Porter’s Pensées

My Swedish citizenship should come through soon. In the meantime I’m wondering whether I should bother to hold on to my British nationality any longer. Of course I shall – there are practical reasons for me to keep a foothold in the old country – but I’m finding it more and more difficult to identify with Britain as she is increasingly projecting herself.

It’s a depressing image: ungenerous, unwelcoming, shockingly unequal, stupid, racist, isolationist, selfish, her people constantly spied on, food banks, the poor demonised, the ruling classes corrupt and sexist, her footballers overpaid, her venerable Parliament crumbling to dust, fixated on the one (mainly) ‘good’ bit of her past history (WW2), whitewashing over or even rehabilitating the dubious bits (the Empire), utterly delusional about her prospects as a ‘free’ agent in the wider world now that she has irretrievably lost the attributes that made her an imperial power (her manufacturing industry and trade): all provoked and encouraged by a newspaper press that is possibly the most cynical and amoral in the world, and tolerated by an apathetic, irrational, uninformed and grossly misled electorate. (I’m sorry if that sounds élitist. It is, of course.)

Now I’m sure Britain still has her good qualities as a nation, as a vast number of her individual citizens certainly have; and her proudest achievements, inherited from the past – the BBC, the NHS, cricket, steak and kidney puddings – have not been totally undermined or destroyed just yet. But some days it’s difficult to espy them beyond the putrid smog that seems to be enveloping us (I remember real smogs, in the 1950s and ’60s: it’s just like that), and over my fears of something like the fascism of the 1930s breeding deep within it.

Brexit, the passions it has both revealed and aroused, and the grotesque ‘populist’ leaders it has thrown up, are all part of this. My application for Swedish citizenship was of course triggered by that, as the only way I saw of reclaiming the prized European identity that’s about to be seized from me. But in a way that’s a coward’s way out. Really I should stay and fight for what I believe in, here in the UK. According to the Brexiteer Press, however, that is akin to treason. ‘You lost. Get over it. The people have spoken. One referendum is democratic, but two is not.’ (Eh? There’s a wonderful comment on that here: https://www.facebook.com/1014500498590274/videos/1949502718423376/.*Another good reason for keeping the House of Lords.)

The question is: how far should I go, in my weak and elderly state, to stop the monster that is Brexit? Because I believe Brexit to be essentially unconstitutional, I’m certainly prepared to go extra-parliamentary. In Barthélemy’s day (see last post) they’d have erected barricades. But I can’t really see today’s Remainers blocking Parliament Street with pitchforks and muskets. Nowadays the only barricades in London are put up by the police. Another sign of our national decline?

*Bugger, it won’t come up, and I can’t find it on YouTube. But I seem to have posted it successfully on Facebook. It’s worth hunting out: Lord Lisvane with a brilliant analogy. Very funny. Sounds (and looks) like Gerard Hoffnung.

Later: apparently it’s working for some…

Hutchinsons sent me a proof copy of Marc Mulholland’s The Murderer of Warren Street, coming out in May, for a ‘puff’ on the dust cover. It’s about the life and grisly death of one of the French proscrits, or exiles, whom I came across when I was researching my The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics. It’s outstandingly good, so I sent them the following:

This is far more than a biography of Emmanuel Barthélemy, the mid-19^th century French revolutionary, exile, atheist, duellist and murderer, who ended his career in effigy in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, after his public execution in London in 1855. (‘Now I shall know if I’m right’, were his last words as the noose was put around his neck.) His true story is worthy of a sensational novel, and is recounted almost novelistically, but also sympathetically – despite appearances, he was a man of honour – in this superbly-researched book. In addition, The Murderer of Warren Street serves as a brilliant introduction to Barthélemy’s revolutionary times in France and in Britain; featuring some eminent bit-players – Marx and Engels among them – and steeped in the very different cultural milieus of those two nations. It also carries some resonances for our own terrorised age.

I’m hoping I get it for review. If so, you’ll be able to read more about Barthélemy there. – ‘Now I shall know if I’m right’. I’ve always thought that was pretty cool.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of Brexit, it is clearly being pursued now with the utmost inefficiency. The government appears clueless and divided. Could this be deliberate? Many in the government, including Theresa May, didn’t want Brexit in the first place. The mess they’re making of it appears to show them to have been right then. In the meantime, obviously affected by this, public opinion is gradually turning towards favouring a second referendum, on the terms of the disengagement (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jan/26/britons-favour-second-referendum-brexit-icm-poll). Is this what May was secretly banking on? It’s a clever ruse, if so.

