Porter’s Pensées

For any historical event, there are usually several layers of explanation, interacting with one another. In the case of Brexit I wouldn’t like to claim that what I offer below is the only explanation, but it’s worth considering, among all the others. It may look like a ‘conspiracy theory’, but it isn’t really, because it doesn’t require a small group of people ‘breathing together’ (conspirare) in secret. Often people act in unison but independently of each other, and for their own reasons. And their beliefs and actions may not in themselves be the ultimate causes of the events they appear to be promoting, but may be affected and even formed by impersonal, and unperceived, forces beyond their control.

Our present political difficulties, I should like to suggest, come into this category. Here, the ‘unperceived force’ is the ‘crisis of capitalism’ that has been impatiently predicted for decades by Marxists, but seems only just to have arrived; after several false alarms that were defused in the past by, for example, imperialism, wars and welfare socialism, all of which acted to solve, temporarily, the inherent and inevitable self-destructive tendency of late-stage ultra-free-market capitalism. That’s the elephant in the Brexit room, looming over the deliberate or conscious motivations of the ‘Brexiteers’ themselves, including nationalism, racism, romanticism (Boris), self-aggrandisement, anti-élitism, and the host of littler resentments and prejudices that surround what is called ‘populism’ today.

Many of these motivations are inconsistent, even contradictory; but one major one in the case of the leaders of the Brexit movement shines through. That is the ambition to ‘free’ Britain from unwelcome economic and political restrictions, some of them emanating from Europe but not all, in order to return Britain to the condition that is supposed to have been hers in the glorious nineteenth century, before all those interfering socialists came along. Because the USA is seen as the true inheritor of that tradition in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the nation that is still holding the torch of ‘freedom’ proudly aloft, it is natural for the Brexiteers to wish to get closer to her, notwithstanding ‘chlorinated chicken’, the marketisation of the NHS, and all the rest. It also explains President Trump’s support for Brexit, and his closeness to Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. If Britain achieves Brexit along Boris’s lines, then it is almost certain that she (or rather, her government) will follow it by using her newly acquired ‘freedom’ to dismantle some of the domestic restrictions on enterprise represented by, for example, trade unions and legislation on ‘health and safety’. That will bring her closer both to the neo-liberals’ utopia, and to the USA.

Of course Brexit is ‘about’ Brexit for millions of those who voted for it; either that or – as I have argued before (https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/06/16/is-it-really-about-the-eu/) – arising out of a general resentment against the Tory-Lib government, austerity and our flawed political system. For those who have seized the reins of the movement over the last three years, however, and have now taken over the old Conservative party (Keith Simpson’s) almost completely, like those extra-terrestial human-devouring aliens in the old science-fiction movies, it is about something else. It’s the culmination of the movement Margaret Thatcher set in train in the 1980s in what I’ve called elsewhere the ‘Great Reaction’ against the social democracy of Attlee’s and Wilson’s Labour Party, and has been growing in ascendency ever since, even through ‘New Labour’ times. We can tell it’s really that if we examine the social and financial situations of most of its rich and privately-educated leaders and propagandists; including, of course, the billionaire and tax-avoiding owners of 85% of the British Press. It’s also borne out by their quite unbalanced hatred of Jeremy Corbyn – who is reacting against the Great Reaction – which is what is mainly firing the Conservatives in the present election campaign. It is also suggested by the unprecedented political cheating and foreign meddling (American, Russian, Israeli) that have brought us to this situation. Lies and dissembling are more characteristic of capitalism, I would venture to claim, than of the Left. It’s something to do with advertising, commercial amorality, and ‘winning at all costs’. – But I’ll put some more thought into that.

The Right has been sitting waiting for this since the 1960s. Now Brexit has given it the perfect opportunity to achieve its long-term aims. The ‘anti-semitism’ row has been a further unexpected (because untrue) bonus. What a bit of luck (for the Right)! Whether or not this entirely or even mainly explains Brexit, it’s undeniable that the neo-Liberal Right has cleverly exploited whatever other reasons there may have been for it, to its own material advantage. And it may well win.

