Porter’s Pensées

With Dominic Cummings in the news this morning as the supposed evil genius behind Sajiv Javid’s surprise resignation as Chancellor – thus enabling Boris’s absolute control of government, on the way to Dominic’s ultimate vision of a new quasi-Fascist(?) way of governing – I thought it might be worth re-posting this earlier blog of mine, originally entitled ‘Separated at Birth?’

That’s Dominic (Demonic) Cummings on the left, and the evil Mekon on the right. Remember Dan Dare? I imagine many won’t; which is probably why this rather obvious analogy – as I thought – didn’t catch on.

I’m becoming very depressed about the scale of both Johnson’s and Trump’s successes. Dominic, in his diabolical way, was clearly right. Questions of ‘character’ don’t matter to half, at any rate, of the British electorate, just as they don’t matter to Trump voters in America. Have you seen those TV programmes featuring Trump’s rallies and interviews with their unbelievably stupid ‘fans’ bussing around the US to follow them…? After one of them last night I found myself wishing that that that flaming asteroid heading for the Earth so beloved of Sci-Fi disaster movies really would crash into us and force humanity to start all over again. The Mekon could be driving it.

One of the keys to both Trump’s and Johnson’s present successes appears to be the optimism  they give out: ‘MAGA’, and the ‘sunlit uplands’; however false that optimism turns out to be in the end. By that time we could all be Dom-dominated, robotic Treens. And without any Therons from the other side of the planet to help us out. (Anyone not brought up on the Eagle 60-70 years ago will have lost me there.)

As a passionate anti-racist for all of my adult life, as you can tell from my books; an admirer of Jewish culture; and with a huge sympathy for the Jewish people’s sufferings, alongside others’, throughout history, I still cannot find it in myself to forget or forgive the conduct of certain British Jewish agencies and spokespeople in libelling Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party as ‘anti-semitic’ during the last British General Election. Apparently they’ve now started doing it to Bernie Sanders – himself a Jew, of course – during the American Democratic Primaries. Can it be a coincidence that both Corbyn and Sanders are self-proclaimed ‘socialists’? I’m reluctant to infer that it’s money that is the prime consideration here, because that might pander to a genuine anti-semitic trope that I’m reluctant to be associated with.

Besides, my understanding of Judaeo-Christian social morality – whose tradition I was brought up in – suggests that Corbyn’s and Sanders’s political principles are far more in alignment with that, than with the selfish late-capitalist anti-ethic that fuels both Trump and Johnson. Which is probably the reason for other  Jews’ resistance to the British Board of Deputies’ propaganda, and support for Corbyn; including that of Professor Geoffrey Alderman, the foremost historian of the Jewish community in Britain, and (I believe) one of Corbyn’s constituents. For a principled anti-racist to be accused of racism must hurt almost as much as accusing an innocent and loving father of paedophilia. It will take me a long time, on behalf of Corbyn and my Labour Party, to get over it, and to regard the Jewish community – though not, of course, my Jewish friends – as I once did. That is so sad; and must – if it’s a general feeling – do the cause of combatting genuine anti-semitism much harm. I don’t imagine for a moment that it was this ‘Jewish’ propaganda that lost Labour the election, though some Jews are boasting of this; but any influence it may have had must undermine Labour members’ previously close alliance with Judaism.

One result of this propaganda was to widen the definition of ‘anti-semitism’ to include opinions and attitudes that really should not have been part of it. The most notorious examples are support for Palestinian statehood, and opposition to Israeli colonialism (and its attendant atrocities) in the Palestinian territories. These are supposedly supported by an ‘international’ definition of anti-semitism which was never designed as a definition, and has been disavowed as such by its author, but which the Labour Party has been bullied – there’s no other word for it – into officially adopting. That has led to a number of Labour members being expelled for acting or speaking in ways that are supposed to contravene that definition, unjustly and – writing as an academic – irrationally. This has added to my personal pain.