‘Presidents Club’ goings-on – all over the newspapers today – are at least as much a sign of class and wealth inequality as of endemic sexism. I first observed these kinds of depravity when I was at Cambridge; a predominately male university – women were allowed in, but had their own colleges – with the musty, clubby atmosphere that these present-day degenerates appear to want to replicate in their private dining clubs. Occasions such as those revealed the other night at the Dorchester Hotel were too expensive for me to be able to afford, even if I had been invited (or had wanted to go); but one got to hear of them. Some idea of them can be gathered from the film The Riot Club, directed by the Dane Lone Scherfig (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riot_Club), and modelled on the real-life Oxford Bullingdon Club, of which Boris and our ex-PM David Cameron, of course, were leading members. Only the rich and powerful participated. Their attitudes to women – ‘totties’, they called them – were similar to the Presidents Clubbers’. I’ve been shocked by the Financial Times‘s revelations; but only because I had assumed that this sort of thing had been dying out slowly over the past fifty years of moderately successful feminism, and then at a quicker rate post-Harvey Weinstein. It just shows what debauchery you can cling on to if you’re well-heeled. It’s another symptom of our present corrosive social inequality.

I think we ought to be told which of the guests got out his dick to show to one of the totties. Shaming is the only answer.

When he first put it on the side of the Brexit bus, Boris Johnson’s claim that leaving the EU would save Britain £350 million a week that could be spent on the National Health Service was almost universally derided as ‘fake’. Other ministers were quick to disown it as soon as they returned to government. It became, indeed, the main exhibit in the Remainers’ case that the Brexit referendum victory was based on black propaganda and lies, strengthening their argument for a second vote. Boris became a figure of (even more) ridicule.

Which may make it surprising that he has now resurrected his claim, and indeed upped it; admitting last week that ‘There was an error on the side of the bus’ – but in the other direction. In fact, he goes on, ‘we grossly underestimated the sum over which we would be able to take back control’. (See https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/boris-johnson-vote-leaves-350m-week-nhs-pledge-low/.) So, even more money for the NHS. This comes at a moment when public concern over the government’s underfunding of the NHS is at an unprecedented peak, with almost daily press and TV exposés of the difficulties being faced by doctors and nurses (and of course patients) at over-full and understaffed hospitals, and the impression being given that the system is breaking down. On the Left they think this is a deliberate Tory plot: let the NHS fail and people might accept private enterprise’s stepping in.

Except they won’t. The NHS (together with the BBC) is one of Britons’ proudest and most prized institutions, whether that reputation is merited or not (I’ve experienced the Swedish system, so am not all that impressed); so that ‘privatisation’ on the American pattern – and probably benefitting American health companies, as a part of the ‘free trade’ deal Britain would need to negotiate with the USA in order to replace her lost European trade – would be regarded by many as akin to treason. Boris realises this, and so is pushing for greater State support for the NHS; conveniently linking it with the case for Brexit, and with his own personal political ambitions – three birds with one stone! It’s the move of a maverick; but a bold one.

And mavericks seem to be doing well these days, with conventional democratic politics wilting under the impact of late-stage capitalism, leaving gaps for the Trumps and Farages and Johnsons to bluster their ways to the surface. And hopefully for a democratic socialist to creep through sometime. If, that is, we can find one with a similar panache; or if Jeremy and Bernie can persuade voters that their very different kinds of panache are more reliable.

Civilized debate stands no chance against the forces now arraigned against it, from the lowest depths of the ‘blogosphere’ to the highest reaches of the US government. ‘Fake news’ is the aspect being highlighted presently, turning President Trump’s neat phrase against himself, but in a way that casts doubt on all sources of evidence, Left- as well as Right-leaning, and indeed – assisted here by some of the wilder ‘post-modernists’ – on the very possibility of objective ‘truth’. I’m reminded of my American radio-show caller-in a few years ago, insisting that the London Blitz was an act of retaliation for the bombing of Dresden (three years later); on the grounds, ultimately, that ‘I’m a free American, and so can believe anything I like’ (https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/22/btl/). There’s no way that rational argument could penetrate that mind-set. I imagine him sitting in dirty overalls, chewing baccy, and strumming his banjo somewhere in the Appalachians.

