Porter’s Pensées

I’m working on my latest book – another collection of old articles, mainly, but hopefully corralled into some kind of order. I’ve come almost to the end, and a new ‘Concluding’ chapter; at which point I thought I should look back at my ‘Introduction’, which set out my original plans for the book, in order to be able to return to these. (That’s always a good way to finish.) I was surprised however to discover that what the book has become is nothing like what I originally intended for it; so I’m going to have to write the Introduction – not hopefully the meat of the book – all over again.

This is how it often happens with writing – my writing, anyway. You begin with an idea, and start developing it, only for the idea itself to deviate in entirely different directions. It’s a bit like pushing one of those supermarket trolleys with defective wheels – it goes where it wants to. That’s not a bad thing, of course; it means that one is prepared to change one’s mind as one meets with new obstacles. The odd thing is that I do that best through the process of writing, rather than simply in my head. I imagine that having to put an idea down on paper forces one to define and reconsider it. If I didn’t write, I really would be stuck in my ways and prejudices.

So this is one reason why I’m not blogging much just now. Another is that I can’t think of much new to say. On Brexit, for example, others have already said it all. And – as I’m writing presently in my Conclusion – History, my sole claim to expertise, is not all that much help in explaining what is going on today. Not in terms of ‘precedents’ or ‘lessons’, anyhow. Were there any leading politicians in Britain’s past quite like Boris and Nigel?

Paul Mason is my favourite left-wing commentator. I met him at an ‘alternative’ conference to mark the anniversary of Magna Carta a couple of years ago. This – if you can get it up – is v.g.

I’ve argued before that one way of tackling not only ‘fake news’, but also the other sorts of blatantly nonsensical thinking one finds in popular political discourse today, is to teach critical thinking, explicitly, in schools: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/10/23/logic-lessons/. Now Kajsa tells me that something like this was incorporated into the Swedish national school curriculum in 2011, under the name of Källkritik – käll meaning ‘source’ – in order to encourage pupils always to go to the sources of statements or claims before accepting them uncritically.

I imagine there might be philosophical objections to this, along the lines of ‘What is truth?’; but at a relatively simple and straightforward level this would seem a good idea for Britain too, and even for the USA.

For anyone fluent in Swedish (as I’m not, I’m ashamed to say), Kajsa’s given me the following references (or källor): http://skolvarlden.se/artiklar/sa-ska-elever-lara-sig-att-granska-kallor, and https://www.skolverket.se/skolutveckling/resurser-for-larande/kollakallan/lektionsmaterial.

Here’s an interesting take on Brexit that I found on a ‘Brexpats’ thread on Facebook, by Hugh Croft. It has occurred to me, too, in the light of the current British government’s seemingly clueless Brexit negotiations over the past few months. Can Davis, Johnson and Co. really be as incompetent as they’re making out? Comments posted underneath the original post are sceptical, mainly on the grounds that it credits our government with too much intelligence.

The following is an opinion, but one which wouldn’t surprise me if it were true: The UK and EU have decided there will be no Brexit and are going through a scripted charade to make it clear it would be a disaster. There will be a second vote, in which it will be agreed to remain, voters having been socially engineered into believing they made the choice…

If only….

We’re experiencing even extremer weather conditions in Sweden than in Britain – a metre of snow here in Stockholm – but they’re coping with it. Of course, we say, they’re used to it. (True enough.)

‘If you pay peanuts, you’ll get monkeys’. Or, raising the bar a little, ‘in a competitive global employment market, you’ll only get good candidates if you offer them high salaries’. That’s the excuse for the obscene salaries – and bonuses, and expenses – that are paid to people at the top nowadays, including university vice-chancellors, who are the most recently highlighted guzzlers at the trough of greed. Interestingly, it isn’t an argument that is applied to ordinary university lecturers, or to nurses, or to most other employees in almost any line of work. ‘Top’ people are different; motivated only, it seems, by filthy lucre. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be justified by the achievements of many of those ‘top earners’, who are of course the ones who brought our economy to its knees ten years ago, and are currently engaged in ruining – through subjecting it to ‘market principles’ – Britain’s previously excellent university sector; as well as, I understand, many other countries’. It doesn’t seem to work.

Indeed, I’ve always been highly doubtful of the principle of attracting CEOs, VCs and the rest with offers of huge sums of money. My scepticism rests on this simple notion: that if you are mainly attracted by money – if for example it takes £800,000 a year to lure you to the VC-ship of Bath University (not one of the ‘top’ ones) – you’re likely to be less interested in the job and the task itself. Consequently, having the wrong priorities and motivation, you’re likely to do it less well.