I’m off to Sweden soon, but will be back just before the election. The result of that may decide whether I move to Sweden permanently, to get away from a country I used to love but now hardly recognise any more. I’m not alone. 8,000 Brits have applied for and been granted Swedish citizenship over the last year. And the figures are probably higher for warmer countries.

Good to see my old student Keith Simpson MP, saying this on TV yesterday: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-50467008. Keith was one of my favourite early students, despite our political differences, and the fact that in my courses on British history I didn’t cover the military side as much as he would have liked. He later went on to become a notable military historian, as well as an MP. He told me he married a General, in order to be saluted when he visited Army camps with her. (I’m sure that was in jest.) He’s 70 now, and not standing in this election, which is a shame. He’s one of those old-fashioned Tories I’ve always got on well with, by contrast with all those ideological right-wing public school-educated journalists and financiers who seem to have taken the party over recently. I trust Keith now to carry on sniping at our mutual enemy from behind the lines.

He’s on wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Simpson_(politician). And there’s a clip of him here on an old TV discussion programme with an incredibly drunken and quite incomprehensible Oliver Reed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_hBnSkQZCQ. Keith is the other one with a moustache. Reed offers to take him on ‘tash to tash’.

I really can’t understand what’s not to like about Corbyn. But that’s possibly because I see a lot of me in him. And I wouldn’t make a good PM either. Some recent criticisms of him seem simply ludicrous: wonky glasses, pronouncing ‘Epstein’ in an antisemitic way… (really?!). (It was the German pronunciation of ‘stein’.) Yet people, judging by the ‘Vox pops’ on TV, seem to lap them up.

His (or rather, Labour’s: it’s a collective effort) new Election Manifesto, launched yesterday, ought to be a winner, promising all the things that social democrats like me have been yearning for for years. The Daily Mail, of course, calls it ‘Marxist’. (Do they have any idea what ‘marxism’ really entails?) If successful, it could stop our long Thatcher-generated decline in its tracks, returning Britain to the progressive path it was on before she – or, rather, the neoliberal tide of the time – took over. And Corbyn clearly means it all; unlike Boris’s unconvincing promises – unconvincing because they go right against all the principles he’s been holding to, or pretending to, hitherto.

Boris anyway should have ruled himself out of contention already because of his obvious and notorious lying over the years. How anybody could possibly trust the empty, clownish idiot (knowing Greek doesn’t make you intelligent) who was revealed during his TV ‘debate’ with Corbyn, I can’t credit. (Apparently he’s ducking out of future one-on-one debates.) It must be that – as in the USA – voters simply don’t care about ‘honesty’ any more. Otherwise why did the Conservative Central Office dare to put out that propaganda on the internet disguised as a ‘fact check’ site – and then not turn a hair when it was very quickly revealed as such? (See https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/election-debate-tory-fact-check-uk-twitter-boris-johnson-corbyn-a9209816.html.) I imagine they’re relying on the common popular reaction to this kind of thing: that ‘oh well, politicians are all the same; they all do it’. In this way Labour and Corbyn become tarred with the shit (apologies for the language, and for the mixed metaphor) that really should only attach to the Tories.

Then they go on about Corbyn’s reluctance to say whether he’ll back Brexit or Remain in his promised referendum. For pity’s sake; the ‘Brexit’ choice in that referendum will be a new deal with the EU that he hasn’t negotiated yet. How can he decide at this stage whether that will be worth voting for? I won’t know, until I’ve seen it. If it retains the single market and freedom of movement I might even vote for it. I imagine that Corbyn might too. But at present that’s just a pig in a poke. And the crucial issue is, surely, that he’s proposing a nationwide, and this time better-informed, democratic vote on it; which ought to be valued much more highly than his personal and premature word as ‘leader’. Politics is not always black or white, this or that, chalk or cheese. The ‘ishues’, as Tony Benn used to call them, are always more subtle and complicated. But politicians like Johnson, and much of the ‘commentariat’, don’t seem to be able to rise to that intellectually. ‘Which side is he on?’ sounds a bit like ‘have you stopped beating your wife?’

