Porter’s Pensées

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.

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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.)

A week or so ago the Daily Mail devoted 17 (seventeen) pages to Harry and Megan, and their decision to leave ‘The Firm’, as the Royal Family calls itself, and settle in Toronto. I take little interest in our royal goings-on, even when they concern the deplorable Prince Andrew, and so am not qualified to comment on this matter here. Except to say that, as I understand it, one of the reasons for the couple’s discontent is the treatment meted out to them by the British tabloid press; and especially the scarcely-veiled racism it directs at the ‘ethnically mixed’ (apparently) Megan. That immediately warms me to them. I wonder what the tabloids now feel about their role in exiling what until now has been a major source for their journalism? Will it make them pull back? Of course not. They’ve still got whomever Labour chooses as its next party leader to smear.

All this comes at a time when major events both in Britain and the world should be much more newsworthy, and so have taken up at least some of those seventeen pages. It’s almost as if the Harry/Megan story were a planned distraction from, for example, Trump’s impeachment, climate change and the fires in Australia, eruptions in Indonesia, the Israeli elections; and – nearer to home here in the UK – the report on Russian interference in British elections that is being deliberately held back by Johnson (who should have released it before the last election), and his plans to emasculate Parliament to the advantage of the Executive. All this, quite apart from the much larger story of the grotesque corruption of our politics by the Right-wing media itself. But then you wouldn’t expect them to report on that.

Toronto, incidentally, seems a good choice, partly because it’s a fine and pleasant city, secondly because it’s still in the Queen’s beloved Commonwealth, and thirdly because it’s not the USA. Canada is getting a good press here in Britain nowadays. Perhaps it could be said to represent what the USA might have become if it had not broken away from the British Empire. – No, of course not; but it’s worth a thought.

At a dinner party we gave last night for some of our fondest Swedish friends the conversation turned to our family backgrounds. All were Swedes, mostly Swedish-born, apart from me (now a demi-Swede); one of Indian origin; another from Sierra Leone; and a Latvian. That left six who had been born in Sweden. What interested me, however, was that all those six had recent ancestors who had come from elsewhere. Kajsa’s people on one side of her family were originally Walloon. Others boasted – or admitted to – Danish, German, various kinds of Belgian and other ancestries.

I was the odd person out. In the past I’ve tried to find ‘alien’ descendants, through DNA testing and (with Sylvia’s help) those ‘Heritage’ websites that trace your family back via census reports and the like. DNA has all my forebears coming from ‘Anglo-Saxon’ stock; ‘Heritage’ roots my father’s side in rural Essex for at least four generations. According to the latter we were all peasants, and many of us illiterate. That has been a disappointment to me, hoping as I did for something more interesting: Scandinavian, for example. (Tenth-century Essex was a great field for rape and pillage by the macho Vikings.)  But out of the ten of us at dinner last evening, I was the only ‘pure-blooded’ one.

I was also struck by the fact that all our guests had famous or at least moderately distinguished (by Swedish standards) relatives and friends. I had none of these until I went to Cambridge, and most of those were actors and comedians. (I was involved in dramatics there.) That may have had something to do with my class, and with where I lived before university. In a small country like Sweden, and an intimate community like Stockholm’s, it’s easier for middling-class people to rub shoulders with the ‘greats’, than in London suburbia.

Our circle of Swedish friends is varied, liberal and stimulating. I imagine this has a lot to do with their diverse heritages. In common, I think, with the Nazis, I used to think of the Swedes as ‘racially’ homogeneous. Thank goodness they’re not.