Porter’s Pensées

Doubtless John McDonnell will get a lot of stick from ‘patriots’ for expressing the opinion in a TV interview that Winston Churchill was a ‘villain’: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-47233605. He made it clear that he was referring specifically to his conduct as Home Secretary during the 1910 ‘Tonypandy Riots’ in South Wales – Churchill is supposed to have set the military against the strikers – and not to his career more generally. But the right-wing press is unlikely to make that distinction. For them, the Labour Shadow Chancellor, by attacking ‘the Greatest Ever Englishman’ in this way, has uttered something very close to blasphemy. I’m sure we’ll be reminded of it several times during the course of the next General Election.

No serious historian will dispute that Churchill had his ‘villainous’ sides. Everyone is a mixture of good and bad, although perceptions of which are the good and which the bad bits can change over time. India is, in my opinion, another huge stain on Winston’s escutcheon. And his policies and strategies even during the years of his greatest glory – World War II – are not without their critics. I’ve written about these, in two review essays: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n02/bernard-porter/over-several-tops, and https://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n16/bernard-porter/mule-races-and-pillow-fights. (They may be behind pay walls. You’ll just have to subscribe.)

But oh! His rhetoric, when it mattered! As a child of the War – quite literally – I’m afraid I can’t be persuaded to loathe his memory as some older and younger Leftists seem to do today.

A book proposal I sent to a publisher nearly a year ago, but which then dropped out of sight as the publisher (the excellent IB Tauris) was being taken over by the (equally excellent) Bloomsbury Group, has suddenly re-emerged, with Bloomsbury writing to say that they want to consider it again. It’s actually both less and more than a ‘proposal’; it’s a collection of my old articles, essays, reviews and a couple of blogs, together with some new material to bind them all roughly together, on the general topic of ‘Britain and Europe’ (going back to the Stone Age, and finishing with Brexit). It would be a companion piece to my already-published Empire Ways (IB Tauris), which is a similar collection of my old imperial history essays.

How that sold I don’t know, and haven’t bothered to find out. It’s bound to influence Bloomsbury when they consider the new proposal. Publishers are commercial enterprises, after all. But sales of my books have never concerned me  much. A couple have sold well, but others have merely had modest ‘academic’ runs. One was eventually pulped. That doesn’t matter to me. I write books because I enjoy writing them, and I like to see them in print in much the same way as one thrills to hold one’s new-born baby. Being in print also gives them a kind of solidity and permanence which electronic publishing, for example, can’t. (What if there’s a sudden sunburst that wipes out all our computer files?) And it means that my ideas are on record, for as long as the world lasts. That gives me comfort, aware as I always am of the cosmic impermanence of things. Which is why I’m so anxious to have Cosmopolis (my working title) out in print. Bloomsbury may turn it down; it is, after all, a bit of a mix, albeit (I think) a novel and stimulating one. If they do I may even try to publish it privately. If anyone here has had experience of this, perhaps they’d let me know. But I’d prefer a ‘proper’ publisher, obviously.

I’ve also been approached with a couple of other book suggestions, one of them with the attractive title of Farewell to Empire, which I may consider; and my and Kajsa’s Modern History of Sweden for Anglos, which we’ve been accumulating material for. The problem with all these projects is the work  that will be involved. Having just turned 78, and suffering as I do (or think I do) from ME and occasional depression, I find it difficult to sustain an interest in anything that requires that kind of effort. (I spend much of my time dozing off.) In fact I can hardly credit or understand the enormous work I put in over the past 50 years in researching the books I wrote then; just as I can’t think myself back to the time when I could – and did – do 50-mile walks and 10-mile jogs, or play squash and tennis energetically, and actually enjoyed it. That sort of physical activity is out of the question now, for bodily reasons (lots of ops); but I feel I should still try to keep my mind exercised.

Writing does that. It stimulates me creatively, so that just an idea for a piece, like this blog, once written down, will engender new ideas, and keep my mind working. It’s a kind of therapy. Not that I think that none of my ideas is worth anything objectively; but that’s not the main reason I write them down. It’s to keep me going, creatively, in ominous times, both personally (the end looming!) and politically – Trump, Brexit et al. Humans live to create. It’s what differentiates them from the other animals, and makes them akin to Gods. If they stop creating, they die.

