Porter’s Pensées

Two interesting things in the British press today. Firstly Rory Stewart’s resignation from the Tory Party: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/04/rory-stewart-resigns-from-conservative-party. Stewart has impressed me for some time as one of the more thoughtful and reasonable sorts of Conservative, in the mould of those I used to tolerate – if not actually support – in the now rather distant past: https://bernardjporter.com/2019/06/18/eton-mess-3/. Stewart is another Etonian, but young enough, perhaps, to have avoided the ethos of the school in Cameron’s and Johnson’s time, so recently disowned – it appears – by its present Head:   https://bernardjporter.com/2019/09/24/more-eton-mess.

The second is this piece in the Guardian by the excellent Gary Younge:  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/04/jeremy-corbyn-mps-labour-leader-legitimacy. (Yes, the Guardian: an implacable opponent of Corbyn normally.) Young argues here – as I’ve been doing too (pats himself on the back) – that Corbyn’s way is the only hope for those of us who would much prefer the UK to stay in the EU, but, failing that, and in the spirit of genuine compromise, who even more desperately wish to avoid the ‘hard’ Brexit that the Tory ‘Spartans’, as they’re now called, seem to be dead-set on driving us towards. Whatever the ‘people’s will’ was at the time of the referendum (and is today: all the polls suggest it has shifted towards ‘Remain’ over the last few years), it was never that. In 2016 many Brexiteers used to assure us that we could remain in the Customs Union – with all its safeguards for labour rights and the environment – even if we left the political union. This of course would solve the ‘Irish problem’ at a stroke. It should also prevent civil war in the UK. And it is, as I understand it, Corbyn’s plan, which he has already apparently negotiated – albeit informally – with European leaders; suggesting that it might be a goer. It must  be the way forward now.

Surely, even for Corbyn-haters, this – plus the second referendum he’s also promised – is worth giving him just a few weeks in No.10 to try to achieve? I despair of the Lib-Dems’ trying to block this on narrow party-political grounds. (And in the case of their new leader, trotting out again that vile ‘antisemitic’ lie to justify her position.)

The truly dreadful right-wing journalist Toby Young, about whom I’ve written before (https://bernardjporter.com/2018/01/03/toby-young-journalist/), has just withdrawn a tweet in which he accused the ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond of ‘anti-semitism’, after Hammond threatened to sue him for libel. (See https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/toby-young-apologises-defamatory-philip-hammond/.) Young’s reason for his ‘anti-semitic’ charge was a recent article by Hammond, also reported on this blog  (https://bernardjporter.com/2019/09/29/the-horses-mouth/), claiming that short-termist financial speculators were among those behind the ‘No Deal Brexit’ movement. Young took that as a ‘coded’ anti-semitic reference. Of course it isn’t, necessarily, and is unlikely to have been so in Hammond’s case; but this is one of the difficulties that socialists also have to put up with when they  criticize any aspect of capitalism. Anti-capitalism is claimed to be the same as, or merely a cover for, anti-semitism. That of course widens the field enormously. – But doesn’t it also indicate an anti-semitic view on the part of the anti-anti-semites themselves? Isn’t it revealing, that Young and his ilk should also immediately identify rogue capitalists with Jews?

Two books and an important article have recently been published analyzing the powerful propaganda onslaught on Labour during the past couple of years on the grounds of its supposed ‘anti-semitism’. Here they are:

and finally:  https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/smears-evidence-and-free-speech-breaking-the-vicious-cycle-of-labours-antisemitism-rows/.

I’ve just started reading the first of these. It’s very academic and objective, and so far – the first couple of chapters – focuses on the part played in this perverse propaganda by the press. (The authors are media researchers.) One initial finding that impressed me is that most people believe that around 40% of Labour members have come under scrutiny for ‘anti-semitism’, whereas the real figure is 0.1%. That’s because of the headlines they see in the newspapers they pass when shopping at Aldi or Tescos or wherever. (Very few read the papers themselves.) It’s by this means that the mud has stuck.

