d want from my country before ‘greatness’. And a glance at any of those international ‘happiness indexes’ that are published from time to time – here’s one of them: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-countries-in-the-world – suggests that ‘greatness’ in the conventional sense is not what makes the ‘happiest’ countries happier. Finland?

Of course it matters to Trump and Putin, and presumably to the people around them. Also – on another level – to some supporters of the most successful football teams. (Not West Ham, of course. We’re more interested in how our team plays – the ‘art’, if you like.) Living as I did (just) during the tail-end of the British Empire, I remember feeling no pride in my country’s supposed ‘greatness’ then. If in order to qualify as ‘great’ you need to boss other countries around, then count me out. Leave that to Trump and Putin.

Incidentally, as I’m sure you know: the title ‘Great Britain’ – ‘Storbritannien’ in Swedish – was not originally intended to imply ‘greatness’ in the Trumpian or Putinesque sense. Only that Britain was a group of nations: England, Scotland, Wales and (Northern) Ireland; as distinct from Little Britain, or just England. Many people – including whoever made the current radio ad for Weetabix – have got this wrong. ‘You may wonder why Britain is not as great as she used to be. It’s because she is not eating enough…’ yes, you’ve guessed it. ‘So we need to eat more of it – bix by bix.’ (Weetabix, incidentally, was invented by a moderately ‘great’ Australian.)