I’m not against ‘PC’ in certain circumstances, to spare feelings where they’re worth sparing; but I have to say I object to it when it comes to the classics. The other day we saw a production of Bizet’s Carmen at Stockholm’s Kungliga Operan, where I assume that the liberties taken with it were for PC reasons. No bull-fighting; instead a wrestling match. (One of the fighters was nicknamed the ‘Toreador’, in order not to have to   change the words of the famous chorus.) The women didn’t seem to be working in a cigarette factory – ‘smoking can damage your health’ –  but in a centre for sorting second-hand clothing for Oxfam shops. (Or the 19th-century Spanish equivalent.) And Carmen of course wasn’t played as a seductress – after ‘Me Too’, women can’t be blamed for inflaming men’s desires – but as a girl whose attraction clearly lay elsewhere. As a result, the production was a travesty. (Not the music, which was played well under a woman conductor’s baton.) The whole point of Bizet’s ‘orientalist’ opera – Spain was France’s nearest ‘Orient’ – was that it should be bright, fiery and sexy. It’s in the music; but it needs to be in the stageing too. This was a cold and rational – very Swedish? – version.

The last time I experienced this sort of thing was in a Swedish-language production at Stockholm’s Dramaten theatre of Shakespeare’s Richard III,  in which Richard was entirely able-bodied. No hint of a hunchback – which I understand the skeleton recently exhumed in that Leicester car park shows he really did have. That necessitated some textual changes, with the early ‘Dogs bark at me in the streets’ soliloquy – so important to the play – cut out. We don’t want to associate physical infirmity with evil, do we? This incidentally was the exact opposite of a recent British version, which cast a genuinely disabled actor in a wheelchair as the king. I wonder what the PC brigade made of that?

How far can this go? A young King Lear, so as not to seem ‘ageist’? A white Othello? A gentile Shylock? I’m sure the last two have been tried; I’m just glad I didn’t get to see them. Quite apart from anything else, there’s enough in these four plays to show that Shakespeare could empathise with their disadvantaged villains – ‘If you prick me, do I not bleed?’ – which  provides a dimension to the age-race-disability aspects that merely censoring them out of the plays can’t do.

In any case, plays (and operas) are of their times, and in general – except perhaps to make them more comprehensible to modern audiences – shouldn’t be wrested completely out of those times; certainly not in order to conform to the sensibilities of the modern day. We ridicule Thomas Bowdler for having done exactly that with Shakespeare in the 18th century – cutting all the sexual and other references, to spare young women’s blushes. (We were still given those versions at my school in the 1950s; luckily our teacher de-Bowdlerized them for us. The result is that it’s the rude bits I remember best.) Today’s sensibilities are different; but pandering to them is no less ludicrous. And, of course, shockingly ahistorical; which I suppose is partly why I, as a historian, am so offended by this kind  of ‘political correctness’. (If that’s what it is.)

Except that there isn’t one, is there? Nothing to laugh about in our present political situation. We’re being led and governed by walking and breathing jokes: Boris (‘he’s a card, isn’t he?’), Moggy (Lord Snooty), little Govey (‘we’ve had enough of experts’: how witty), Nigel (oh that saloon-bar banter! So non-PC), and all the rest. But it’s proving to be no fun at all. We can chuckle at the incompetence of our Transport Secretary, ‘Failing Grayling’, commissioning a post-Brexit cross-channel fleet from a company without any boats; but then we need to remember that we, as taxpayers, will be paying the cancellation fees on that. Gavin Williamson’s grand new scheme as Defence Secretary for beefing up the British military so it can confront the Russians head-on is more a matter for scorn, if not alarm – because it’s so stupid – than for humour (https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/gavin-williamson-threatens-hard-power-13982359). Theresa May’s witty catch phrases – ‘strong and stable’, ‘Brexit means Brexit’ – and her Tom and Jerry-like headlong charges into European brick walls are becoming rather tedious with repetition. (Maybe that’s the cunning plan: to bore MPs into acceptance.) On the other side, Jeremy’s jam-making is no longer quite the hilarious put-down it used to be, even, one suspects, to the snobby upper classes, who buy all their confiture from France. Even foreigners – Barnier, Tusk, Merkel, Macron and the others – are not as funny, simply by virtue of being foreign, as they used to be. The only kind of laughter all this can generate must be the bitter, hysterical kind.