I’m hoping that as I read on I’ll learn more about where this mud came from initially. (I feel I can’t mention the Israeli Government for fear of being labelled an anti-semitic ‘conspiracy theorist’ myself.) As well as this, Bad News for Labour  also criticizes the Labour leadership for its response – it has been a public relations fiasco – and tells how it should  have been done.

But there are also deeper questions raised by these works. One obvious one – not a new one – is what it says about our democracy, if the information on which we base our political decisions can be manipulated and distorted in these ways. Be of no doubt: Dominic Cummings is very aware.

I’ve commented on this ‘Labour Anti-Semitism’ business many times before, starting with https://bernardjporter.com/2016/04/28/anti-semitism-and-labour/,  and going on for a few more posts. It would be nice not to have to do so again. I’m sick of it; and in particular afraid of what it might do to my own – hitherto broadly favourable and sympathetic – view of ‘the Jews’. Luckily I have Haraatz on line, and my own critical faculties, to remind me that they’re not all like Margaret Hodge.

PS. Waterstone’s bookstore in Brighton had planned a launch for Bad News for Labour  on September 23rd, with all the main authors involved; but then was apparently persuaded to cancel it after ‘a barrage of abusive emails, phone calls and tweets’. (See https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/statement/waterstones-censors-academics-launching-book-on-labour-and-antisemitism/.) Who or where these came from we don’t yet know, but it would not be too paranoid to suspect an ‘Israel Lobby’ at work here.  In any case it’s a worrying sign.

There used to be a Public School word for people behaving like Boris Johnson, even if we discount for a moment – because he denies it – his alleged squeezing of the inner thighs of   female journalists. The word is ‘cad’. I don’t think we’ve had quite so notoriously caddish a Prime Minister since Lloyd George; and he wasn’t Public School. Boris excuses his sexual predations on the grounds that he’s ‘got more spunk’ than most men. Ugh.

This obviously affects Boris’s trustworthiness. Whether it necessarily disqualifies him from the job he has now is a matter of opinion. It’s arguable that a bit of caddishness is acceptable – even an advantage – in politics. (I’m trying to remember if Machiavelli said anything about this.) And ‘innocent’ people do not always make the most successful leaders.

Maybe this generalisation will be tested soon; if and when the spunky Johnson comes a cropper, and holy Jeremy – his very antithesis – gets his turn.

Here we have it, from the horse’s mouth, no less: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-news-latest-brexit-philip-hammond-no-deal-radicals-a9124186.html. You can’t get much more horsey than the man who was Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer just a few weeks ago. The ‘no deal’ Brexit movement is being financed and perhaps driven, claims Hammond, by rich hedge-fund speculators hoping to profit from the damage that Brexit will do to the pound sterling and to the British economy.

This is not by itself proof that the whole thing is a ‘capitalist conspiracy’ – in the sense that it is this ‘conspiracy’ that has been the root cause of the current crisis. But, together with the social statuses of the men who are leading the Brexit campaign – Public school and all that – it must at least do something to undermine the myth that they’re trying to put over, that they represent the ‘ordinary folk’ of Britain against the ‘élite’; the ‘people versus Parliament’. That of course, as every historian knows, was a favourite line of just about every Fascist movement in the last century. (I wouldn’t call Boris a ‘Fascist’, yet. But ‘Proto-’: certainly.)

Then there are all those threats of violence, murder and civil war coming from the Right, if it doesn’t get its way. They’re posted as ‘warnings’, but read very much – and are clearly intended to – as threats. So does the war imagery that is being employed now by the Brexiteers.  Johnson, for example, is inveighing against Britain’s ‘surrendering’ to the EU over the Benn Act (which won’t allow him to conclude a ‘No’ deal without Parliament’s consent). That and others of his metaphors – ‘treachery’, and so on – have introduced into the debate images that seem better suited to a war situation; which Britain’s negotiations with the EU are surely not. You ‘surrender’ to threats of violence. Or not, as I hope.

