Porter’s Pensées

Just three days now until re-entry to the toxic planet called Britain. I chose this time to return in order to be able to vote in the EU elections. As a dual national, I could vote here in Sweden, but not in both countries in the same election, and I reckoned that, with the UK’s place in the EU being on a knife-edge just now, my vote there would be more important: in as much as any single vote amongst millions can be.

But I feel conflicted about where my vote should go. I understand the reasons for Labour’s ambivalent position over Brexit, and have supported Corbyn’s line on this all along. Brexit is not the main problem facing Britain today, by comparison with growing inequality, the environment, austerity, the rise of the Right, education, health, the press and a score of other deep-laid issues that desperately need to be tackled, on all of which I support the Labour leadership’s policies wholeheartedly; and which I believe lay, albeit invisibly, at the root of that disastrous Brexit vote in 2016. Labour currently reflects most of my views on nearly everything. I’ve been a member since the early 1960s.  I worked and voted for them in the recent local UK elections (where we won in our ward and overturned the sitting Lib-Dem by just 14 votes!), and will again, of course, if they retain their present progressive platform, in the next General Election, whenever that is.

But this EU election is not like those others. It’s to vote in MEPs – members of the European Parliament. And if Brexit goes through, they won’t be sitting there for long. If I knew they were, I’d vote for the party that I thought stood most chance of turning European policies in the direction I want, in alliance with Left-wing MEPs from other countries. That of course would be Labour. But Brexit has fouled up the whole thing. It’s the only issue that counts now. If Labour remain ambivalent on EU membership, or on the question of a new referendum on whether and if so how we should still leave, no-one will be able to tell from the results of the election what the Labour votes represent on this issue. That will tend to boost the Brexiteers.

I’m getting desperate e-mails from Labour candidates in my Yorkshire constituency urging me to stick by my basic political principles, and vote for the party that best represents them. But I’m thinking of supporting the Lib Dems nonetheless. I’ll have to hold my nose, having been betrayed by them before. (Can you believe that I actually left Labour briefly under Blair, and joined the Libs on the strength of their solemn promise to abolish University tuition fees! Fool that I was.) Once bitten, twice shy. I could never vote for them in a ‘normal’ election. But on this occasion, on the basis of their unequivocal ‘Remain’ stand, and if Labour doesn’t re-think in the next couple of weeks, and at the very least promise a People’s Vote come what may, I just might.

I imagine that other pro-Europe British Leftists are faced by the same dilemma. Which is why the results of the upcoming elections will probably tell us little that we need to know.

So, Swedish prosecutors have decided to re-open the ‘rape’ case against Julian Assange: https://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/swedish-prosecutors-reopen-inquiry-into-rape-allegation-against-julian-assange/ – from Dagens Nyheter, but in English. Does this mean he will be tried in Sweden? Who makes that decision? I must say I’m a little surprised, in view of what I’ve been able to gather about the facts of the case: see https://bernardjporter.com/2015/01/09/julian-assange-and-the-european-arrest-warrant/, and the links there; and http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster71/lob71-assange-again.pdf. But of course I don’t have all the evidence, and the case against him may well turn out to be stronger than I suspect. If not, then his extradition and trial, carried out in the full glare of international press publicity, may not reflect well on the Swedish judicial system, and hence on Sweden’s reputation as a nation. (As a Swede myself now, I would regret this.)

On the other hand it is undoubtedly good news for Assange, who has always protested his innocence of the rape charges and his desire to prove it, and only resisted extradition to Sweden in the first place – it should be remembered – because Sweden would not guarantee his re-extradition to the USA on other, political charges. I wonder whether they’ll promise that this time? It always used to be a general and very proper principle of extradition law that it can’t be used to convey the extraditee to a third country. That was seen as an abuse.

It’s also good news for the British government, who in these ‘Me Too’ times will gain kudos from elevating sexual offences against women over the more controversial crime of political whistleblowing; and for liberals who are likely to trust the Swedish government more than the current American. So Britain can’t be accused of truckling to Trump. (Not on this occasion, anyway. Of course we still have his State visit in June to come.)