Here on the Continent, of course, it confirms our reputation for Engelsk humor; but not in a flattering way. ‘We always knew the English were mad.’ We are. And it’s not at all amusing. In our case the road to Hell is paved with bad jokes.

Here we go again:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6685423/How-Jeremy-Corbyns-joyless-approach-life-drove-wife-away-affair-Diane-Abbott.html;

seventeen pages (apparently) in today’s Mail on Sunday, going on about Corbyn – this time his personal life, rather than his careers as terrorist sympathiser, Soviet spy or anti-Semite – in the way we’ve grown to expect from this appalling Right-wing – even proto-Fascist – ‘news’paper. Surely they’re overplaying their hand? Won’t readers of the Mail be bored by all this, at the very least? How much purchase can overt and obvious propaganda of this kind possibly have on the majority of people?

Possibly a lot, which is my great fear. Britons don’t realise how unfree our much vaunted ‘free’ press is: propaganda-sheets simply, owned by expatriate tax-avoiding millionaires, with Right-wing agendas of their own, and no respect for ‘balance’ or even ‘truth’. There’s nothing quite like this in any of the other countries I’ve lived in, even the USA (in its print media) and Murdoch’s Australia – although I’m open to correction here; certainly not in my current home of Sweden. All recent efforts to reform our British press have largely failed – Leveson Stage 2 among them – partly because the press lords control the narrative; and may even ‘have something on’ the politicians. Hence Britain’s low standing in most Indexes of national press freedom. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2017/04/30/press-freedom/.) Which in its turn is partly responsible for the rotten state of our also much-vaunted ‘democracy’.

I still think I’m right about Corbyn and Brexit. He’s playing a blinder.

In reply to those who accuse him of vacillating, his latest open letter to Theresa May, restating what has been his position from the beginning, should put them right. If there is to be any chance of Britain’s negotiating a favourable ‘deal’ with the EU, it has to be with May’s ‘red lines’ rubbed out. That means effectively reinstating the single market with Europe, with all the ‘freedoms’ that the EU insists upon, including freedom of movement. That, of course, is May’s bottom-line sticking point, obsessed as she is – and as she was shown to be as a cruel Home Secretary – with the idea of keeping Johnny Foreigner out. The EU has indicated that it would be willing to renegotiate on that basis – a common trading zone – if not on May’s. And it would, of course, do away with the Irish border problem at a single stroke. If she accepted it, and renegotiated from that position, Britain could achieve a status very close to her present membership of the EU. Problem solved.

But of course she won’t; as nor will her party’s swivel-eyed loonies. It would split the Conservative Party – her other main priority – possibly for good. So, she’ll come back to Parliament with a similar proposition to the one that was decisively defeated last month, with just a few tweaks to the Irish ‘back-stop’, and probably lose that vote too.

Which will leave only three options open. (a) Exiting with no deal at all. But nearly all parties (apart from the swivel-eyed one) are highly nervous of that, as they should be. Even the pro-No Deal Rees-Mogg accepts that it will take decades for the British economy to recover from it. (b) The fall of the Government, and a General Election. But the Conservatives are terrified of this, if it lets that terrorist-hugging Commie Corbyn in; and so will probably have to go for Option (c).

That is for a new referendum, in which one of the choices could be Britain’s remaining in the EU. That, in fact, is the Remainers’ best hope. If a ‘people’s vote’ were called at this stage of the proceedings, after all other solutions had been tried and failed, it might reconcile many of those who are presently so stridently against it on the (highly illogical) grounds that it would be ‘undemocratic’, and so disarm the Rightist street-mob, which is looking so menacing now.