Whether or not this whole thing can be categorised as a ‘capitalist conspiracy’ at root, it has certainly been exploited cleverly by one or more of our genuine conspiratorial élites. To repeat: hardly any of that famous 52% of the British population who voted for Brexit in June 2016 had cared at all about the EU before that vote. But they had been suffering under Austerity, and felt neglected by the Conservatives and the whole political class (especially up here in the North) for years; whereupon they were offered a vote which they felt they could use as a protest, nothing more; and a clearly visible scapegoat for their sufferings in the persons of those foreigners over the North Sea. (Cf. Germany in the 1930s, with the Depression, and the Jews.) The real villains of the piece – not the ‘people’, but the Right-wing élite – seized upon this to carry out their own agenda; which however will only become clear when they’ve finally won their ‘no deal Brexit’. At present Boris is obscuring this agenda with his sudden  ‘One Nation’ promises of social reform. That has been a historical proto-Fascist ploy also. All the other signs from his camp, however, indicate a neo-liberal and pro-American ambition for Britain. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2019/07/29/a-special-relationship/.) We’ll see what the next few weeks brings.

Just as Philip Hammond doesn’t recognise the present Conservative party as ‘his’ party, I don’t recognise the present United Kingdom as ‘mine’. Perhaps I’ve been wrong about Britain all along; choosing – in my historical writings, for example – to over-emphasise its liberal, tolerant and internationalist aspects. My first book was about the ‘anti-imperialists’, after all. I still think that the principles upheld by those men and women reflected an important historical strain in British society. But Farage, Boris and Rees-Mogg, and the ‘patriotic’ thugs that are backing them and adding to the menace in the streets, represent something entirely different.

Back in Hull to find a burst pipe has flooded much of my house, so I’m rather taken up with that just now. Blogging will have to wait. Has anything happened in the meantime? Are the two straw-tops still President and PM? Are we still in the EU? Can I still find a Polish plumber?

Be under no illusion: today’s Supreme Court judgment is one of the most important in the long history of our Parliamentary system, and in reasserting the supreme power of representative democracy. (I write that as someone schooled in British Constitutional History: see https://bernardjporter.com/2019/08/28/jr-tanner/.) It was the best result that any of us democrats could have hoped for. Just a few minutes after it, I’m feeling uncharacteristically joyous! (It won’t last.)

Now to see what follows. The judges decided that Parliament was never legally prorogued, so I presume MPs will reconvene tomorrow. Will Johnson have to resign? Probably not; though he may call a snap General Election. Could he be arrested? Very unlikely! And dangerous, of course, to make a martyr of him. Will the gutter press dare to run its ‘Traitors’ and ‘Enemies of the People’ headlines again? We’ll find out tomorrow. Will this result merely encourage the populist Right to continue their proto-fascist ‘People versus the Elite’ campaign into the next Election? Probably. Are we on the cusp of a constitutional revolution – one way or the other?

The next few days and weeks are going to be interesting, to put it mildly. I’ll be flying back to Britain tomorrow to watch it all closer at hand. Although, to be fair, the judgment was  carried live today on STV. The Swedes are loving it, while being glad it isn’t happening to them.

What interests me about this interview with the headmaster 0f Eton, published in the Guardian yesterday (https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/sep/23/head-of-eton-hits-back-at-labour-plans-to-abolish-private-schools), is that he seems to have disowned the school’s best-known – or most notorious – recent alumni entirely. Eton used to take pride in the number of leading politicians it had produced. No longer, if this is anything to go by:

Henderson said Eton had changed significantly from the school that produced the likes of current prime minister Boris Johnson, former prime minister David Cameron and the leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg.

“What you are talking about there is a very small number of individuals who left the school over 30 years ago and who have made it to the top levels of politics. Eton in 2019 is a much more inclusive and diverse population than it was previously.

“My responsibility as headmaster of Eton in 2019 is to look at what Eton is doing now and in the future. I can’t change what it may or may or may not have done in the past.” He agreed, however, that the image of Rees-Mogg lounging on the frontbenches during an emergency debate on Brexit was “not a good look”.

It is the behaviour of those three Conservative politicians over the past few years that has, of course, newly besmirched the escutcheon (is that right?) of their old college, and given fresh impetus to Labour’s ambition to abolish the ‘Public’ schools entirely. Whether throwing Dodgy Dave, Boris de Pfeffel and Lord Snooty-Mogg overboard in this way will encourage Labour to call off the hounds is, I would think, unlikely. (With apologies for the mixed metaphor.)