One Labour member has confronted this by offering herself for expulsion, on the grounds that she, too, has criticised the government of Israel. Here is her letter, reprinted by the Jewish Voice for Labour, which I’ve recently become a (non-Jewish) member of. It has also been widely disseminated in Labour circles.

https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/nat-sims-refers-herself-to-jenny-formby-for-antisemitism/?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=today-on-the-jvl-blog-newsletter-total-articles-for-you_1

I’m thinking of following Natalie’s example. After all, I’ve criticised Israel too, in this small and insignificant blog.

The following article is about Finland, but it also applies to Sweden. In fact – remembering my own days as a father of small children – the Swedish parental leave and childcare systems were the first things that struck me about the country when I began my association with it 25 years ago. I so envied present-day Swedish parents for the assistance the State affords them when their children are young; not only mothers, but also fathers, who are just as much ‘liberated’ by being able to share the early stages of parenthood equally with their partners. I would have loved being able to take a year ‘off’, fully paid, to look after mine; and then had excellent free pre-schools to send them to afterwards. (And it would probably have made me a better dad.)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/11/gender-pay-gap-shared-parental-leave-finland.

From a broader, societal point of view there can be no doubt that the system also contributes more to gender equality than any other reform one could think of. Hence Finland’s present progressive and enlightened women-dominated government. Nervous British men need to be assured that women in power don’t need to be like Thatcher or May. They had to force their way up through a patriarchal system. That could explain their sharp edges. Instead, learn from the Nordics.

I was quite excited by this item on the BBC News this morning. An academic has unearthed a diary or journal written by a working Yorkshire farmer in the very early 19^thcentury which reveals, as well as much else, some unexpectedly enlightened views on the subject of homosexuality. Here’s the report: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-51385884.  It’s worth reading, especially by those who assume that people of an ‘inferior’ class are likely, or even bound, to have reactionary opinions. In truth, there is no reliable evidence for this.

That’s because there is no reliable evidence for the working or lower-middle classes’ views on anything before the age of mass literacy. I first came against this problem when I began researching into popular attitudes to the British Empire for my book The Absent-Minded Imperialists. Until then it had been widely assumed that the ‘lower orders’ were invariably ‘jingoistic’, as it was called, because (basically) they were ignorant, stupid and emotional. The evidence for this – almost the only evidence – was the jingo mobs that crowded into London and elsewhere to celebrate the relief of Mafeking during the Boer War. In fact those few months of ‘imperialistic’ rioting were almost unique in modern British history; involved far smaller crowds than they gave the impression of (they looked a lot in the narrow streets of central London); may have been more lower-middle than strict working class (they worked in the City, after all); and didn’t invariably indicate any true ‘imperial’ feeling on the demonstrators’ parts.

Seeking for a more accurate measure of ‘working-class imperialism’, I too turned to contemporary working-class diaries and memoirs. The problem here is that not many of them have survived. I think I found about sixty – some of them mere sketches. This may indicate that not all that many were written. Even literate workers didn’t have the inclination – or the time – to write; and if they did, they assumed that their own lives would be of little interest to the ‘reading’ – that is, middle-class – ‘public’. Hardly any of them expressed any opinion at all about the contemporary Empire, let alone an enthusiastic one. Which is why I then tried to dig deeper, in order to find out what they were likely to have felt about the Empire, in view of their functions in society, their education, and so on. (My methods and conclusions are spelled out in the book.) In fact they were likely either to have no opinion, or else a wide range of opinions, mainly lost to posterity; sadly for their posthumous reputations today.

So I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that at least one early 19^th-century working man wasn’t as prejudiced against gay people as we might have thought, and that he had clearly discussed the question, in rational terms, among his mates. This seems to indicate that prejudices of the kinds often attributed to the lowly and ignorant are not necessarily innate in them, only to be countered and corrected by education. In most cases it’s ‘education’ of another kind that inculcates them in working people’s minds. Today’s working-class Brexiters have the Sun, the Daily Mail and Nigel Farage to teach them their prejudices. Our Yorkshire farmer didn’t.

The idea that Britain and America could turn ‘Fascist’ soon is beginning to take a hold. Until very recently any suggestion of this kind tended to be dismissed as Left-wing paranoia. Now it’s part of mainstream speculation.