In any case Corbyn’s proposal has put the Government on the spot. That is both clever, and principled, in that it doesn’t go against any of his known views. Either Remain, or his ‘soft Brexit’ option, would undo most of the terrible harm to our society that is being inflicted by the swivel-eyed faction just now. And it might even bring a Radical Labour government closer; which could then start working to repair most of the social and economic damage inflicted by the Conservatives (in the name of ‘neo-liberalism’), which – as I’ve argued many times before – was what lay at the root of the original Brexit vote.

All it needs now is for Corbyn to get a fair crack of the whip from the media, which happened remarkably, you’ll remember, at the time of the 2017 General Election, when they had to report what he was doing and saying, and when the worst propaganda against him appeared so outlandish as to be widely dismissed. Theresa May – the ‘Maybot’ – performs dreadfully at elections, as we also learned from that campaign. And the more exposure Farage, Johnson and Gove are given – before they take up their positions in Tusk’s ‘special place in Hell’ – the more ridiculous they too will surely seem

So, as ‘Straight Red’ argues on Facebook today: ‘Corbyn and his team have charted a remarkable course through an exceedingly difficult period, and have arrived at a point where a General Election and a Labour victory are on the agenda, three years ahead of schedule. For those who have doubted Corbyn’s strategy and leadership, it may be time for a little reflection and humility.’ Amen to that.

But then anything can still happen. This must be one of the least predictable episodes in all British history. We’ll see over the next couple of weeks or so. These are nervous times for those of us who value our transnational European identity, and who fear the other possible outcomes of the hostile nationalism that Brexit represents.

I really ought to write something – a blog, an article, maybe even a short book – on how History has been perverted in the service of the ‘Brexit’ cause. As it has been of many other causes, you’ll say; but this is a particularly egregious example. The Brexiters are wrong about the Second World War; about the British Empire; about Britain’s historical ‘identity’; about the real meaning of ‘sovereignty’ (for a small island vulnerable on its own, for example)… and about so many other things that I know something about. But persuading them of this is  a difficult task to take on, mainly because it involves a critical understanding of historical causality and responsibility which seems quite beyond our self-styled ‘patriots’. What kind of History do they teach them at Eton, I wonder? But I may have a stab at it. It feels like my duty, as a historian of Britain and, in particular, of British imperialism.

On the question of ‘responsibility’, my hackles always rise when I read Brexiteers claiming that ‘we won the War’. Really? ‘We’? The only people alive today who can take any personal credit for defeating Hitler would have had to have been 18 years old in 1945; that is, 92 today. OK, I realise that people aren’t talking personally, but merely taking pride in the past achievements of their tribe or team. But tribes and teams change over time; as the nation of Britain certainly has. We aren’t the same people as that generation of heroes. ‘They’ weren’t ‘us’.

And that’s quite beside the questions of whether it really was ‘Britain’ who ‘won the War’; or whether the ‘Empire’ could be called an ‘achievement’; or whether Britain has always been apart and distinct from the Continent of Europe in the ways that the Brexiteers claim. These are some of the topics I feel I should address. (I won’t of course be the first historian to do so. Genuine historians have been fretting over this for a couple of years.) In the meantime, my fairly recent British Imperial. What the Empire Wasn’t makes a start on the imperial side.

Of course I would love Brexit to be revoked, and for us to rejoin the EU on the – very favourable – terms we have now. And it may yet happen. May’s negotiations for a good deal with the remaining 27 look hopeless so long as she sticks to her notorious ‘red lines’. In view of this, however, pressure is mounting for a new referendum on the outcome, with ‘Remain’ being one of the options on the table. With the evidence against Brexit mounting up, the deception and sheer illegality involved in the original ‘Leave’ campaign now revealed, and the difference between what voters were promised and what they’re likely to get becoming more and more clear by the week, the ‘Remain’ side might – just might – win. And in that event one presumes that the EU would take us back: if they thought they could ever trust us British again. (If they didn’t, I for one wouldn’t blame them.)

