Porter’s Pensées

I’ve written about our dreadful ‘Home’ Office before: https://bernardjporter.com/2018/05/31/our-unhomely-office/. It really does look like it’s metamorphosing into a typical Soviet-type ‘Ministry of the Interior’. Countless examples are cropping up every week of well-established residents and loving partners and parents being expelled from the country at a few days’ notice, their passports confiscated and sent to the airports they are directed to fly from, often on the basis of wrong information, and without any possibility of appeal. One recent one was an Australian:

“After waiting 14 months for my UK visa application without a single update, this month it was refused. I have just a matter of days to leave the country I love, the partner I love, our dog and our friends. I have also been refused the right to an appeal. My passport has been confiscated and will be sent directly to the airport where I will be met by immigration officers. Worst of all – The Home Office used incorrect information in their refusal letter. I don’t want to have to leave the life I have built, and I don’t want others to go through the anguish our family have been through at the hands of the Home Office over the last year. I started a petition to make things better with the hope we can raise awareness for cases like ours, and the thousands of families who are also being affected.”

I’m only glad my Aussie daughter-in-law managed to fix her dual nationality in time.

This seems to have started during Theresa May’s long stretch as Home Secretary: her ‘hostile environment’, and the rest. She really is a monster. I wonder why so many of our leading women Conservative politicians turn out so – well – ‘unwomanly’? (Is that being sexist? But you know what I mean.)* In Thatcher’s case it was widely blamed on her awful father. May’s vicar father is more obscure – it’s difficult to find out much about him on the internet, which has given rise to some rumours (see https://bernardjporter.com/2018/08/21/sauce-for-the-gander/); but we don’t really know. She obviously believes her quasi-fascistic approach is getting her brownie-points among the great unwashed. Let’s hope she’s wrong. And perhaps be grateful that she can’t have children of her own. Cruel, I know; but she’s not a nice person.

With regard to immigration: do the great unwashed realise that under EU rules any country is permitted to expel immigrants who don’t land jobs after a certain period – a right that the British government has chosen never to exercise? And that of course ‘freedom of movement’ doesn’t apply to non-European immigrants – even Aussies? I’ve never seen it mentioned in the Right-wing press. It rather undermines that argument for Brexit.

• It could be: either the assumption that kindness, charity etc. are distinctively gendered characteristics; or by the suggestion that she could only have got her ideas from her dad.

Isn’t it remarkable how many of Trump’s henchmen, whatever their crimes may have been against the democratic process, turn out to have been crooks in other ways? There must be a direct causal link between uncontrolled capitalism and crookery. In this way the present US government really does represent the culmination of the invisible and inevitable forces that are pulling us – via late-stage capitalism – either to our destruction, or to revolution. And I wouldn’t put much money on the latter.

Has Labour got Machiavels on its side too – in order to counter the clever ‘anti-semitic’ slurs the Conservatives are putting out against Corbyn? If so they will doubtless have their eyes on Theresa May’s long spell as Home Secretary, when she famously ‘lost’ a file, compiled by Geoffrey Dickens MP, which was claimed to contain evidence of leading Tories’ organised paedophilic activities in the 1980s. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_paedophile_dossier.) One conspiracy theory has it that her Reverend Anglo-Catholic dad was somehow involved; but there’s no solid evidence for that. (What there is, is here: https://theswamp.media/theresa-may-s-father; it’s pretty thin, but why should that deter any unprincipled propagandist on the Labour side?) Anti-semitism is a vile accusation; but kiddy-fiddling might just trump it. Let’s see if it comes up.

But wouldn’t it be better if we could simply debate the issues? (Or ‘ishoos’, as Tony Benn used to call them.) I’m just now following the Swedish general election debates on SVT: civilized, rational and intelligent – certainly by comparison with ours..

A sleepless night last night, agitated – no, more than that, infuriated – by the plotting against Jeremy Corbyn. I have to admit, embarrassedly, that I’m a full-blown ‘Corbynista’, desperate for him to win the next general election, in order to lead us back to the moderate social democracy of my younger days. Yes, I could wish he had more ‘charisma’, to boost his chances among those who are foolishly impressed by such things; but to set against that I’m hoping that his obvious honesty, probity, politeness, decency, humanity, humility, having been right about almost everything in the past, and of course his present-day policies, might compensate and push him forward, as they did with his equally uncharismatic predecessor in 1945. After all, in recent months ‘charisma’ has given us Brexit (Boris) and Trump. Best, I think, to put it back in its box.