PS. I’m not altogether confident of the fairness of any trial Assange may stand in Sweden.  I expressed my doubts about the Swedish legal system on this blog some years ago: https://bernardjporter.com/2015/01/09/julian-assange-and-the-european-arrest-warrant/. It’s not what Assange will have been used to, coming as he does from a country where – for a start – juries are required. They’re not in Sweden. And I’m not certain that the trial would need to be ‘public’, in our sense. In which case, in a high-profile case like his, the Swedish judicial process might well come under some adverse international scrutiny. This was one of the reasons why I originally thought the authorities might be content to let the case lie. But I imagine his defence team are aware of all this.

Yesterday morning a happy event occurred in my step- (in Swedish ‘bonus’-) family. I spread the news to my own children via  e-mail and text-messaging – but NOT on Facebook. Less than 24 hours later I received an email from Moonpig.com  advertising ‘new baby’ greetings cards and gifts. Unless this was an extraordinary coincidence, how did they find out? Are our personal emails and texts now spied on by – or for the benefit of – private companies? I’ve always known that the State can hack into our Facebook accounts; but this appears to go much further than that.

Not that I’m worried for myself – I’ve never to my knowledge used email or messaging to communicate content that might compromise or even embarrass me in any way. But what if, in the future, I did  need to communicate information privately? Is there any way of doing it now, short of whispering in someone’s ear? And even then I might need to ensure that my TV, laptop or i-phone weren’t nearby. I read somewhere that they can pick up conversations even when they’re switched off.

I suppose we could all go back to writing old-fashioned paper letters. And delivering them personally, to avoid interception by the Post Office. (That’s been going on since 1845 at least. See my Plots and Paranoia.)

Mother, father and child are doing well, by the way. But I won’t be Moonpigging them.

How about a nice piece of music?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg9CBBd3vZ8

Wasn’t that splendid?

I ‘discovered’ Joseph Martin Kraus long before I came to Sweden, and was surprised when I arrived here to discover how little he was known in his adopted country. This symphony – his best – was on an old Turnabout LP called ‘Symphonies for Kings’. The King in this case was Gustavus III of Sweden; the highly cultured but latterly increasingly authoritarian monarch whose assassination is the subject of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera (1859). I reckoned that this symphony was up there with Mozart and Haydn; and apparently Mozart and Haydn thought so too. Haydn claimed that Kraus’s Symphony in C minor would be ‘regarded as a masterpiece for centuries to come’. Mozart called him ‘the first great composer of genius that I ever knew’. He wrote several symphonies, plus operas and chamber music; as well as being a playwright, poet and philosopher of some merit. He also shared a rather spooky history with Mozart: sharing his dates (1756-92), dying tragically young, therefore, and with his final musical work being a Requiem (of sorts, for his murdered king), just as Mozart’s was. Some of his music is appearing at last on CD, and on YouTube, whence this example is taken.

Kraus was one of those German composers who sought patronage abroad, as had Handel in England earlier, and one of the Bach sons around Kraus’s time. The German states clearly had a surplus of symphonists, and other countries a serious lack of them. Who between Purcell and Elgar could be counted a really ‘great’ native composer in England, for example; or at any time at all in musically impoverished Sweden? The quirky Berwald, perhaps; but he couldn’t make a living there as a composer, so only made music part-time. His day job was as an orthopaedic surgeon. (I’m sorry, I can’t accept Stenhammar: see https://bernardjporter.com/2019/02/23/walton-and-stenhammar/. But maybe I’m just deaf to him.) In fact it’s curious that Sweden is the only Scandinavian country that can’t boast a Grieg, a Nielsen or a Sibelius; though I’ve long thought it might appropriate the last-named, who was a Swedish-speaking Finn, after all. – And yes, of course I’m being elitist in my choice of the kind of music I’m writing about; though I think I could be accused of greater elitism if I thought that ‘ordinary people’ couldn’t appreciate classical music too.

It’s for reasons like this – the unequal spread of musical genius around Europe – that what talent there was needed to be shared out. And – to insert a political point into this argument – doesn’t it more than justify freedom of movement in Europe, at least on this cultural level? Just think what Britain might have been if Brexit had gone way back? Little decent music, no Gothic architecture, Shakespeare without his Continental links (visits by his ‘players’, for example, to the castle of Helsingør), no Saxon democracy, even possibly no drinking cups (brought over from Europe by the ‘Beaker Folk’); to put against the less admirable aspects of immigration: Viking rapine and pillage, the Norman Yoke, our aristocracy, the Royal Family, and so on. And the same applies the other way around. Where would the Continent be without our manufacturers (Engels’s dad, for example), railway builders, football, and Political Economy? All of which was made possible because freedom of movement was more or less a ‘given’ in that period; except in a few very backward countries – Tsarist Russia was one – where there were even restrictions on travelling between towns. Britain, for one, didn’t require passports for foreign incomers until the 20^thcentury.