Lastly, on this whole Brexit thing: one thing that strikes me about Labour’s new programme is how European it is. Commentators have already pointed out that, however expensive it appears measured when against Britain’s spending under Austerity, it doesn’t look at all excessive by the side of several other European countries’ national expenditures, especially those – like Germany and the Scandinavian countries – which are generally reckoned to be far more stable, prosperous and efficient economically than we are. That’s because they are – if only marginally – more Social Democratic, compared with a Britain whose distinguishing feature in Europe since Thatcher’s time has been her abandonment of even mild socialism and her closer adherence to neoliberalism. Hence the support that Brexit and other forms of Europhobia have recently attracted from the political Right (in the ’70s it was more from the Left); and of course from the Americans. That ought to make Corbyn a pro-European. But, again, that will depend on whatever ‘deal’ he manages to negotiate in the meantime.

What fun it has been over the past couple of days! Firstly that excruciating interview with the Duke of York over his relations with the American billionaire and convicted serial paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Then, the following evening, an investigation into the present British prime minister’s relationship with another American, Jennifer Arcuri; which turns out to have been as ‘close’ – that is, sexual – as was widely suspected, until he dumped her, provoking last night’s electrifying ‘woman scorned’ performance on TV. What a treat for the tabloids! It reminds me of a headline I once read in the old News of the World, which I thought represented in one short sentence the main foci of the ‘yellow press’: ‘Duchess Wore Turban at Naked Parties’. It’s just what we needed, to take our minds off Brexit for a while.

Of course neither of these events is important in itself. ‘Boys will be boys’ (sorry!), and there’s little harm in those who are attractive, rich or important enough to be able to, seducing young women (or men) whenever they like, so long as it’s done consensually. I’m always grateful that I was none of those things, and so was almost never subjected to temptations which might have got me into trouble later. Likewise, I’ve never taken much interest in Royalty; which is why the other week I turned down an offer of £800 from the Sun newspaper to comment on the latest episode of The Crown, about the relationship between Harold Wilson and the Queen. (I’ve not watched The Crown, though I’m told it’s good.)

What were important, of course, were certain implications of the two affairs. The first was the accusation that Prince Whatsisname’s paedophile friend had provided him with an under-age girl to sleep with; which she claims, but he denies. The second was the fact that Boris, as Mayor of London, had granted substantial and profitable favours to his mistress’s commercial business, without declaring her as an ‘interest’ on the London Assembly’s books. Both of these are crimes, the second of which the London Metropolitan Police are currently investigating. That makes these events more than just merely titillating.

More generally, both of them illustrate quite vividly some deeply unattractive features of our British class system, as it relates to the upper classes and Royalty. Both Boris and the Prince appear to believe – or did, before these rows broke over their heads – that their positions in society rendered them immune to the moral constraints that ordinary people are subjected to; able, in other words, to do almost as they liked. In Boris’s case that also involves serial lying. In the Prince’s, it goes along with an entire lack of understanding or empathy for the wider problem, of child sexual abuse, that his behaviour was suspected to be a part of. Even if he had not noticed at the time that this was going on – which seems scarcely credible – he should have realised it by the time of his TV interview. (Especially as he is – or was – a patron of the NSPCC.) This illustrates their arrogance. These people really do live in a different world. All of them are immensely rich, too, which may have something to do with it. Yet there they are: over and above us still.

Then – quite fortuitously – came the BBC’s splendid new adaptation of HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds. That began with a Martian attack on Woking. (It’s the same in the book, too, I seem to remember.) Did anyone else notice that it was the ‘Pizza Express’ in Woking that the Duke claimed furnished his alibi – he claims he was there with his kids – for the night his under-aged girlfriend maintained he danced ‘sweatily’ with her in a night club before taking her off to have sex with her? What is it about Woking? I’ve not been there; but I’m sure it doesn’t deserve to be invaded by both the Martians and Prince Andrew.