The Tories and their cheerleaders in the Press are clearly nervous that JC’s qualities  will break through, which is what lies behind their savage and unprincipled monstering of him over the last couple of years. It used to be about the way he dressed; then about his supposed lack of respect (illustrated with photoshopped pictures) on patriotic occasions; then about his relations with Irish and other nationalists; then about his ambivalent stand on Brexit – which I’m unhappy about too, but we’ll see how it goes; and most recently based on his supposed sympathy with the ‘Black September’ terrorists who carried out the monstrous  attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, by laying a wreath on their graves in Tunisia. Except  that they aren’t buried in Tunisia, but in Libya; and Corbyn’s wreath – in the course of a peace mission – was for the forty innocent Palestinian victims of an Israeli air strike there in 1985. No matter; the Daily Mail  refused to change its tune (never mind the accuracy, feel the smear); and a few days ago Benjamin Netanyahu piled in with this: ‘The laying of a wreath by Jeremy Corbyn on the graves of the terrorists who perpetrated the Munich massacre and his comparison of Israel to the Nazis deserves unequivocal condemnation from everyone’ – which must count as a foreign intervention in British politics as serious as Russia’s supposed intervention in the USA’s. (The charge against him of comparing the Israelis to the Nazis, incidentally, is also false.) All this arises from Corbyn’s support for the cause of Palestinian nationhood – alongside that of Israel – which of course is why apologists for the present Israeli government want rid of him. The right-wing British press are simply taking up any weapon they find to hand. (It seems only yesterday that they were the anti-semites.)

The slanders are grotesque, and easily disproved. The trouble is that mud sticks, as you can see on scores of websites, especially Israeli ones, and as the Tories and the ‘Israel Lobby’ are undoubtedly aware. What should Corbyn do? I’m not happy with his offering ‘apologies’, which in themselves might be taken to imply that the charges against him have some basis in fact. I’m hoping that the falseness of the right-wing propaganda may soon become so obvious that it turns into the story itself, which could only benefit Labour.

But in any case it’s clear that, come the next election, Labour will have a fight on its hands. More ‘revelations’ will appear, probably too close to the election to leave  time for them to be discredited in the same way as the ‘wreath’ one. The Tories have done this before. Look at the ‘Zinoviev letter’ affair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinoviev_letter. They could do it again. They are amoral – and possibly desperate – enough to.

I consider myself to be as ‘anti-imperial’ as the next person. I remember the British Empire while it was still a going concern. I always opposed it. I occasionally demonstrated against aspects of it. I wrote my PhD thesis on the early anti-imperialists: later published as Critics of Empire (1968), and recently re-issued by IB Tauris. Later I published several more books and papers about the history of the Empire, hoping to enlighten people about what was in reality a very complex and ambivalent phenomenon. Other ‘imperial historians’ (not ‘imperialist historians’, note, though we were often assumed to be that, simply because we studied the thing: ‘social historians’ are usually socialists, after all), joined in. None, to my knowledge, apart from Niall Ferguson and one or two Right-wing amateurs, was pro-the Empire.

I like to think that much of what we wrote got through to people. My The Lion’s Share, for example, has sold in tens of thousands, and is coming up for a sixth edition next year. But it obviously hasn’t percolated widely enough; which is why I published Imperial Britain: What the Empire Wasn’t a couple of years ago. (The clue is in the title.) People still come up with rubbish, on both sides of the ‘was the Empire a good or a bad thing’ argument.

An example is an email I recently received from ‘The Radical Tea-Towel Company’ – highly recommended; it sells some lovely socialist ephemera – and which is clearly not based on any serious reading, of mine or anyone else’s writing and research. (You can get it on the ‘Radicalteatowel’ website; it’s headed ‘Divide and Rule in the Empire’, and introduces a ‘Gandhi’ tea-towel.) It’s not this piece’s hostility to the old Empire I object to – I largely share that – but the ignorant simplicity of the case it tries to make: mainly the deliberate ‘Divide and Rule’ charge, with regard to India, and then to Ireland and Palestine. If you want to effectively challenge or oppose modern neo- or post-imperialism, as with any institution or ideology, you must properly understand it first. What is written in this Radical Tea-Towel email is easily dismissed, and so likely to be ineffective.

