Porter’s Pensées

To add to my instant review of the Channel 4 ‘Brexit’ drama below: of course its main point has to do with the way democracy can be subverted by these clever modern and technical extensions of the old ‘Hidden Persuaders’ techniques, which is why the nerd Dominic Cummings (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) is its main character; and why so much else is omitted or downplayed, like the part played by the right-wing press. It’s also why characters like Boris, Michael Gove and even Farage appear as scarcely more than comic walk-on parts, like Hamlet’s grave-diggers (an apt simile, I feel), which won’t exactly boost their egos. Cameron is treated even worse: he’s played by his own shallow self (with TV news footage). The point being made here is that power in our modern so-called democracy has now passed out of the hands of politicians, into those of billionaires and the amoral technocrats they can afford to hire to effect their will; not only in Britain, but also in the USA, as is pointed out at the end of the film. This also affects the political discourse of the day, in which expertise and ‘truth’ itself are being widely mistrusted and devalued – simply there to be manipulated for other and usually nefarious ends.

But the film was also as good as I think could be expected in a 90-minute format, on the motives and feelings of Brexit-voters in June 2016; illustrated here by means of an acted-out ‘focus group’ which managed to convey the frustrations of ‘ordinary people’ – both with their material conditions and with the political elite – very feelingly. This section backed up to the hilt my own analysis of the reasons for the vote, which had little essentially to do with ‘Europe’. Surely everyone but the most extreme (and usually public school-educated) ideological Europhobes can see that now.

Last night we managed to catch the Channel 4 drama-documentary Brexit: an Uncivil War, which we missed when it was originally broadcast, through a link Kajsa found. There’s a good review of it in today’s Dagens Nyheter (by a friend of ours). Much against the Guardian’s very different opinion, I found it compelling on this aspect of the Brexit referendum. It also bore out, dramatically, my analysis from the very start – vide infra, around June 2017 – of the reasons why people voted as they did. And at the end I thought that the Dominic Cummings character’s appeal for a new, imaginative kind of politics to replace the old conventional one, so that the damage done by his ‘algorithms’ might be avoided in the future, could be a direct call to Jeremy Corbyn.

Having watched A Very English Scandal, about the Jeremy Thorpe affair, on Swedish TV just a few days earlier, Kajsa reckons she’s now up to speed on two of the different kinds of corruption that beset British politics: the ‘old school tie’ one (Eton of course) in the second case, and this new ‘scientific’ sort in the first.

Historians don’t usually like to guess the future. They know how unreliable that sort of thing has been in the past. Where’s the ‘thousand-year Reich’ today? Or, come to that, the thousand-year British Empire? (Yes, in the early 1900s some imperialists even predicted that.) Or Richard Cobden’s peaceful free-trade heaven? Or Francis Fukujama’s ‘end of history’? Or Marx’s socialist utopia? Or any of the dystopias that have been floated now and then? All have come to nothing. (So far!) Shorter-term predictions are equally foolish. At the end of 2016 I made a prediction of this kind on this blog: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/12/31/2017-prediction/; I don’t know why I’m drawing attention to it now – it only shows me up. And that was on the basis of all my knowledge of the past.

That can provide little guidance. As a historian I can’t even predict what’s going to happen next week in Parliament, when the great ‘Brexit’ vote takes place. A ‘hard’ Brexit, a ‘soft’ one, May’s plan, May’s plan defeated, Brexit postponed, Brexit itself defeated, May ousted, a new prime minister, a new government, political parties torn apart and regrouping, yellow-vest riots outside Parliament…. who knows? I made a guess a couple of weeks ago (https://bernardjporter.com/2018/12/30/corbyns-way/, towards the end); but that was more in hope than in expectation. The present crisis must be the least predictable one in British history. Anyone who thinks they can foresee even a few days ahead is either psychic or a fool.