Man (in the non-gendered sense) cannot live by politics alone; and to relieve the unmitigated horror that is the present Brexit situation, I’ve been digging back into my adolescent interests and enthusiasms for comfort and escape. A search in my attic today revealed a whole portfolio of paintings I made in my teens, some of which I now think are quite promising (I may post a few images here later), making me wonder why I abandoned the artistic career which everyone at the time thought I was marked out for, and became a dull academic historian instead. The history, of course, brought the politics along with it.

I also discovered some large bound and illustrated books I made about local East Anglian churches, which were one of my other deep interests, and still give me great pleasure. There’s nothing religious about this. As an agnostic I regard these beautiful buildings mainly as symbols of human endeavour, community and aspiration, rather than of any particular religion.

Here is the title page of one of them. The lettering, too, is mine; we didn’t have word processors to do this sort of thing for us sixty-odd years ago.

As Hilary Clinton says, it’s disgraceful that No.10 refuses to release the findings of its enquiry into Russian meddling in British politics until after the election. Putin’s motive, of course, is to destroy the EU; as is his ally Trump’s. I blogged about this last year: see https://bernardjporter.com/2018/12/24/those-cunning-russkies/; and note the link there to my great novel, albeit a bit silly and ultimately aborted, featuring another Russian plot; this time involving the ‘Iron Lady’ herself.

The Conservative Party’s most recent fabrication was revealed almost as soon as it was published: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/11/keir-starmer-looks-stumped-tory-video-original-clip-very-different. (It was a doctored video to suggest that Kier Starmer was stumped by a question on Brexit, when in fact he had given a long and detailed response.) Much the same applies to Boris Johnson’s serial lying, for which he is notorious, even among his supporters. That’s why it is particularly worrying: with many voters obviously not at all put off by these underhand methods, if they help to ‘keep Corbyn out’. At least Boris is their liar.

Another bigger problem with these revelations is that the mud doesn’t stick only to the targets it’s meant for, but to all politicians. A common popular response to them is that ‘they’re all the same’, which serves to undermine politics more generally. That’s not true, I think; look at the relatively high-principled Corbyn. But it plays well to two sections of the political Right: neoliberals who don’t hold with any sort of ‘politics’ interfering with the free market; and populists who persist in portraying democracy not as expressing their will, as it is designed to do, but as empowering an ‘elite’ against that will. Hence Johnson’s current – and highly dangerous – ‘people versus Parliament’ election theme. This is what we older-fashioned liberals and socialists will be faced with on December 12.

That’s together with all those other forces arraigned against us: the press barons, Trump and the Israeli and Russian governments almost certainly; and possibly our own Secret Services as well. Knowing as I do something about the latters’ (or some of their agents’) machinations against the Wilson Governments in the 1960s and ’70s, I wonder what they are making of the possibility of an ex-Radical of the kind they used to spy on in his earlier years now entering No. 10? Theoretically, as Prime Minister he should have the power of gaining access to all their dirty little secrets from the time when he was being spied upon. Ireland? Kenya? Thatcher’s ‘Enemy Within’?

Of course they’ll keep all that from him. They’re cleverer liars than Boris, after all. And their official loyalty is to ‘the Crown’, which is supposed to trump governments and prime ministers. Still, the prospect must make them uncomfortable. I wouldn’t be surprised if another Zinoviev letter didn’t turn up before December 12.

The nearest historical precedent I can think of for our upcoming election on 12 November is the ‘Khaki’ election of 1900. That was fought between a worn-out but jingoistic Conservative party and a divided Liberal party, with the burning domestic issues of the day being overshadowed by the ongoing Boer War, which was starting to go badly then, and was provoking extreme language and violence in the streets comparable to what we’re seeing today. The Tories thought they could win with the ‘patriotic’ vote, and did win overall, but not as decisively as they had hoped, and with their chickens coming home to roost in the following election, which gave the Liberals a landslide victory, and the infant Labour Party its first substantial bunch of MPs. By this comparison ‘Brexit’, of course, is our ‘Boer War’. I’m not suggesting we draw any lessons from this.