Those who deny its possibility probably have in mind a version of Fascism – Hitler’s – which was extreme and, yes, very unlikely to be implemented today. Few of us can envisage death camps in the English countryside or in the American Mid-West, for example. No-one is thinking of gassing immigrants, gypsies, communists or the disabled, let alone the Jews. But Fascism isn’t defined by these sorts of atrocity. In fact it’s a rather vague concept, which is why it can be employed so loosely on the Left.

The best definition – amongst all those I’ve googled – may be Merriam-Webster’s.

‘A political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual, and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.’

Even that, however, is too strong to characterise government under either Boris Johnson or Donald Trump. Its major flaw, for this purpose, is the bit about ‘economic and social regimentation’, which clearly doesn’t fit with America’s and Britain’s dominant neo-liberal philosophies, and their espousal by those on the Right accused of ‘Fascist’ tendencies.

Which is why I’m wary of employing the term in present conditions. If I use it at all (as I think you’ll find if you trawl back through this blog), it’s with the prefix ‘proto’ attached to it. For I do believe that there are (a) political circumstances arising today which are reminiscent of the situation in which the original forms of Fascism took root in the1930s; and (b) aspects of the present policies of both Trump and his great admirer Johnson which may be said to carry a Fascist potential.

The circumstances hardly need to be spelled out. They include economic depressions in both periods and the hardships for ordinary people resulting from them; feelings of national loss in both cases – empire in Britain’s, World War I in inter-War Germany’s, world-domination in America’s; fear of ‘alien’ invasions – ‘blacks’, Poles, Jews, Mexicans; growing inequalities; and declining trust in their forms of democracy and the ‘elites’ that had captured them, today dubbed ‘populism’. To meet these challenges Trump and Johnson are pursuing similar strategies, which verge on the authoritarian, if not the overtly Fascistic.

Both are overtly nationalistic, and hostile to internationalism. ‘If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere’: that’s Theresa May, who had something of the proto-Fascist about her too. Both appeal to past national ‘greatness’: ‘Make America Great Again’; and Boris’s scarcely-disguised appeal to Britain’s ‘glorious’ imperial past. Both are impatient of the constitutional ‘checks and balances’ that stand in the way of their absolute power: judges and the House of Lords in Johnson’s case. This must indicate an authoritarian cast of mind. (Johnson long ago professed an ambition to become ‘World King’.) They both use the extreme language of ‘treachery’ to describe ordinary opponents: ‘enemies of the people’, and so on. Both seek to delegitimise their fourth estates – another constitutional ‘balance’; Trump with his ‘fake’ news accusations, and Boris – just yesterday – by restricting access to his press conferences to trusted media outlets. They both push domestic agendas which are widely regarded as reactionary. Both are – obviously – anti-socialist; or could this be at the root of it? Both employ lies and dirty tricks in their propaganda which might have made Goebbels blush. In the last UK general election 88% of the Conservatives’ propaganda has been shown to have been misleading, at the very least, as opposed to 0% of Labour’s; if this survey is to be trusted: https://metro.co.uk/2019/12/10/investigation-finds-88-tory-ads-misleading-compared-0-labour-11651802/. Both Trump and Johnson are notorious, and perhaps even unique in history, for their blatant disregard for the truth, and their gross amorality by most measures. Their electoral appeals are couched in as simple terms as possible, usually just three words, in order to attract the simpler-minded populists: ‘Make America Great’, ‘Get Brexit Done’. Both leaders – despite their obviously elite positions in their respective societies – make a great play of being anti-establishment, anti-elitist, and even anti-expertise. (Michael Gove once notoriously dismissed all ‘experts’; Trump insists he’s an expert on everything.) They pander to racism, and to racist groups, with Trump being ambivalent about his racist support (’fine people’), and Johnson’s Conservative Party apparently taking in 5000 new members from the extreme ‘Britain First’ movement just a few weeks ago: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/28/britain-first-far-right-members-5000-have-joined-tories. Whether or not this can be directly attributed to them, the rise of each man has seen increased thuggery and violent attacks on foreigners and minorities in their respective countries. Fascism is always accompanied by violence. In Britain, Boris Johnson, not a great thinker himself, has a ‘Special Adviser’ in the person of Dominic Cummings who seems to come straight out of Machiavelli’s, if not Goebbels’s, book. Trump used to have Steve Bannon. American ‘Alt-Right’ ideas are gaining purchase in both countries, only feebly combatted by the Left. Is it unreasonable for the Left to fear these trends, for the proto- or neo- or even straight Fascism that is implied in them?