Of course I come from a profession where the job itself – teaching young people, researching, writing – is particularly satisfying, as well as being reasonably paid (I could afford a mortgage at 30), which was reward in itself. Lecturers are dedicated to their calling, and so usually work well at it, whatever the level (within limits) of their remuneration. But apparently being a Vice-Chancellor isn’t like this. Being greedy has the opposite effect. There are greedy lecturers, of course, whose avarice seems – at best – to encourage them to write silly and sensational books for ‘the market’, to boost their royalties. (No names, no pack-drill. And no implication is intended, by the way, that all popular history books are ‘silly’. I’ve tried my hand at writing one or two myself.) But on the whole, poor-ish academics are probably more trustworthy than rich ones, and rich VCs not to be trusted all.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if VCs’ salaries nation-wide were capped at – say – £150,000 per annum. (That still seems a fortune to me, and I was a Prof!) My prediction is that you would then get genuinely dedicated men and women to take on these positions, to the benefit of everyone and everything: the universities, the students, the lecturers, the nation, and academic values. The greedy ones could go off into banking, benefitting but also harming no-one but themselves. They would be no great loss. So, more monkeys, please; fewer pigs.

(On Tuesday, incidentally, I’m off back to Sweden for a couple of weeks – ah, a sane and civilised country! – which might limit the blogging, at least while I’m settling in.)

To me Brexit seems an obvious mistake, with all the makings of a national catastrophe, economically, politically, and with regard to Britain’s reputation in the world. (We really are a bad joke abroad.) For me personally it has been – or will be, if and when it is finally achieved – profoundly depressing: not so much because of the material effect it will have on me as a bi-national, but rather because of the way it is seeking to narrow my generous pan-European self-identity to a parochial British one. Added to this are the profound divisions it has either opened up or revealed – a bit of both, I think – in our always fragile and fractured society, accompanied by a viciousness of debate, especially in our offshore-owned Right-wing press, which has revealed a dark and vindictive side to our national discourse that I wasn’t aware of before. Quite simply, Britain has become a much nastier country as a result of David Cameron’s foolish decision to hold a once-and-for-all referendum on EU membership in 2016. Politically speaking, I don’t like living here any more.

Luckily I have my bolt-hole in Sweden. But I won’t be bolting there without taking with me my feelings of resentment – vindictive, even – against the political leaders and newspaper magnates who have dragged my much-loved Britain to this low and wretched state. I can’t see any ideal salvation for us short of reversing the Brexit decision, and asking to be accepted back into the EU, tails between our legs, no doubt, but to the plaudits and relief of most of our former European allies and friends. There are movements on foot to effect that. The problem with them is that even if, by some miracle, they succeed, it won’t allay the viciousness – the nastiness – one whit, but is much more likely to exacerbate it. Brexiteers who voted that way because of the effects on them of ‘austerity’ – a.k.a. ‘late-stage capitalism’ (that was the underlying reason, after all: see https://bernardjporter.com/2016/06/16/is-it-really-about-the-eu/) – will resent this further ‘betrayal’ of their ‘popular will’ by the ‘elite’, and get even nastier as a result. It could even end in a kind of civil war.

So this is my dilemma. Is it justifiable to take that risk, in order to undo a great wrong? Aware of the dangers that even success will bring, should we even try to strive for it, or rather settle for something less, but still preferable to what the ideological Brexiteers are looking for? That – a so-called ‘soft’ Brexit – seems to be the second-preference of most unreconstructed ‘Remainers’ today. It will still enrage the extremists, but perhaps not quite so much. And then – out of the EU but still close to it – we can apply for full inclusion again later, once the hysteria has died down. That may be our last best hope, as rational, genuinely patriotic Brits.

The right-wing press – Telegraph, Mail, Express, Sun – is currently recycling the old accusation of ‘communist subversion’ against the Labour Party, and specifically against Jeremy Corbyn: the smear that served them so well during the Cold War. One leading Conservative MP was yesterday forced to withdraw a tweet in which he claimed that Corbyn had ‘sold British secrets to communist spies’, under threat of legal action. I hope they charge him nonetheless. (He’s the same Tory – Ben Bradley – who suggested that the unemployed could be vasectomised to stop them breeding.)

Of course it’s a smear. It apparently derives from documents in the old Czech security service archive in which secret agents placed in Britain made all kinds of claims to have ‘recruited’ left-wing Brits, or – in Corbyn’s particular case – to have regarded him as a potential collaborator – no more.

