Porter’s Pensées

I’m afraid I’ve finally lost patience with our (the UK’s) Labour government: the one I voted for. Its worst policy decision, in my view, was its re-classification of ‘Palestine Action’ as a ‘terrorist’ organisation, leading to the arrest of literally hundreds of peaceful demonstrators over the last month, protesting against the decision, quite reasonably; half of them (if reports are to be believed) over 60 years of age. They’ll be coming up for trial later. It will be interesting to see how the courts treat the old codgers.

Then there are Sir Keir Starmer’s two clever wheezes, both involving Trump, and both showing some imagination – thinking ‘outside the box’ – but with embarrassing outcomes. The first was his appointment of Lord Mandelson as British ambassador to the court of King Donald, probably on the grounds that one moral reprobate (I’m referring to his social rather than his sexual preferences) was likely to get on better with another, than a boring old professional diplomat would. Now of course that has turned to dust. The second clever wheeze was Starmer’s ‘unprecedented’ invitation to Trump to make a second state visit to Britain, with all the fawning ceremony that will involve, and which Trump is clearly a sucker for. We’ll be seeing how that turns out in this coming week, sans Mandelson. Trump is the most internationally despised American President in history. Was it really necessary to suck up to him in this way?

In the background to this there is of course the rise of the Right in Britain, demonstrated by today’s 100,000-strong march of ‘Tommy Robinson’ (Yaxley-Lennon)’s supporters in central London. 100,000 is a lot. Apparently Elon Musk addressed them. I’m scared; as I’m sure Yaxley-Lennon, Musk and the rest want us all to be.

I’ve been off-blog for a few weeks now, for a number of reasons: misery, injury, and trying to write an autobiography, which is proving more difficult than I expected. I’ve covered my first forty-odd years; but reading it back it seems very boring; and my past, although relatively privileged, is sometimes upsetting for me to recall. (Hence the misery.) I’m sure that other people’s autobiographies would be far more interesting. (Lord Mandelson’s, for example.)

Trump has already called Charlie Kirk a ‘a martyr for truth and freedom’, which should thrill the extreme Right no end. Every cause needs a martyr. From what I’ve learned over the past couple of days – I’d never heard of him before – Kirk seems to have had some pretty obnoxious views: obnoxious to me, that is; but ones that are on the rise internationally. Human nature? Or just one side of human nature?

Or a reaction against Western imperialism? – Which is an idea I’m mulling over just now, for a new post, bringing my historical expertise into the picture. That is,  when I’ve got over the misery.

What can I add, as a historian, to all that is being said and written about POTUS 47 just now? He is entirely sui generis. There are no close precedents for him in the past, at least among US presidents, and probably among leaders of any other country – although I shouldn’t be surprised if ancient Rome provides a few. (And of course POTUS 45. And some Mafia bosses?) – But maybe that’s the important historical point to make: that Trump is an entirely new phenomenon. No-one quite like him has been seen in the White House before.

But there’s also an alternative historical reading – my own idiosyncratic one, as it happens. This is that he represents the climax of an underlying historical trend in America – underlying, that is, its presidential history; which trend is the progress of capitalism, a.k.a. ‘freedom’, from the very beginnings of the Republic, to its final(?) crisis today. Other Presidents have gone along with this trend, notably Ronald Reagan; but none has represented, even personified, the chaotic ending of it, in a kind of ludicrous quasi-fascism, as faithfully as Trump does; unfettered as he is by the constraints that the American constitution was supposed to impose on its Presidents.

Ah, Shakespeare! Thou shouldst be living at this hour! Here we have a wonderful tragi-comic hero for you – powerful, but immensely flawed, ignorant, narcissistic, revengeful and childish: all of which would surely be grist to your mill. A combination of Richard III, Falstaff and Othello, perhaps? (Although Shakespeare might not get the ‘crisis of capitalism’ bit.)