The main problem, as I wrote a couple of days ago, is the reaction that this might provoke on the other side. Is the prospect of ‘civil war’, which is being held out as a threat by the Brexiters, and which the Government is making contingency plans against (https://bernardjporter.com/2019/02/03/7280/0), too alarmist, for a country which is supposed not to have gone in for this kind of thing for nearly four hundred years? (Though there are one two times when, in my estimation, she came close.) The Right in Britain, from whom the Brexit army would be recruited, are looking highly threatening; at least, on Social Media they are.

Popular opinion on Brexit doesn’t seem to be shifting very much; mainly because the real grievances that lay behind it are much the same as they were in 2016. Only a completely new government could make much difference to that. That in itself – under this government – carries the threat of something like civil war if there were a possibility of Brexit’s being dumped. Which is why I’ve argued in favour of compromise, in the post referenced above. That however could be seen as the coward’s way out; and possibly an over-nervous reaction on my part.

Over against that, if it did come to pitched battles between Remainers and Brexiters, I would be only too willing to march (or rather, hobble) out on to the streets to take part in them, on the pro-European side. I’d love to get in there, meeting the Reactionaries and proto-Nazis and press barons and new Imperialists and stockbrokers and Old Etonians and their deluded ‘popular’ following, armed with clever verbal taunts and barbs (I don’t go in much for physical violence), until we have persuaded them of the error of their ways. I can smell the cordite…

I’ve just had the results back from my DNA ‘ethnic’ test (by ‘MyHeritageDNA’. It was a Christmas present). Can you trust these outfits?

I have to say I was disappointed; mainly by the lack of detail, but also on learning that apparently I have no Scandinavian in me. Coming from a part of England that was ravaged and raped by the Vikings in the Dark Ages I was expecting at least a little bit. It would give me something in common with Kajsa, apart from mutual affection and our shared politics and sommarhus. And it might have finally convinced Migrationsverket to grant me the Swedish citizenship I’ve been waiting for. I was also hoping to have a smidgeon of Jewish; some Irish (I had a grandmother from Liverpool); and one or two even more exotic drops – maybe just ‘a touch of the tar brush’, as racists used to put it. But no. I’m 100% boring western European. As an enthusiast for multiculturalism, I feel somewhat deflated.

Of possible interest to me, however, as a convinced anti-Brexiter, is that I’m supposed to be only 14.3% English, and 85.7% continental European. They’ve sent me a little map: the 14% totally excludes Ireland, Wales and Scotland, whereas the rest – by far the biggest proportion – covers France, the Low Countries, and Germany, but not any part of the British Isles. That’s despite the fact that I’ve had the father’s side of my family traced back a couple of hundred years, showing all of them living in rural Essex (mostly as illiterate peasants) continuously. So the 85% must have entered our bloodstream before then. I supposed it could go back all the way to the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, who of course came from the Continent originally. But if so, who are the ‘English’, in contradistinction to them? (Celts?) I couldn’t be Norman, or else the Scandinavian (‘North Men’) would have shown through. That’s a bit of a relief. It was the Normans who gave us our original aristocracy. I wouldn’t like to be associated with them.

I wonder how many ‘English’ end up with DNA charts like this? And how many Brexiteers would be unsettled by the knowledge that they were less distinct from our Continental cousins than they might have thought?

MyHeritageDNA provides you with impressive documentation about its methodology, featuring lots of pictures of laboratory workers in white coats with test tubes. But I’m not convinced. This was the cheapest of the three or four companies advertising this service. (It was on ‘special offer’, of about £60.) I could waste more money on a rival outfit; it might be instructive to compare. But I’m not a great believer in ‘ethnicity’ in any case.

Incidentally: on the question of the intrinsic weaknesses of the case for Brexit, it must be significant that the Sweden Democrats – roughly equivalent to our UKIP – are back-pedalling on their previous anti-Europeanism, after seeing what is happening in Britain: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-31/sweden-democrats-step-back-from-demanding-exit-from-the-eu. Brexiteers used to think that their example would encourage other European countries to pursue a similar nationalistic path. That doesn’t seem to be happening, here in Sweden.

PS: On the other hand (9 February), Kajsa tells me that their rationale for staying in may be to destroy the EU from inside.