Porter’s Pensées

When I was at university the only British history we read was ‘constitutional history’, based (if I remember rightly) on JR Tanner’s books of British Constitutional Documents. It was legalistic, parliamentary, and meant to illustrate the formal progress of Britain from a monarchy to a (nominal) democracy. So it made us feel good about ourselves. Still, it was boring, and missed out vast aspects of history that I was far more interested in: social history; cultural history; foreign policy; and even (you may be surprised to learn) British imperial history. There was an optional course on that, entitled – tellingly – ‘The Expansion of Europe’; but that was only there for the dumber students, who couldn’t cope with the alternative ‘History of Political Philosophy’ option. Otherwise British Constitutional history was our basic, porridge course. I never imagined I’d find any use for it after my second undergraduate year.

All this current talk of ‘proroguing Parliament’ however, involving the Queen, creating new peers, legal challenges and the like, has suddenly given it a modern relevance. I’m now quite grateful for my early grounding in this dull fare. I know, vaguely but still better than most people, what the British ‘constitution’ consists of. Being ‘unwritten’, of course, it rests on precedents. Which means constitutional history. I don’t remember all of that, after 50-plus years; so I must look out my Tanner’s Constitutional Documents again. In any brought-up-to-date future edition the years 2016-19 will figure large. We are living through a key moment in our constitutional history.

I’ll be going to Turku in Finland next month, to deliver a conference paper on subversion and counter-subversion. Kajsa and I have decided to travel over there by ferry from Stockholm, rather than to fly. It will take 11 hours.

The ferry is popular because it sells duty-free liquor. That’s curious, as the route is surrounded by EU countries, and so strictly speaking EU taxation laws should operate. But half-way across lie the Åland islands, which are Finnish and so members of the EU, but with a special dispensation which exempts them from EU duties. Apparently most of our fellow passengers will be travelling for that reason alone; with the result that I’ve been warned of drunken behaviour on board by young Swedes and Finns. Well, it can’t be worse than the scenes in Green Street, Upton Park, when West Ham used to play there.

How interesting, however, that ‘Brussels’ permits this sort of exception! I believe there are several others like it. It rather upsets, doesn’t it, the Brexiteers’ portrayal of the EU as an authoritarian empire?

Great stuff that. Henry Newbolt just about caught the mood.

There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight,                                                                             Ten to make and the match to win –
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,
But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”

There’s no need to read the rest. It’s about a British soldier under fire in the desert, who is motivated by imagining he’s Eton’s number 11 batsman against Harrow. Jack Leach was the No.11 yesterday. But Ben Stokes, of course, is the hero. And yesterday epitomises why cricket is the greatest game ever invented.

If I’d been in England, I probably would have gone along. (Leeds isn’t far from Hull.) But I’m still in cricket-starved Sweden. So I missed it; with no-one even to share the moment with me. Kajsa’s ‘that’s nice, dear’ doesn’t really do it justice.

Back from hols next week, when serious blogging will be resumed.

From the Guardian. Frightening.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/16/the-myth-of-eurabia-how-a-far-right-conspiracy-theory-went-mainstream

Holidaying just now, with little opportunity to comment on Britain’s crazy political situation currently, and in any case with nothing much to say that hasn’t been better said by others. But I thought I’d re-post this on the Labour ‘anti-semitism’ controversy, providing some very useful in-depth context for the whole monstrous fraud.

https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/the-roots-of-the-new-antisemitism-narrative/?fbclid=IwAR0LZuz5qMv5tMvThozbMzQA63otVfN-az4lCLqM7vRrXbFMynFCTtYkqHU

The next election – due soon, surely? – is going to be very difficult for Labour, with its erstwhile comrades the Jews – or some of them – joining the capitalists, nationalists, Trumpites, proto-Fascists and just plain stupid (as well as decent Conservatives) on the other side. I hope their obstruction doesn’t rebound too damagingly on the reputation of Britain’s Jewish community. Otherwise we might see a genuine left-wing anti-semitism arising, in place of this manufactured one.