It might go OK for the Left if Labour offers a new Brexit referendum in its manifesto, after negotiating a new ‘deal’ – which should be easier than most people seem to assume, if it lifts Theresa May’s and the ERG’s ‘reddest line’ against staying in the single market: Corbyn knows he can do that; and  if people can see through (a) Boris’s baseless bluster and (b) the smears of the Daily Mail. I’m not sure that any other Labour Leader wouldn’t also be subjected to that. Look at poor Ed Miliband.

Yes, I’d feel more confident with a more ‘charismatic’ Labour leader. But charisma has its dangers – viz. Boris. Corbyn is – and has always been – right on most things. He’s been far more consistent on Brexit than we’re generally told. (Not coming down on one side or the other  – ‘in’ or ‘out’ – isn’t a mark of irresolution, but of good judgment.) His polite, honest and empathetic style of politics is what we could do with more generally just now. And – I must admit – as someone with absolutely no charisma myself, I rather identify with him.

‘The meek shall inherit the earth’, says the good book. Wouldn’t that be great?!

Don’t listen to them. It’s all going swimmingly for Boris. Remember that his ultimate object – whatever he may say – is a Rightist, neo-liberal revolution in Britain, with minimal state interference and protections, which is why he wants to escape from European ‘red tape’; harking back to the country’s heroic nineteenth century; and with some of that century’s romantic glow – buccaneering merchants, derring-do, patriotism, Churchill, even the old British Empire (though he can’t say that explicitly) – adding a patina of glory to it, and taking the material sting of it out for us poor deluded proles. Read his literary output, his journalism and his books (as I’ve tried to do: the sacrifices one makes!), and that becomes blindingly clear.

The only question must be: does he really think that deeply? The conventional view is that he’s superficial, a bit of a joke, solely concerned for his own career, tacking to every breeze. But that could be part of the clever plan. If not, then it merely leaves him open to manipulation by more committed ideologues; such as Dominic (or ‘Demonic’) Cummings: the reputed Machiavel who was the eminence grise behind the Brexit campaign, and is now Boris’s chief advisor. (Picture below.)

Johnson’s latest ‘deal’ with the EU is an obvious means to this neo-liberal end; with – for example – workers’ rights and environmental protections not guaranteed in it, but merely dependent on our ‘trust’ in Boris’s word (and trust in Boris is at a pretty low ebb just now), and plenty of holes in it to drive a ‘no deal’ through. This is obvious, that is, when one reads the small print, which the government’s effort last night to rush the whole thing through Parliament with virtually no time for discussion or even for MPs to read  it, was clearly meant to prevent. Boris lost that one.

But there’s another side to this, which works in his favour. It’s the second layer of the ‘cunning plan’. He can now go to the country, as currently seems likely, on his favoured issue all along, the seeds of which were sown by Theresa May and of course our tabloid press: which is the proto-fascist slogan of ‘the People versus Parliament’; pandering to voters’ frustration and sheer boredom at the Government’s not having ‘got Brexit done’. Not getting it done wasn’t his fault, or the Tory ultras’, or even due to the intrinsically complicated difficulties of prising Britain out of the EU. (Actually, as someone said yesterday – it may have been Tony Blair – ‘it is  rocket science’.) According to this analysis it can all be blamed on the ‘Establishment’ – MPs, judges, intellectuals and the like – conspiring to thwart ‘the people’s will’.