It bears comparison, I think, with what the ‘Alt-Right’ is putting out these days: material which feeds prejudices rather than analysing them. As in that case, there are bound to be germs of truth in what is reported – there are some in this piece – but mixed in with sheer uncritical nonsense. I’d urge the author, if he sees this, to read my Imperial Britain before he writes anything else on this subject. That will save my elaborating on his misconceptions here. Unfortunately, ‘fake news’ and ‘fake history’ are not just the prerogatives of the Right.

But isn’t this the fate of all serious scholars?

Up to and including the 1960s Britain and Sweden were travelling roughly along the same politico-economic path, characterised by the mixed economy and the welfare state. Then they began to diverge. Britain experienced (suffered?) what I call in one of my books her ‘Great Reaction’, while Sweden (and the rest of Scandinavia) by and large kept to the Social-Democratic road. Living in Sweden for the past 23 years, on and off, I’ve been mulling over why this divergence took place, and – with Kajsa, mulling from the other direction – developing some ideas.

She and I are now contemplating writing a book about this together, which will also serve as an introduction to modern Swedish history for Anglos. We’re both fairly familiar by now with each other’s countries, and professionally engaged on the histories of our own. It seems to be a project ideally suited to us, and could just work.

Any ideas from others will gratefully received, and acknowledged if the baby ever gets born. I may post progress on this blog.

Another good piece on the ‘Labour anti-semitism’ thing: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2018-08-08/labour-crisis-israel-anti-semitism/.

I’ve blogged about Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson before: https://bernardjporter.com/2017/11/12/boris/. It really beggars belief to think that he could be regarded as a suitable candidate for Leader of the Conservative Party, let alone a future – perhaps the next – Prime Minister. He was the worst Foreign Secretary we have ever had, managing to insult almost every foreigner who came into his view, except Donald Trump, and to increase the prison sentence on a poor woman he was supposed to be interceding on behalf of. He’s shallow, and exceedingly foolish. His recent comparison of Moslem women in burkhas with pillar boxes has given offence: though I have to say I thought this was one of his better jokes, and religions ought to be able to put up with insults. – Yet the Tories still love him, and calculate that his teddy-bear looks, fun antics and odd juvenile upper-class-Etonian language will endear him to the plebs. If so, that doesn’t seem to say much for the plebs. (Too much ‘reality’ TV?)

I don’t reckon any historian could be on his side. This old review of his biography of Churchill – by the most respected current historian of the Second World War years – shows why: https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2014/11/one-man-who-made-history-another-who-seems-just-make-it-boris-churchill. Of course Johnson is not up for Evans’s job as the next Regius Professor of History at Cambridge. The qualities required for both positions are different. But ‘making up’ things is not a qualification for high political office either. Or didn’t use to be….

I’m still sweltering under a Scandinavian sun. (Hence no proper blogs – only reposts.) Is this the tipping point of global warming? If so I imagine Boris will deny it, if he thinks that can get him into his fellow-liar Donald’s good books.

Here’s the case for the Corbyn anti-semitism farrago’s all being an Israeli plot. Make of it what you will.

http://medialens.org/index.php?option=com_acymailing&ctrl=archive&task=view&mailid=500&key=521d744d358c2252091b6dea00b40a3b&subid=21698-85fe6f953c0798a17ba9ea557e6eb9b6&tmpl=component

Sweden has a general election next month. Anything could happen – any sort of coalition, that is. Present polling shows the middle-ground parties being squeezed by the ‘extremes’: the Vänster (roughly Corbynistas) on the Left, and the Sweden Democrats (Ukippy) on the Right. Just like nearly everywhere: it’s a world trend. (Obviously arising from the crisis of global capitalism.)

The Sweden Democrats are limbering up for the fray by putting out a false (at worst) and selective (at best) version of the past history of the Social Democratic (Labour) Party, claiming that it was pro-Nazi in the 1930s and ’40s, and embraced ‘eugenic’ social policies thereafter. There’s some truth in the latter, but the Socialists weren’t alone in Sweden in this. Yesterday there appeared an authoritative riposte in Dagens Nyheter, penned by a number of top academic historians.

https://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/forskare-sverigedemokraternas-valfilm-forvanskar-historien/

The SD’s approach looks very much like the same cynical tactic employed by the Trumpists against the Democrats in America, and the Israel Lobby against Corbyn in Britain. Maybe Steve Bannon has had a word in their ears. For those who read Swedish, the foregoing article has some excellent points not only on this, but on the selective use of history generally.