I’m beginning to warm to those Continental commentators – many of them here in Sweden – who believe that the UK, or at least the English part of it, has gone collectively mad. Electing Boris as our Prime Minister is one sure sign: except that he wasn’t of course ‘elected’ in any true sense of the word. The Monty Python-esque conduct of Jacob Rees-Mogg – ‘Member of Parliament for the Eighteenth Century’ – is another. There are rumours of Parliament’s being ‘prorogued’ in order to see a ‘No Deal’ Brexit through; followed by a General Election on the theme of ‘Parliament versus the People’. How much more ‘populist’ can you get? Dagens Nyheter recently published a piece by its (very good) London correspondent claiming that it might require the Queen to step in and stop all the nonsense: which sounds ridiculous, but is technically possible. Yesterday a Conservative MEP called for the Treason Act of 1372 to be extended to all those who profess loyalty to the European Union: https://www.businessinsider.com/conservative-mep-david-campbell-bannerman-british-people-eu-loyalty-tried-for-treason-brexit-2018-7?utm_medium=referral&utm_content=topbar&utm_term=desktop&referrer=facebook&fbclid=IwAR0XjPnAkghzwSimtYQeFcIfrPSLVVfdXT9Yqnp0hGZlIGyr8Ze18tpznFE&r=US&IR=T. ‘Patriots’, on the other hand, those who would no doubt avoid the new definition of treachery, are bad-mouthing immigrants in the streets. Then, on the edges of all this, there are the grotesque attacks on Corbyn from the Right-wing press and some in his own party – charges of spying for the Czechs and being an anti-semite, among others – which in cooler-headed times would never be credited by anyone. Where will it end? Many are now predicting a form of Fascism – a cuddly English sort – which is looking more and more likely as time goes by.

For my part, relatively secure as I am now with my new Swedish and consequently European citizenship, this seems all very sad, indeed tragic; a grotesque betrayal of the values of tolerance and compromise which used to cement my loyalty to my country of birth. I still believe that Corbyn’s way is the only one that could heal the present painful divisions in Britain: ‘Brino’, or Brexit in name only; out of the EU but still bound to it in every way possible short of formal membership, including remaining within the European common market and under the aegis of European law. That would be a generous compromise on my side. (Compromise because I’d prefer to stay in the EU.) Why won’t the Brexiteers meet us at that half-way point? Most of them will have voted in the 2016 Referendum for something close to this; having been repeatedly assured that their European trade would not be affected by Brexit. Scarcely any of them will have voted for the ‘clean break’ the present Brextremists are insisting on; an option that was never put to them. Nor, of course, did they vote for the shortages, the collapse of the pound, the flight of industry, their under-staffed hospitals and restrictions on travel that are already upon us; and the Götterdämmerung of ultimate Thatcherism that our neo-liberal leaders, and their American backers, are plotting as their next stage.

Back in Britain I can see myself being arrested under the 1372 Treason Act; or expelled from the Labour Party simply for demanding (in an earlier post: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/04/28/anti-semitism-and-labour/) evidence of anti-semitism there, like Chris Williamson was. This is no time for rational debate. To call it ‘mad’ is of course an opt-out. There are reasons for all this. I think I can glimpse some of them, but I need to organise them properly. A crisis of late-stage capitalism must I think be the root cause. But I’ll come back to this.

This – if you can get it up – is an excellent little lecture by a Yale philosopher about the origins of Fascism, given about a year ago as a warning to Americans, but updated here to include some Swedish examples; and clearly relevant in almost every detail to Boris’s Britain. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

In the early 1900s a number of British imperial zealots came to believe that the Empire could only survive in the future if it re-embraced the United States of America, and moved its capital to Washington. They were influenced by the mining capitalist Cecil Rhodes, whose will provided scholarships to Oxford University for British colonials, and also for Americans. (And, as it happened, for Germans: our ‘race cousins’.) The American and Commonwealth ones are still going. Past ‘Rhodes Scholars’ have included number of future American presidents, the most recent being Bill Clinton. The ‘Round Table’ group, as it was called, also formed a secret society to further their grand British-American imperial ends. An American historian called Carroll Quigley inferred from this that America’s foreign policy was unduly influenced on the side of Britain by this transatlantic conspiracy. That is nonsense, of course.

And yet…. Boris Johnson was born in New York, seems to have imperial sympathies, has a high regard for the current American president, and has made it pretty clear that he would favour a trade deal with the USA which most economists believe would make Britain dependent on America in a way she wasn’t while she was in the EU. Trump of course is doing all he can to tear Britain away from the EU.

One result of this could be to reduce the UK to the status of a de facto colony of America, which could be said in a way to realise the Rhodes conspirators’ vision, of an Anglo-American empire, a hundred years on. (Perhaps the US-born Boris could become its President? Apparently his ambition at an early age was to become ‘world-king’. That would really cement it.) Whether or not ‘conspiracy’ had anything at all to do with this – I very much doubt it – it seems an odd way for Britain to ‘take back control’.