Even without the Bard’s help, I have to say that I’m enjoying the drama that is coming out of America today. – Albeit not without some schadenfreude; but combined with genuine sympathy for my American friends.

I wonder whether there are any serious historians out there who support Donald Trump? If it rests on his relationship with the subject itself, there can’t be many. His historical gaffes are becoming legendary: talking of the Revolutionary army capturing enemy airfields in the 1770s; eliding the War of Independence with the Civil War; confused about what the Declaration of Independence says (although it’s hanging on the wall of his Oval Office); uncertain whether or not he should obey the Constitution – ‘I’ll have to consult my legal team’ (although he swore allegiance to it at his inauguration); his claim that ‘we [the USA] invented everything’ – the list goes on; plus of course his utter ignorance of the histories of other countries. All this must read embarrassingly to anyone who knows his or her history, and woundingly to those (like me) who write about it. I imagine – or hope, at least – that my old American students at the Universities of Rochester (NY) and Yale won’t be indifferent to all this. Whether it put them off voting for him, I’ll never know.

More serious than any of this is what Trump is aiming to do to institutions of higher education, like (currently) Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution: forcing them to teach only what he regards as ‘patriotic’ history, unencumbered by critical or what he calls divisive or ‘woke’ thinking; his being an old-fashioned heroic white men’s version of the American story, which will cement students’ loyalty to their flag. That’s a direct attack on the fundamental purposes of history teaching and research at this level: which are (a) to uncover ‘truths’, whether ‘patriotic’ or not; and (b) to open people’s minds to different ways of interpreting or defining those truths, wherever that may lead.

At the root of this appears to be a narrowly utilitarian view of education, and indeed of knowledge itself; which sees it not as a means of understanding, but only for how it can be used, in the pursuit of other objectives. Is it oversimplifying to connect this with the capitalist values – ‘deals’, and so on – that have defined his whole career? And which indeed represent so perfectly the stage of social and political development that the US has reached today.

When I used to research and write about historical anti-terrorism (The Origins of the Vigilant State, Plots and Paranoia), the term ‘terrorism’ had a specific and quite limited meaning. It didn’t cover all violent political activities, even assassinations, if they were directed against political enemies, or for a particular and well-defined political end; but only actions which were designed to terrorize whole populations, in order to make them less supportive of those enemies. (Some violent acts of course could do both.) So, a bomb placed in a café or a concert venue, killing indiscriminately, would qualify (and there were some of those in the late nineteenth century, as there are today); but not the murder of kings or generals, or (to cite a modern example) throwing paint over military aircraft.

Nowadays the word is used far more loosely; but surely not loosely enough to apply to Palestine Action, a march in support of which in London on Saturday led to the arrest of 500-plus demonstrators – many of them elderly – on charges of ‘supporting terrorism’. Painting airplanes, whether you approve of it or not, surely doesn’t qualify as ‘terrorism’ by any definition of that word. The Home Secretary has told us that she knows of other activities that Palestine Action indulges in that make it more dangerous to the common weal, but which she can’t vouchsafe to us yet. So we’ll just have to wait. In the meantime, the events of Saturday do seem somewhat incongruous – to put it mildly – for a Labour government, and in particular for an ex-barrister prime minister who used to specialise in human rights law. Critics suspect, of course, the ‘Israel Lobby’.

Incidentally, the word ‘terrorism’ was first used – in French revolutionary times –  to describe actions not by protestors, but by authoritarian governments, in order to cower opponents into submission.

I may write an Autobiography. I’ve sketched out three chapters; and a Preface – here.

A number of my friends and acquaintances – well, two or three – have suggested that I write a memoir or autobiography. I’ve always resisted this, on the grounds that I’m nowhere near important or interesting enough. (In fact my life’s ambition has always been to rise to ‘average’.) Nor do I really have the stomach for it, recalling as I do most of my early years with embarrassment, rather than pride.