I really don’t know how a general election fought on these lines would turn out. (Perhaps the Tories should be warned by Ted Heath’s disastrous ‘Who rules Britain’ election in the ’70s; or May’s ‘strong and stable’ one in 2017.) But I fear the effect that a heightened present-day populism might have on it, resulting in a Right-wing (Tories plus the Brexit Party) victory; followed by not only a ‘hard Brexit’, but also a turn to the far Right in domestic and social policy.

Dominic Cummings has the reputation of being a political ‘genius’, albeit a dark and Satanic one. If even I can see through this ‘cunning plan’ of his, however, he can’t be all that bright. Unless of course my prediction turns out to be wrong. Or the plot has a third  layer, invisible to me. Or someone even cleverer than him manages to checkmate him. Let’s hope so.

(Sent off just now.)

Dear Diana,

As a multi-racial Commonwealth man at the time – a British imperial historian, indeed – I believe I may have voted against Common Market membership in 1975. But circumstances are very different today, both global, and in my case personal, so I have become a passionate ‘Remainer’ over the years, while acknowledging the many flaws in the present-day EU; even to the extent of acquiring (dual) Swedish citizenship earlier this year. (I think you met my partner Kajsa a couple of years ago. You won’t remember.) The main object of that was to enable me to retain my European  identity, which Brexit will take away from us.

So I voted ‘Remain’ in 2016, and was – like very many others – shocked by the result of that referendum. I was also aware of the Machiavellian trickery and deceit which secured it, and which in other circumstances would have justified nullifying it. I never believed that the majority of the ‘Leave’ side was really voting on the issue of Europe at all, which opinion polls show was of very little concern to them before 2016; but voted mainly in order to express their discontent with successive governments, going back to Thatcher but particularly under the impact of ‘austerity’, which they believed had neglected them socially and economically, especially in the north of England. This was compounded by their frustration at the fact that our electoral system did not seem to reflect these feelings in Parliament.

But ‘the people spoke’ in 2016 in favour of Brexit, especially in Hull; and – more to the point, I believe – appear to be still in favour of pushing it through, backed up by threats of violence and even civil war. I’m sure it’s only a minority who would go this far, but it’s scary nonetheless. It’s for that reason – to ‘appease’ them, if you like – that I’m now reluctantly in favour of a compromise Brexit (or ‘Brino’), along the lines advocated from the very beginning, I believe, by Jeremy Corbyn: that is, political disentanglement from the EU but remaining in the common trading area and the Customs Union, with all that implies for ‘free movement’ and the like. It’s not my ideal solution, but it would surely satisfy most of the 52% who voted for Brexit, while easing the situation for Remainers; and, most importantly, helping to defuse the toxic and even dangerous situation we’re witnessing in British politics just now.

It wouldn’t of course reconcile the leaders of the Brexit movement – Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Farage, Gove and the rest: rich public school ‘elitists’ all, by the way – whose underlying but scarcely hidden agenda is to ‘complete the Thatcher revolution’, as one of them has put it, by destroying the employment rights and environmental standards which at present are guaranteed by the EU, and so reduce Britain (or perhaps just England, if Scotland and NI leave) to the position of a neo-liberal dystopia dependent  – ‘informal-colonially’, as we imperial historians would put it – on a neo-liberal America for its trade.

That will almost certainly be the ultimate outcome if Boris Johnson’s ‘deal’ is allowed to pass in the House of Commons without amendment. It’s not only our relations with the European continent that are threatened, but the social-democratic domestic settlement that has kept us largely immune from serious civil disruption and even proto-fascism since 1945.

It must be difficult for a Remainer MP representing a ‘Leave’ constituency. But you will not, I believe, be betraying your constituents (of whom I’m one) if you help obstruct the current ‘deal’ by voting for it to be amended in the Commons this week.

I’ll be backing you, by the way, at the constituency re-selection meeting on Friday. I guess I’m more ‘Corbynist’ than you; but I greatly admire you as a constituency MP and for the causes you champion in the House. I also feel that the Labour party should be (to coin a cliché) a ‘broad church’; and that local selection contests at this crucial point in its history are needlessly divisive.

Bernard Porter.