How often over the past week have we heard or read these words, in connexion with Boris Johnson’s elevation to the leadership of the Conservative Party, and consequently of the nation; and his new Cabinet appointments? As if he wasn’t bad enough himself – a proven liar, lazy, egotistic, a philanderer, disloyal, an acknowledged disaster as Foreign Secretary, obviously poorly educated and even worse socialised (at Eton), with little going for him apart from his elderly admirers’ (his Tory Party voters’) willingness to overlook these flaws in the light of his cuddly upper-class image, his extreme Europhobia, his heady appeals to an outmoded version of British ‘pluck’ and optimism, and the chaotic political situation of the day – he has appointed the most Right-wing Cabinet since Lord Liverpool: a team of near-crooks and Brexit extremists. It includes a Home Secretary – Priti Patel – who is against LGTB equality and wants to bring back the death penalty, for pity’s sake; and the risibly eccentric Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is apparently issuing instructions to his staff never to use metric measurements, or certain words he dislikes – ‘equal’ is one – and to address all male Commoners as ‘Esq’. (Can this be true? Its source is his local North Somerset Conservative association. See https://metro.co.uk/2019/07/27/jacob-rees-mogg-bans-staff-using-word-equal-bizarre-new-rules-10470603/.)

The general consensus is that this can’t last. Johnson and his Government have Parliament to negotiate through first. Their majority there is tiny, depending on a small band of Protestant fundamentalists from Northern Ireland, whom May bribed onto her side a couple of years ago and may need to be offered more money to carry on with their support; and with many Conservative MPs wishing him no good. (I had an email yesterday from one of them whom I happen to know: ‘Boris is a horror and will always let you down’.) One assumes that a defeat of some kind – probably over a ‘No Deal’ Brexit – must be followed by a General Election which will turf him out. But there’s no guarantee of this. Tory malcontents might easily be dragooned into line by the fear of a Corbyn (‘communist, appeasing, terrorist-loving, anti-semitic’) government; or, alternatively, Labour’s electoral chances might be fatally undermined by its own divisions, fed on by clever lying propagandists from the Right. That’s how unpredictable the situation is.

So is the ‘will of the people’ just now. On Brexit it seems clear from opinion polls that a majority is against leaving with ‘No Deal’. The adverse ramifications of that are now obvious. Another thing that ought to be obvious to those who originally voted to leave as a more general protest against the upper-class ‘Establishment’, is how upper-class Establishment Boris’s new government itself is. Nigel Farage could perhaps market himself as a maverick – a champion of ‘ordinary people’ against the toffs, although looking into his background as a banker that never really rang true – but a government that includes Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and Jacob William Rees-Mogg (it’s the hyphen that does it; ‘Rees’ and ‘Mogg’ would sound rather common on their own) is going to find it harder to maintain a plebeian image. Surely some Leave voters will come to realise how they’ve been conned? Which of course is one of the arguments for a ‘Second Referendum’ on Brexit.

Boris hasn’t outlined his government’s policies apart from Brexit in any great detail yet – he’s hardly had time to – but the signs are that he’s going to promise to roll back ‘austerity’. That suggests a possible new direction for an otherwise Right-wing, neo-liberal government, and a return to the approach of one of his more illustrious predecessors. No, not his favourite, Churchill, whom he’s clearly trying to ape, albeit superficially; but Benjamin Disraeli, whose slogan of ‘imperialism and social reform’ is supposed to have revived his Tory party after a period in the doldrums and won them the General Election of 1874. Among historians there are doubts about the sincerity of both these Disraelian policies – even his ‘imperialism’ didn’t amount to much. But isn’t that another thing that Boris shares with him? And also suggests a sharper but lower cunning than the shaggy old twit is currently credited with.

The Swedish media is full of Boris today. (I’m back there now.) Most of the reportage is pretty accurate, and less opinionated than ours.

Dagens Nyheter’s London correspondent claims that Johnson’s right-wing nationalism has less in common with Continental and American varieties, than with old-fashioned British liberal imperialism. That’s a theme I’ll be examining shortly; ultimately for the new concluding chapter of the sixth edition of my Lion’s Share, but I may share it here first.

A few weeks ago I wrote to the Head of History at Eton College, to find out what kind of British imperial history Boris could have been exposed to there. (If any. The public schools, as I understand it, have always been keener on the Greeks and Romans.) Was he – quite incidentally – recommended any of my books? They might have pricked a few illusions. I’m still waiting for an answer.

The irony of the situation for anyone with imperial ambitions, of course, is that Brexit is much more likely to reduce Britain to the status of a colony  herself; and a colony of a former colony – the USA – at that.