As to the effects of Brexit itself – if it ever takes place – we’re almost as much in the dark. Surely it’s not going to produce a magnificent renaissance of British power and prosperity in the world, let alone the kind of ‘empire’ the Old Etonians obviously hanker after. For a start, Britain’s former supremacy was not all that supreme: see my British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t. Secondly, such as it was, it was established in entirely different conditions from today’s. Nor is Brexit likely to make Britain any more ‘independent’, essentially, than she is today: ‘dependence’ not requiring to be ‘formal’ in order to be just as chafing as it is supposed to be under Brussels, and with American ‘informal imperialism’ – a term coined by us imperial historians – making us even less independent than we are now. So I think I can predict that the most outrageously positive modern predictions for a Brexit Britain won’t come to pass. Instead, it will all probably turn out badly, with Britain becoming poorer, isolated, and for almost the first time disrespected in the wider world, with so many of the national qualities for which we used to be admired, or thought we were – tolerance and the rest – having in very recent years been thrown overboard to appease the quasi- and proto-fascists in our midst. In that case the present period of our national history is likely to be regarded by future historians as a foolish and embarrassing one; to be analysed in much the same way as previous disasters have been. Boris Johnson almost certainly won’t come out of it as the Churchill figure he aspires to be. Of course I could be wrong.

When our present-day crisis is examined by future historians, and also the crises going on in parallel in much of the rest of the Western world, they may be seen to fit into the broader trend that I see as furnishing a genuine clue to all our futures: which is the general long-term crisis of uncontrolled capitalism, which affects us all in different ways. But that’s the Marxist in me.

And even with this insight – if it is such – I can’t predict what will happen eventually. Will it be controlled and limited, perhaps by new forms of social democracy? Or provoke revolutions, of one kind or another – socialist, or neo-fascist, or religious, or something else? Or will the ‘natural’ and unstoppable development of the capitalist system result in the destruction of all of us, though wars, famines or – most likely – global warming through over-exploitation of resources? As a historian, and based on past trends, I think I can see the general direction in which things are moving; but not their end.

The distinguished economist Simon Wren-Lewis asks why the 2016 referendum result is regarded so highly now, in view of the obvious deficiencies and deceptions which have come to light in the 30 months since: https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-2016-referendum-was-badly-designed.html.

The answer, of course, is that the upper-class public school-educated leaders of the Brexit movement, aided by the majority ‘popular’ press – in reality a right-wing propaganda machine – have elevated an ‘advisory’ vote into a binding  one, smeared any dissidents as anti-democratic and unpatriotic traitors, no less, and encouraged ‘the mob’ (as it used to be called) to directly intimidate anyone, but especially MPs, who dares to go against what they (the Brexiters) read as the ‘will of the people’ on that distant, June 2016 day. With people so dissatisfied with so many things in Britain today, untrusting of politicians and of ‘experts’, unable to analyse their situations rationally (not their fault: the press again), and ready to seize on any convenient scapegoat to vent their anger against, it will take more than the revelation of Boris’s lies and the machinations of Cambridge Analytica to distract them from the prey that they now have their teeth into. Indeed, there’s a strong feeling that if they are persuaded to turn away from the European fox, it will only be to sink their claws into the liberal protesters who have been trying to protect him (to stretch the metaphor somewhat), leading to open violence, such as has  killed one Labour MP to date, and even serious civil unrest. Theresa May has already put the Army on standby. She may need it.

It’s this very real fear that is deterring some otherwise principled ‘Remainers’ to soften their approach, and to go for something less  than Remain – like the Norway option – that wouldn’t be perfect for them, but which they might be able to present as conforming to the ‘will of the people’ enough  to keep the hounds off them. Of course the extreme ‘stab in the back’ Brexiteers (the reference of course is to German malcontents after WorldWar I) would remain, but hopefully would be marginalised – as they should be, socially: what do the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg know of ‘ordinary people’? – while the real  problems facing those ordinary people could be addressed. That would be the task of an incoming Labour government, which is why Corbyn is so right to insist on an election instead of, or at least prior to, a second referendum. Released from austerity, gross inequality and all the rest, people could take their eyes off Europe; and we might even creep back into the EU again. Brexitism will have lost its sting. Any settlement that keeps the Tories in power couldn’t do that.