And – finally – why not a ‘Fascism’ that supports ‘free’ enterprise? Which is, after all, what Margaret Thatcher stood for: ‘a free economy in a strong state’. All Fascisms vary according to their localities. They are ‘national’ ideologies, after all. This could be the Anglo-American version.

*

PS. Even Sweden is not immune to this. We already have the ‘Sweden Democrats’, of course. And I was depressed the other night by a Swedish TV programme about an Alt-Right ‘think-tank’ that has just been formed in Sweden. It’s called ‘Oikos’: Greek for ‘home’, though the name might not go down well in Britain, ‘oik’ being Public School slang for a pleb; and numbers Milton Friedman and the late Roger Scruton amongst its heroes. (See https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2020-02-02—mattias-karlsson-(sd)-starts-conservative-think-tank-.S1x2JZ24GI.html.)  Proto-Fascism seems be getting everywhere.

Not a very good photo, I’m afraid, but here’s the British community in Stockholm ‘celebrating’ Brexit. It was at the excellent Tudor Arms, which is more English than an English pub. Kajsa and I had fish and chips there, of course, and two pints each of London Pride. Lots of nice Brits there, with their Swedish sambos. No-one around us mentioned Brexit. It was very crowded, hot and noisy, and closing time was 11 p.m. CET, which was an hour too early for the actual Brexit moment. We followed that on TV when we got home. Pathetic, I thought. Thank God (and Migrationsverket) for my new Swedish – and hence European – passport.

Every analysis of voting patterns for the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum, and for the December 2019 General Election, which was also about Brexit, reveals two major factors that seem to have determined people’s votes. The first is age, with the relatively young being significantly more likely to be pro-European than my generation. The second is level of education, with the better or longer educated more likely to be Europhile than the poorly educated. Oddly enough, Old Etonians seem to come within this latter category. That’s because it’s the quality of education that counts, not just the length. (I once wrote to the Head of History at Eton to ask him for a view of the modern history syllabus taught there, but received no reply.)

I’ve always in fact believed this, in contradistinction to the common ‘élitist’ view that the poorly educated voted for Brexit because they were stupid. In fact all the so-called ‘stupid’ ones required was to be taught properly. And in my view – as I’ve expressed once or twice in this blog – that requires a degree of education in logic, or clear, rational and above all critical  thinking, which would enable them to see beyond and behind the propaganda they are fed in their media. History could provide this, if taught properly – that is, critically, not simply factually, or – God forbid – patriotically; but I’m sure there are other disciplines that could do it almost as well.

Here in Sweden I’m told that schoolchildren are taught källkritik, which is to go back to the sources of statements made before accepting them. That’s a start. In Finland they’ve gone one further. This article shows how children there are taught to spot ‘fake news’ when it’s presented to them: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/28/fact-from-fiction-finlands-new-lessons-in-combating-fake-news. Isn’t that wonderful? And couldn’t our UK schools, in a country where our print, broadcast and social media are some of the least reliable in the ‘free’ world, take a leaf out of the Finns’ book here?

It’s now just under 36 hours before we cease to be part of the EU (apart from all those pesky loose ends to tie up).  I’ll be marking it tomorrow night, together with 60+ other British exiles and their Swedish sambos, here in Stockholm in the Tudor Arms pub. (I’ll try to remember to post pictures.) I’ll be interested to see and read in the British media how the event passes off in Brexitland. I do hope there are some counter-demonstrations.