Two considerations however have changed my mind on this recently. One is that I know from my own past researches that the memoirs of ‘average’ people can be as telling to a historian as those of ‘important’ ones; and even more so, in many cases, if one is wanting to plumb the Zeitgeist of a period. (I read dozens of ‘working-class’ autobiographies for my Absent-Minded Imperialists.) Secondly, and more personally, I need to write – I get depressed if I’m not doing it – and have run out of other topics to write about; or rather, at my advanced age, have run out of the concentration and energy that would be required to research them adequately. The last collection of material that I have left to work with now is my own life, locked in my brain; albeit not altogether reliably (more about that later), and not always pleasantly, for a habitual depressive like me.

I’ve also thought of a way of doing it which may be safer for me, and of more interest to others. That is to write a My Life and Times kind of book, with the ‘times’ featuring as prominently as my own petty affairs. For it is incontrovertible that I have lived through ‘interesting times’, from the 1940s to the 2020s – albeit probably no more interesting than any other comparable passage of years; and also in four different countries, which should have broadened my experience. So there must be enough here to be worth recounting, and to compensate for the embarrassing bits; which – in the interest of honesty – I shall need to refer to, but only fleetingly.

Those ‘interesting times’, to summarise, have carried me from the depths of a ‘total’ war to the collapse of the post-war consensus; taking in the loss of a world-wide empire, entry into and then exit from the post-war European Union, the creation and later partial dismantling of a welfare state, the social emancipation (to an extent) of women, foreign immigration and its repercussions, a revolution in popular music, sexual liberation following the spread of efficient means of contraception, a ‘cold war’ that threatened to become hotter under the shadow of ‘The Bomb’, the establishment of television as people’s main source of information and entertainment, the whole computer/internet thing, men on the moon, huge changes in the character of the popular Press, even greater changes in eating habits, several frightening pandemics even before Covid, the commercialisation of ‘the People’s Game’ (football), the entire reign of Britain’s longest-living monarch… and much more. That of course is an Anglocentric list. Other nationalities will have experienced the last eighty years in different – often more gruesome – ways.

My own place in this history has never been a leading or even a particularly active one, but it is one that has enabled me to observe it from a number of different points of view. That is because of my anomalous and shifting position in the all-important class structure of Britain – or of England, anyway – giving me what I think is an unusual insight into the situations, and especially the prejudices, of them all. My immediate family were aspirant lower-middle class; my paternal grandparents working class; at school I mixed with middle-middle class boys; and at university with the upper and public school-educated classes and even a few aristocrats. I got on pretty well with all of them. (The aristos were very kind.) In university vacations I worked in a factory, a dairy, and in theatres. My profession has been as an academic, at different types of university, and in three or four countries; specialising in British imperial history, for which I was sometimes mistaken to be an imperialist. I’ve written about a dozen books. I was brought up a Methodist, but enjoyed the Anglicans’ church services, and their architecture even more. I was a member of the Labour party for a long period, but with gaps when I’ve been unhappy with particular party policies. I’ve experienced marriage with a Scots-Irish wife, fatherhood, divorce, and a new relationship, this time with a Swede. I’ve lived in both the south and the north of England. I travelled extensively in Europe as a young man, and more later, when I also lived and worked for fairly long periods in the USA and Australia. I now live mainly in Sweden. My passions are architecture, music and cricket. The only substantial gap in this catalogue of life-experiences is women and girls, whom I scarcely got to know as a boy, or even at university, in my single-sex college. (This accounts for many of my ‘embarrassments’, which I shall pass over lightly here.) If all these experiences have affected my research, teaching and writing in my adult years, they are at least varied enough to have likely influenced them in divergent ways.

Of course this won’t be as ‘objective’ an account as I hope my other history books are – although it goes without saying that none of us can achieve absolute objectivity. Indeed, this is the whole point of it: to recount the history of the last eighty-odd years simply as it has appeared to and impinged on the life of just one male person who has lived through that time, studied it, and come to certain conclusions about it. Now read on. We average people need to be heard.

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.