If that happens, it might cheer me up.

Why do people insist on classifying depression as an illness? That’s better, of course, than treating it as a personal weakness – ‘pull yourself together!’ – but it implies that something is wrong with your body or mind.

Is this so? Looking around me at the state of the world today, and the human condition generally, it seems perfectly normal: to despair, deeply, of everything and of ourselves. Only callow and stupid folk can be cheerful inwardly. From which it follows that most deep and intelligent people are simply putting on a brave face. Depression is normal, the only rational way of looking at things, certainly at this period in world history. It’s happiness that is the disease.

I hope that doesn’t make any of my readers depressed. If it does, join the club.

Sorry to be so silent, but my blogging time has been taken up with a long and (mainly) instructive conversation on the LRB Blog: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/12/31/bernard-porter/what-is-corbyn-thinking/.

I had been hoping to get back to the UK in time to see Channel 4’s Brexit drama on Monday, but the Swedish weather – in the form of an icy patch in the road which caused Kajsa to fall and break her wrist – intervened. So I’m having to stay behind to help. But I picked up some useful information on the way about Sweden’s healthcare system. It’s generally superb, as one would expect: Kajsa had four doctors and two nurses assessing her at one moment; but I was quite surprised to see scores of very sick-looking patients lying on trolleys in corridors, which was something I had previously associated with our underfunded NHS. No complaints, and the dreadful weather was probably partly to blame. But it was, in a curious way, nationally reassuring.

And apparently the TV programme wasn’t that good, according to the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jan/07/brexit-the-uncivil-war-review-superficial-irresponsible-tv-cumberbatch. I’d still like to see it though.

I am so lucky to have Sweden as my bolt-hole from Brexit Britain. The Swedish Minister for the EU, Ann Linde, has just reassured us expats that, whatever happens in the Brexit negotiations, we’re safe, so far as our new adopted home is concerned. We’ll be allowed to live, study, work and even retire here, with all the benefits – like healthcare – we enjoyed under the EU. That’s as long as we’ve lived here for a period already.

What especially pleased me was the impression she gave, in a radio interview that can be heard here – https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=2054&artikel=7119825 – that she welcomes and even loves us 30,000 immigrant Brits. Of course we are mostly an asset to her country. But all the same, what a contrast to Theresa May’s frosty attitude towards EU expats in the UK!

My posting of a version of my last blog here on the LRB blogsite ruffled some feathers. Immediately a couple of anti-Corbynists leapt in with comments which didn’t begin to address my argument, but simply bad-mouthed JC. He is a ‘coward’, an ‘opportunist’, ‘wishing the worst for the UK’. ‘I’m not even sure why we are debating this,’ wrote one dyspeptic correspondent; ‘in better times under Churchill etc, the bearded wonder and his sinister henchman McDonnell would be residing in the Tower on a diet of bread and water. Traitors will always be traitors.’ – I thought that kind of talk had gone out with the Goon Show.

All these comments were offered over pseudonyms; a practice I deplore, and have railed against in earlier blogs (here’s one: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/22/btl/). I sometimes wonder about the depth of the hostility shown towards this apparently pretty good man. In some ways it resembles the animus against Obama in America, another good man, however much you might disagree with him. I also, these days, wonder whether the pseudonyms might be concealing something else: the Israeli government agencies, for example, which we know for sure are trying to undermine Corbyn subvertly – because of his defence of the Palestinians. I doubt it, in these cases; but those who write over (or under) pseudonyms must be aware that the practice could arouse this kind of suspicion. It’s better to be open and upfront, willing to own your opinions, never to cower behind aliases. (Unless of course openness puts you in danger; for example of losing your job.)