You can see where poor Martin Kraus fits into this argument. But his music should mainly be listened to, of course, for its intrinsic beauty and drama. I thought of him in this context because I’ve just acquired a volume of his letters in translation, edited by the leading – perhaps, sadly, the only – scholarly expert on him, Bertil Van Boer. I’m looking forward to reading it, with the Symphony in C minor playing in the background.

Anyone who still thinks that we have a free press in Britain, in any meaningful sense, should watch this.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=604221586603881

It’s old, but telling. – In fact our press is about as ‘free’ as the Mafia was in 1920s America, and in much the same way. The Daily Mail has long been our substitute for, or equivalent of, Fascism on the Continent – English, lower-middle class, family-centred, nostalgic, superficially friendly, but also prejudiced, hostile towards the weak, and dangerous; followed closely by the Express and the Sun. Hence our disgracefully low placing on most current global indexes of ‘press freedom’, which I’ve noted before: https://bernardjporter.com/2017/04/30/press-freedom/.

The right-wing press isn’t the cause of all our current national poison; but it’s the conduit through which it flows.

‘Anti-semitism’ on the Left is an issue here in Sweden too.

https://ledarsidorna.se/2019/05/socialdemokraterna-ansvarigt-for-ssus-antisemitism/

Again, it’s the Social Democrats’ sympathy for the Palestinians that appears to lie at the root of the charge.

Oh come off it! Fair’s fair. As much as I loathe and despise Nigel Farage, and willing as I am to believe he’s an anti-semite underneath, I can’t accept that this is proven by the words and opinions that are held against him in a recent attack by certain ‘Jewish organisations and a series of other groups’, which argue that his appearance on right-wing US talk shows (damning enough, I agree) where he ‘openly’ discussed conspiracy theories, ‘some of which have been linked to antisemitism’  (my italics), definitely establishes this. None of Farage’s statements quoted in this Guardian report, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/06/nigel-farage-under-fire-alleged-antisemitic-tropes-far-right-us-talkshow-alex-jones, mentions the Jews specifically; and the ‘links’ it claims to antisemitism seem, to my mind, to be tenuous.

There are and always have been conspiracy theories alleging a desire for ‘global domination’ which don’t involve the Jews at all: the Illuminati, Freemasons, communists, the ‘Rhodes group’, capitalists of all races and religions, the CIA, the mainstream media, and so on, depending on your prejudices and gullibility; which makes it curious – surely antisemitic, even – to assume that talk of ‘conspiracy’ automatically involves Jews. Find a better petard to hoist Farage by, please. There are plenty of them around.

Of course it’s useful to be able to counter the specious accusations that are being made against Corbyn with these mirror-image ones against Farage. But therein lies the flaw, and the danger when it comes to rational political debate. What’s sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. If we object to the ‘anti-semitic’ insinuations made against Corbyn – and, to take the latest of them, I’ve written favourably about Hobson’s Imperialism too – we should extend the same privilege to his enemies. I hold no candle for Nigel – precisely the opposite, in fact; and there may be other reasons to attribute to him one of the nastiest prejudices in human history. He’s of the right class, in the right trade, and with the right brand of politics, after all. What is at issue here, however, is the integrity of our political discourse, which should not be coloured on any side by insinuations and alleged ‘links’ of this kind.

If this study is accurate, then we in Britain don’t really need to be too worried about the  xenophobes in our midst. Apparantly we feel more positive towards immigrants – if only marginally – than most other European countries. That might be another reason for reversing Brexit, without now needing to fear the hostile reaction it would provoke. Here it is: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/02/britons-more-sold-on-immigration-benefits-than-other-europeans.