But, as everyone who (like me) has studied these murky historical matters is fully aware, this is par for the course for spies of all nationalities and stripes, and at all times. Urged to seek out useful sources of information, and paid by results, they invariably exaggerate their successes. So, an innocent cup of tea at a cafe with the young Jeremy – to talk about Czechoslovakia, perhaps, or politics generally, or even football – is inflated into a Smiley-style assignation wherein microfilms of nuclear weapons and troop movements are covertly passed across the table, to find their way eventually to Moscow Centre. Except that in Corbyn’s case there were no microfilms. (As if an insignificant backbencher in the 1970s would know anything worth passing over to the Russians!) Which is probably why his particular ‘contact’ was, apparently, sacked shortly afterwards. MI5, more knowledgeable about these things than the bloody Daily Telegraph, will have been fully aware of this. And by that time they had probably also come to realise, tardily, that despite all their class prejudices, traitors were more likely to come from the ranks of the ‘posh’ – the ‘Cambridge Five’, for example – than from the Labour Left. (Which didn’t necessarily stop MI5 plotting against the Labour Left. But that’s another story.)

I must say I was surprised to see this old smear being peddled by the Tory press today, and so blatantly. Is it a sign of desperation? Can it possibly have any purchase on opinion? It seems not to have done so during the last General Election. The basic problem with it, from the Right’s point of view, is that as well as being a smear, it looks like one.

OK, pretty sordid, exploitative in most cases, downright illegal in a few, and not at all good for Oxfam’s ‘holier than thou’ image. Much of the same, incidentally, went on in some of the old British colonies. Sexual temptation may have been hard to resist for men in power, lonely, separated from their families, and in a hot climate. See Ronald Hyam’s Empire and Sexuality (1990). A few years ago I was sent testimony by an ex-District Officer in – I think – Nigeria which relates similar goings-on in the closing years of Britain’s colonial rule there.

But it’s probably only a small minority who are responsible, as was the case then; and it may not have greatly affected Oxfam’s overall humanitarian work. That’s surely the only thing that should determine whether or not we continue funding it, either individually or as a nation. It’s unfortunate for Oxfam that this affair should have come out at a time when sexual harassment in other quarters is so much in the news, and has been elevated to the status of almost the only type of scandal of the day; more serious, for instance, than famine, earthquakes and war. It would be sad, to say the least, if poor Africans and others were reduced to starvation again, because of a sudden outbreak of moralism or – dare I say it? – puritanism in the West. Tory and UKIP anti-foreign-aiders won’t be able to believe their hypocritical luck.

The picture below – I don’t know where I got it from – is of course a joke. (That’s in case the fake news people get hold of it.)

I watched Boris’s speech this morning. (See https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/14/boris-johnson-urges-remainers-recognise-benefits-leaving-eu.) It seemed to me – and to a friend of mine who has been insisting from the beginning that Brexit won’t go through – to indicate a certain weakening of confidence on the Brexiteers’ part. He has obviously taken on board the Remainers’ reasonable objections, well put (not by me) in my last post here; which he gave faithful and fair expression to. None of all that ‘Remoaner’, ‘traitors’, ‘enemies of the people’ and ‘you lost: get used to it’ stuff that has been coming out of the Right-wing press in recent months, and which has so angered the 48% of us – or probably more than that now, with the oldies dying off. (The elderly were far more pro-Brexit than younger voters.) Boris sees, maybe feels, our pain; even, he claims, our ‘patriotism’. Is that because he has never been a committed Brexiter? Only an opportunist?

This was the most impressive part of his speech. The rest he spent trying to answer our objections, but with no substance or detail to back up his counter-arguments. So the speech may not have been enough to halt and reverse the anti-Brexit trend which seems to have been slowly building up recently; but at least it implicitly acknowledged it. As such, it could serve us Remainers as an encouragement.

Boris is right to say, however, that dropping Brexit now would create a storm of protest in the country, even amounting (this is my gloss) to civil war. That may be the most convincing reason to stick with that fateful decision made in the summer of 2016 – albeit as ‘softly’ as possible. The damage to our whole political fabric was done then: by Cameron’s decision to call a referendum on such a simple – but ill-defined – question; by a nervous Government’s decision to treat its result as mandatory rather than merely advisory; by Parliament’s shamefully going along with this; by the Tory press’s taunts and threats against anyone who wanted even to consider its legitimacy, or advocate a second referendum after rational consideration; and by Farage’s and UKIP’s stirring up sufficient xenophobia in the more deprived parts of the country to push it through. That’s a storm which may not be stilled; except by measures which will truly allay working- and lower-middle-class Brexit voters’ fears. In other words, a new social – I would say socialist – contract with the people. And that will take time, and probably stir the whole seething mess up even more on the way.

Ego desperatio. Is that right? Boris could tell me.