I am of course delighted that the Labour Conference has backed Jeremy Corbyn’s eminently sensible strategy; and hopefully an election-winning one, if the Press’s incredible distortions – including even the Guardian‘s – don’t stymie him. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2019/09/22/learning-from-wilson/.) It will give me the opportunity to vote Remain in the promised referendum, but also relieve me of the feeling that we’ve been swindled – as we were in 2016 – if the second vote, taken on the basis of much better knowledge and a properly spelled-out alternative (Labour’s prospective new ‘deal’), goes against me. Best of all, however, it could cut the ground from under the feet of the (proto) Fascists, and so help to repair our democracy.

It seems such a rational approach that I sometimes suspect that much of the Right-wing Labour opposition to Corbyn’s programme arises, not from any consideration of its merits, but from personal hostility against him. In the case of the newspapers, of course, it’s clearly more self-interested, on the part of their rich tax-dodging and neoliberal proprietors. Which is not, of course, to impugn the motives of the more genuine and principled ‘do or die’ Remainers; who may turn out to be right, not only in principle (I agree with them there), but tactically as well. Who can tell?

Anger and passion from young Greta. (Skip the ad.)

https://www.tv4play.se/program/nyheterna/12500757

On Corbyn and Brexit I should explain. I’m a dedicated ‘Remainer’, and in fact have become more so in the three years that have passed since the referendum. I accept that the conduct of that referendum was fraudulent, and that its result did not indicate a majority in favour of a ‘no deal’ Brexit at the time, and even less so subsequently, when the real effects of Brexit have become a lot clearer. I acknowledge the harm that this whole affair is doing to Britain’s stability at home, and to her reputation and influence abroad – which I’m witness to as a part-time expat. I would dearly like the whole decision to be reversed, or, short of that, a new referendum to advise whether it should be. To this extent I sympathise with those who are pressing Corbyn to come out firmly on the side of ‘Remain’, and resenting the fact that he is so unwilling to do so. So my heart – and, I would say, my intellect – are on the side of the angels.

But…. We need to acknowledge two things. The first is that Corbyn has always been a critical ‘European’, which is a defensible position to take, even among Europhiles. His main slogan in 2016 was ‘Remain and Reform’. The second factor which must be taken into account is the strength of feeling on the devils’ side. Irrational and terrifyingly populist as it is, it presents a real danger to the country, and to any social and political progress that might be made there under a Labour government. Brexit is not a question of principle for socialists, as neither were the other ‘foreign’ policy issues on which Labour has traditionally split in the past – imperialism, the Great War, the Iraq War, entry into Europe, and many others – all of which can be and were argued from either side. But it has the potential – demonstrably – to divide and injure Labour, and so prevent its coming to power and the inestimable reforms that could follow from that.

Which is why Corbyn’s suggested policy – renegotiate a deal (which the EU would probably allow on the basis of retaining the common market and its rules: remember it was Theresa May’s ‘red lines’ that stymied this kind of compromise originally), and then putting that to a new public vote, with the alternative being ‘Remain’; a vote which would not be ‘whipped’ by the party – seems to me to be the least harmful way out of this (‘Eton’) mess. It would be democratic, and so should appease the populists; and even if Labour’s new ‘deal’ were accepted, would be acceptable to compromising Remainers like me, and probably most of those who voted for ‘Exit’ simply out of hostility to the Tories; while also marginalising the ultra ‘No-Dealers’.

Just imagine what might happen if Labour clearly obstructs the (so-called) ‘will of the people’. Brexiteers are already threatening violence and civil war. It sounds craven, I know; but history shows that neutrality and appeasement do sometimes work. They worked in 1973 for Harold Wilson. Even his cabinet was given a free vote in that year’s European referendum. Today Wilson is given far less credit than I believe he deserves for anything he did when he was prime minister. But he was a clever old stick. Corbyn seems to be learning  from him. Who would have thought it?