Actually I’ve always been sceptical of the impression that has been around for years that Brits are peculiarly hostile to foreigners. I don’t know much about other countries historically (apart from a little about Sweden), but it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that xenophobia and racism were – and are – at least as common there as in Britain. A number of factors have combined to single the British out in this regard. One is their – literal – insularity. But that has never stopped Brits from travelling abroad more than most peoples, and not usually in search of imperial conquests; or literally millions of foreign Europeans coming to visit, work or settle in Britain over the past 200 years, for all kinds of reasons. The people mainly responsible for spreading the libel were British  novelists, like Dickens, Thackeray and Lever, who found that they could make great comic fun out of portraying their own countrymen (and women) as arrogant isolationists and racists abroad. This was rarely countered – there’s not much amusement to be gained from Brits behaving well  abroad – and the idea has, to my knowledge, never been tested by social historians since; properly tested, that is, in a way that would establish the extent of xenophobia in British life. Of course you can always find scattered examples.

At one time I was planning a new book about this aspect of British society, with the title Cosmopolis. It even made it to the stage of a synopsis and some sample chapters, and an acceptance (in principle) by a publisher. But then age and infirmity caught up with me, and I gave the project up. I’m still hoping that Bloomsbury Press will give me the go-ahead for a collection of essays on aspects of this theme, mostly published previously: a kind of European companion volume to my Empire Ways (2017); but I haven’t heard from them yet. Cross your fingers.

I returned to Sweden on Friday; my last trip through the ‘EU Citizens’ gate at Arlanda with my British passport. From now on – if Brexit goes through – I’ll have to queue separately with all the other Foreigners. Or, rather, I would have had to, if I hadn’t taken the wise precaution a couple of years ago of applying for (dual) Swedish citizenship, which was granted to me last month. I’m here now, in fact, partly in order to collect my brand new Swedish passport from the central Police office in Stockholm; when I shall feel free – in this respect – again.

This is the curious thing about Brexit: that although it was presented in the summer of 2016 as a means of ‘liberation’ – Farage asked for June 16 to be recognised in the future as marking our ‘Independence Day’ – its effect has been to deprive us of more freedoms than it has released. In the first place, the restrictions that ‘Brussels’ placed on our liberties were very minor ones, scarcely noticeable, even by keen Brexiteers who, when asked what effects they had on them from a personal and individual point of view, usually found it difficult to cite a single example. ‘Immigration’ was the thing they usually fell back on; but generally without realising that even under EU rules European immigrants could always be ‘sent back’ if they were a burden, and that closing off EU immigration would not get rid of the ‘blacks’ and ‘Muslims’ who were the ones to whom the Brexiteers most objected. As well as this, it scarcely seemed to register with them that ‘freedom of movement’ also meant freedom for them to move where they liked on the Continent; something that was cruelly brought home to those British oldies who had retired to the Costa del Sol (for the sol), and apparently (being old) had mostly voted for Brexit in 2016, only to find that it meant that they could no longer benefit from Spain’s health system for their arthritis and Altzheimers, as they once had. Serve them bloody right, I say. But it wasn’t only the oldies that will be affected. British workers, students, manufacturers, scientists, partners, children, ordinary holidaymakers and many others will all lose this automatic freedom to live and work in the remaining EU countries, on account of their having been robbed of their European citizenship and identity  by this single act of foolishness.

The most extreme and xenophobic Brexiteers probably won’t mind this at all. Some of the hypocrites among them have already made provision for Brexit on a personal level, by for example securing German citizenship for themselves or their kids (Farage), or hiving their ill-gotten millions off to Ireland (Rees-Mogg). For the less privileged, staying in Britain should be regarded as right and patriotic; for only ‘traitors’, surely, would want to live amongst foreigners? Which I imagine includes me; and the thousands of others who have done what I have done, and acquired a second nationality within the EU in order to restore our formal European identities.