There were some more reasoned and reasonable objections to my argument. But it also occurs to me, as I suggested in the course of that rather dispiriting exchange on the LRB Blog, that the nub of the matter may be simply the importance one attaches  to the Brexit issue. To me, and to most of those who read the LRB, it must seem pretty vital; affecting as it does our very feeling of identity and the character of our country. In a nutshell, it’s existential. (My application for Swedish citizenship is in order to escape from it. That’s how strongly I feel.) But for the mass of people, and in the long term, it really matters very little. They didn’t really vote, in that notorious referendum, on the issue of Europe, about which they had shown little sign of caring before then. That was an ‘elite’ thing, on both sides. The fundamental problems with Britain, which fuelled the ‘out’ vote, ran much deeper: to do with austerity, late-stage capitalism, inequality, the democratic deficit, the north-south divide, and much more. The European issue didn’t directly affect these, though there can be arguments on both sides over which position – in or out – will marginally help to cure these basic woes. It seems more likely, however, that the main significance of the European issue in this broader context was, and is, to act as a distraction from these profounder problems; in which case Corbyn’s ambivalent stance towards the Brexit issue makes sense, and the higher priority Labour is putting on securing a General Election could be wise.

Corbyn’s getting a lot of stick just now – certainly on the anti-Brexit Facebook pages I subscribe to – for not clearly coming out in favour of a second referendum, and for ‘Remain’. The relatively left-wing Guardian is especially critical: but when hasn’t it been, of this untidy bearded radical who flouts even liberal standards of respectability? I have to say, a part of me is disappointed too. I’d have liked Labour to have taken more of a pro-European lead on this matter. But then I think again.

There are three reasons, I think, for at least suspending judgment on Corbyn until this whole sorry affair has worked itself out. The first is that he is at least being consistent in his career-long Euroscepticism, which is more than you can say for Theresa May: pro-Europe one day, leading the anti-Europe charge the next. What would the press have made of a similar volte-face  by the famously principled Corbyn?

Secondly, he has always been a Eurosceptic, not an anti-European; and for totally different reasons from the Right-wing Antis – because he sees the EU as having been taken over by global capitalism and so an obstacle to the democratic socialism he wishes to see reinstated in Britain. That’s why he must be against a form of Brexit that releases Britain from the hands of Brussels only to send her into the claws of Trump, and of America’s lower product and labour standards generally, which would be likely if Britain found she had to compensate for her European trade losses by sucking up to Washington. That’s why his emphasis in his speeches has always been on jobs and workers’ rights; which could either be secured within a reformed EU (there are plenty of Leftists there to help him), or by a ‘soft’ Brexit arrangement which would keep Britain within the European Common Market, thus involving free movement and common standards, at least. In the present chaotic situation it’s not clear which is the more likely. So Corbyn is – sensibly and intelligently – holding his fire. Of course the Manichaean tabloids are too thick to see this; or else assume their readers are.

The third reason for giving Corbyn the benefit of the doubt is that he has got his Northern working-class voters to think of. They largely voted Brexit for all the wrong reasons – see my June 2016 posts – but don’t like being told this, especially by ‘elitists’ and ‘experts’, and so are building powerful and expert-resistant barricades – ‘you lost, accept it’, ‘what part of democracy don’t you understand?’, ‘we’re not idiots, we knew what we were voting for’, ‘Brexit means Brexit’ – against any suspicion that they might be about to be ‘betrayed’ by the ‘Establishment’. At the very least Corbyn can’t come out as a Remainer until the practical flaws in the Brexit enterprise have been clearly revealed to everyone. Who better to do this, than our Jeremy, once he’s Prime Minister and has tried everything to reach his own, worker-friendly settlement with the rest of the EU, which might reconcile those northerners to going back there; or, alternatively, might suggest a softer Brexit option which would persuade them that he hadn’t betrayed them, but had honoured the ‘people’s vote’ while safeguarding their interests too?

The working-class Brexit vote was a blind expression of anger, and a desperate cry for help. (Only the elitist leaders of the movement cared much for Europe, or for ‘making Britain Great again’.) Any solution to the present problem that doesn’t address this, or even exacerbates it, could intensify the dangerous divisions that the debate opened up in Britain, and produce a situation close to civil war. (Far-fetched, perhaps; but May has already put the military on stand-by.) This is an important consideration, which only Corbyn’s more subtle approach – if I read it correctly – takes proper account of.