I watched Farage’s departing speech in Brussels yesterday: the one where his little cadre waved plastic Union flags and had to be cut off by the chairwoman. Cringe-worthy; and yet he’s the personification of Britain just now for millions of Europeans. We already in England have a category of ‘National Treasures’: Her Maj, Alan Bennett, Dame Judy Dench, and so on. It’s about time we had a new category for ‘National Embarrassments’. Nigel Farage would have to come top of that list; followed by Boris, Rees-Mogg, and most of the remainder of the Brexit ‘chiefs’. How come we’re now represented by such a bunch of dangerous comedians? Can it be all the fault of Monty Python? Or the Public schools?

It was good however – indeed quite moving – to see the main body of the European Parliament standing up and singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as the Brits departed:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne?

Some even had tears in their eyes, Kajsa noticed. The Swedes have been particularly upset by Brexit; firstly because they rather like us (and Monty Python), but also because they regarded Britain as an ally with them in many of the EU’s disputes over, for example, closer unity. Now they feel relatively friendless. Generously, none of my Swedish friends blames me personally. As a demi-Swede now myself, however, I can’t help blaming the majority of my old countrymen (and women?) for not seeing through the comedy, and electing these clowns.

I’ve just finished my chapter on ‘The Battle for Brexit’. It’s main theme is that it wasn’t about Brexit at all. I’ve written it as the final contribution to a collection of essays on the broad theme of ‘Britain and Europe’ that I’ve published obscurely over the years. Because the book hasn’t been finally accepted for publication yet – I don’t think collections of essays sell well, unless they’re by national treasures – it may never appear in print. I may post it here sometime; though it’s rather long for that. It’s 15,000 words. Perhaps I could post it in chunks? But I’ll wait to see what my publisher has to say first.

Happy Independence Day to all! I’ll be getting pissed.

Cold and dark but cosy and an ideal environment for writing. This is our ‘sommarhus’ in the Stockholm archipelago, now serving as a ‘vinterhus’. I’ve just finished a chapter that was giving me huge problems. After a terrible night last night, however – tossing and turning, greatly depressed, wracked by nightmares – it all came right this morning! Isn’t it often like that: the final bout of pain before the baby emerges? (Kajsa isn’t sure about the metaphor.)

If Boris Johnson is thinking of moving the House of Lords to the North – partly to get it out of his hair, and partly to suck up to the region of England most decimated by Thatcherism – York is the least suitable city to plonk it in. (See https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7904209/House-Lords-moved-York-Boris-Johnson.html.) In reality York is a bit of the South that just happens to be in the North geographically: a pretty, chocolate-box lid tourist town, with lots of splendid mediaeval architecture, to remind their Lordships of their feudal roots, an archbishop to partner the one living in Lambeth, no industry left, and a gleaming newish out-of-town university that doesn’t strike me (and I worked there temporarily some years ago) as reflecting ‘northern-ness’ in any essential way. York is a lovely town, but it’s no longer  ‘the North’.

Five years ago I penned a piece that suggested that Parliament, as a whole, might relocate to another place temporarily, while the Palace of Westminster is being refurbished, in order to bring MPs closer to those of their electors the ‘Westminster bubble’ has rather lost contact with. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2015/01/09/peripatetic-parliaments/.) My favourite choice then was Manchester; and that would be my ideal venue for the Upper House today. It has a fine Victorian  Gothic city hall which was built a bit later than Westminster, but in my view is architecturally superior; and which surely could house their lordships comfortably. It also has two leading football teams. (You can’t get much more Northern than that.) Beyond this, however, Manchester and its environs have a strong claim to be the capital of a vital English ‘identity’ quite distinct from, but just as important as, the one that London, and Westminster in particular, represent: its industrial, nonconformist, creative, democratic and radical (in so many different ways) spirit. Boris might not feel comfortable there; but putting half of Parliament in Manchester could help to bring the North and South together in the way he claims to want.

And I write as an (adopted) Yorkist.

(PS. Also printed in Guardian Letters, 23 Jan.)