I’ve been trying to ascertain how many of us there are. It certainly runs into tens of thousands, who are becoming a significant proportion of the wider British population, and a standing rebuff, surely, to the whole Brexit movement. Its significance can perhaps be measured by the number of Facebook sites devoted to British expats in Europe; where I recently posted a request for information relating to the numbers of European passport seekers in each of our foreign hidey-holes. But it’s hard to get firm figures yet. They’ve not been gathered together on a pan-European scale; and procedures in each country are confusingly varied. (Who said that the EU was ruling out national differences?) In some countries (Italy, for example) applicants are still waiting. Others don’t allow dual nationality, which is putting putative applicants off. In Ireland – a rich source among Brits for EU passports – they don’t count those who are automatically entitled to citizenship though having Irish relatives. (My children, through their Irish mother, should be able to bank on that.) Germany seems to be particularly generous. And so on. No doubt in the future some bright political scientist will be able to put all these figures together, and arrive at a total picture of the numbers of Brits who have been forced to abandon their exclusive British nationality, in order to regain the wider freedoms they used to have in the EU. Most of my respondents write of ‘thousands’ in their respective countries of exile. (I may report on their replies in more detail later.) So it must come to a lot overall.

Farage’s word ‘independence’ is meant of course to draw a parallel with colonial movements of freedom from European imperialisms in the past. It may be relevant in this connexion to remind ourselves that when British colonies were ‘granted’ independence from the 1940s through to the 70s, it was without their people’s necessarily losing their British citizenship. Ex-colonials were still regarded as ‘British’, with most of the rights that went with that. It was this that allowed the famous ‘Windrush’ generation to immigrate to Britain, as British Commonwealth citizens, and without visas or passports, in 1948. That right was eventually withdrawn in 1962, leaving ex-colonials with one freedom less.

It’s in this sense that Brexit (again, if it ever comes about: we still can’t be certain yet) should be regarded as limiting our (Brits’) freedom and ‘independence’. And there should be many thousands of us to drive that point home. Internationalism has always been a significant element in British national identity, and in our sense of freedom. Brexit is about to take that away.  ‘Liberation’, my arse!

Corbyn’s enemies are clearly leaving no stone unturned to prove the contrived and ridiculous charge that he is anti-semitic. The very latest piece of ‘evidence’ is that he contributed a short introduction to a new edition of JA Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study (1902), which according to today’s Times  was ‘about Jews controlling banks and the press’. Not only that, but Corbyn had the effrontery to call the work a ‘great tome’, ‘brilliant, and very controversial at the time’ (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/corbyn-endorsed-book-about-jews-controlling-banks-and-the-press-x6nd73jrq). – Which of course it was, laying the foundation of what became known as the ‘Marxist’ or capitalist ‘theory’ of imperialism, and consequently of what could be regarded as one of the main ideological battles of the 20^th century.

But it emphatically wasn’t about  ‘Jews controlling banks’. It was about western imperialism, and its roots in capitalist over-production, using examples taken from the recent Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), where goldmine-owning capitalists – many of them Jewish – were very visibly involved. The book, in other words, is about capitalism and imperialism, not semitism. And that is the aspect of the book that justifies its description as ‘great’ and ‘brilliant’.

I know a bit about this, having chosen Hobson for my PhD thesis subject in 1963, and published the first solid book about him and other anti-imperialists (some of them not all that anti, as it happens) as long ago as 1968: Critics of Empire; reissued in 2008 by IB Tauris, with a new Introduction (by me). Of course I spotted the anti-semitic references – look up ‘Jews’ in the Index – but came to the conclusion, summarised in a footnote on page 202, that they didn’t indicate any genuine anti-semitic feeling on Hobson’s part. He opposed the South African Jewish capitalists, who he claimed were mostly German, and consequently without British interests at heart, because they were capitalists, not because they were Jews. His daughter, whom I interviewed, talked to me about his Jewish friends – if that means anything. His comments about the Rand Jews – ‘the veriest scum of Europe’ (that’s not in Imperialism, A Study, but in a letter to the editor of the Manchester Guardian) – read appallingly today. There are even suggestions of ‘conspiracy theory’ in them: ‘Many of them have taken English names and the extent of the Jew power is thus partially concealed’ (from the same letter). But in 1900 most people could distinguish between anti-capitalism and anti-semitism.

I doubt whether Corbyn was even aware of the references to Jews in Imperialism, A Study when he agreed to endorse it. They don’t leap out at the reader, unless he or she is deliberately looking for them. Corbyn’s admiration for the book is no more a sign of anti-semitism than is mine. I sometimes wish that the anti-antisemites, wherever they come from – they’re not all Jews; and not all Jews swallow their lies about Corbyn – would focus their attention on the real enemies of their religion or ‘race’, who are predominantly on the Right of British and American politics, rather than on their anti-racist friends.