My money’s on an eventual Norway-style settlement – the single market with free movement, and the freedom to (for example) nationalise things. But don’t hold me to this. In the present situation nothing can be predicted. Just try to see the problem from Corbyn’s – and Labour’s – point of view. The latter’s priority just now is to radically reform Britain’s economy. Her relationship to Europe is secondary to this. A social democratic Britain can be reconciled with both membership of a changed Europe, and  with the softest of all Brexits. It’s not compatible with any Tory policy towards Europe. So: an election must come first.

And that could undo some of the harm done by this wretched contest, by smoothing out the present political divisions between Brexiteers and Remainers, and enabling us Brits to live moderately happily together again. In this sense, it could be seen as the ‘patriotic’ way.

Or am I crediting Corbyn with too much good sense? I hope not.

It’s hard to credit that two millennia of proud British history are about to end like this. (‘Proud’ in the sense that Brits have usually taken pride in  it; unjustifiably in many instances, I’ll grant.) Almost everyone in the wider world now looks upon us as a pathetic joke, a Humpty Dumpty in pieces at the foot of his wall, having betrayed the best bits of our history (openness, generosity, progress, parliamentary democracy), and headed for – what? Friendless isolation? An unregulated bargain basement for trade? An imaginary new ‘world role’? A client state of the chlorinated USA? Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ for incomers? The break-up of the United Kingdom? A freakshow of stereotypical English eccentrics? The socially reactionary country the Brexiteers (or their leaders) seem bent on? Fascism with a Bertie-Wooster face?

I guess that Italy might have looked a bit like this after the Roman Empire fell. (I don’t know; I’m an expert on only one empire.) I really thought that, with Britain’s having accepted her own empire’s ‘decline and fall’ after 1945 with relative dignity – her re-entry into Europe was part of that – she had escaped this kind of fate. It now seems I was mistaken.

It has all gone horribly wrong; and for largely fortuitous reasons: a failing economic system (not the fault of the EU), a fundamentally undemocratic electoral system, a criminally deceitful press, the onward march of ‘late stage’ capitalism, American and Russian interference, the continued influence of the grotesquely misnamed ‘public’ schools in our politics, cheating and corruption on so many levels (including in the 2017 referendum), widespread stupidity and ignorance, a TV-fuelled culture of personality, anti-intellectualism and disregard of expertise, popular distrust generally, political apathy, complacency on the ‘pro-European’ side – and in Europe itself; all contributing to the current ominous situation in which we find ourselves as a nation. (On all this, see https://bernardjporter.com/2016/06/16/is-it-really-about-the-eu/; and some of my other blogs around that time.)

Is this how it ends? Of course we ‘Remainers’ may be wrong, and the picture will improve gloriously after March 29, when we are due to leave: our Brussels shackles thrown off, other markets flocking to compensate for those we are about to lose, all those foreign immigrants – or at least the poor ones – turned away, our passports going back to being blue, our three-pin plugs protected (that’s one reason given for Brexit); and we return to being a proud people, like the ones who ‘alone’ kept Hitler at bay.

Or, alternatively, the simple vulnerability of our projected isolation will become clear: people will change their minds, and be given a second democratic vote to express this; and we’ll come out of the nightmare, bruised by the experience of this dreadful contest, and with enough Brexit irreconcilables remaining to prolong the bad feeling – perhaps even to provoke a kind of civil war – afterwards, and even more mistrusted by our Continental neighbours; but still able, hopefully, to mend bridges and concentrate on the real difficulties of our situation – inequalities, an unrepresentative political system, a rogue press, Eton College, and an increasingly destructive, and self-destructive, economic system. Could a Labour government fix these?

We’ll find out at the end of March. I’m not too sanguine. What we’re going through now feels far too much like death throes. What an embarrassing end to centuries of uneven, and not always admirable, but never quite so risible, history! (You can even see it in the leading Brexiteers’ faces (below): Duncan Smith, Gove, Farage,  Johnson. These aren’t serious men.)