But there are other obstacles to civilized debate. One is the sort of stereotype I’ve just shockingly perpetrated in that last sentence: pre-impressions of whole groups of people whom you identify with the opinions you take issue with. Today the most common ones are, on the Left, stupid working-class people – blamed for example for Brexit – or, on the Right, ‘intellectuals’. Identify a Brexiteer as the kind of person who appears on the Jeremy Kyle Show, or a Remainer as a toffee-nosed academic who thinks too much, and you’re half-way there. (‘We’ve had quite enough of experts’: Michael Gove.) As an academic, I’ve had experience of this (‘it’s OK for you in your ivory tower…’). Brexiteers clearly have, too. In their case it – being looked down on, after years of being politically ignored – must stoke their feelings against the Establishment élite. I tend to attribute the ‘Brexit’ vote to this, although by doing so I may well be falling into the same trap. It really is difficult to get beyond these ad hominem (or feminem) generalisations, or to persuade people that you need to, in order to address the substance of their arguments. So very often the debate simply stops there.

Recently – or it may not be so recent, but is new to me – another factor has intruded; which is the reduction of an argument to such a trivial level that it obscures the larger issues. A recent example was the movement in Oxford to boycott or ‘no platform’ an on-going research seminar about the ‘Ethics of Empire’, on the grounds that there is nothing to discuss: imperialism was immoral, so shut up. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2018/01/04/oxford-and-the-ethics-of-empire/.) What is ‘trivial’ about that is the simplistic notion that some issues are finally settled; together with the totally unfounded suspicion that the seminar might turn out to excuse imperialism; and the reluctance to accept that the issue might be more complex – and so worth discussing, for clarity’s sake – than the simple black/white view of it. The efforts of the objectors to stifle that kind of discussion, on grounds of what I imagine will be called ‘political correctness’ – though I hate that term: most ‘political correctness’ is correct – are not only intellectually trivial, but also academically offensive – almost fascist, I would say. And the ‘I’ here is someone who has always regarded himself as an anti-imperialist, and is old enough to have actively protested against the remnants of British imperialism, but is also informed enough to know that ‘it’s not as simple’ – as trivial – as that. ‘Simple’ equals ‘trivial’. It may be as simple as that. (!)

The same is sometimes true of those who are continuously accusing the Labour Party of ‘anti-semitism’, when there is little solid evidence for it. I’ve posted about this before: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/05/02/the-political-and-the-personal/; https://bernardjporter.com/2016/05/04/antisemitism-again/ ; and https://bernardjporter.com/2017/12/19/more-anti-semitism/. Those pieces are mainly about the way criticism of Israel’s current government is so often confused with racism. The most recent ‘trivialisation’ of this anti-Labour charge, however, is the argument that the party’s failure to find this evidence is itself proof of its unwillingness to take the accusation ‘seriously’, which in its turn is evidence of anti-Jewishness. In the words of one critic, it illustrates ‘a deeply prejudiced view of the Jewish people’s concerns about antisemitism’ . (That’s in yesterday’s Observer: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jan/20/jewish-labour-group-accuses-failing-act-antisemitism.) That would cover me. And of course it’s not necessarily true – and is unlikely to be – but is yet another illustration of what I would regard as a ‘trivial’ way of arguing: from pre-formed conclusions rather than on the evidence.

My third example of ‘triviality’ is the ‘Me-Too’ movement, or some of its activists, and is slightly different. Yet again, if one has a criticism of ‘Me-Too’, one feels obliged to start off with a statement of one’s basic feminism, like one does in the other cases (of one’s anti-imperialism and philo-semitism), which immediately sets other feminists’ (or anti-imperialists’ or Zionists’) hackles rising, on the grounds that you are ‘protesting too much’; but the virulence of the current debate makes it necessary to try, at any rate, to pre-empt this kind of response. So: I am a feminist, and believe that in general the Me-Too movement has been a great force for good. But the ‘trivialisation’ in this case comes in the form of its inflating even the mildest form of ‘harrassment’ – touching a woman’s knee is an example, which has subjected many men to undeserved vilification, and even cost a number of them their jobs – to the same level as far more serious forms, from rape down to serial stalking, generally from a position of (male) power; which of course has the potential to diminish the seriousness of those very real crimes as they’re perceived, and to undermine respect for the Me-Too movement as a whole.

I won’t elaborate on this. I tried to in a couple of earlier posts, but was misunderstood so much – I was putting perfectly reasonable arguments – and as a result was subjected to such scurrilous attacks, that I took the posts down, and determined not to return to that topic again. Recently the Toronto professor Jordan Peterson sparked a similar outbreak of vicious trolling over his suggestion that not all pay inequalities by gender were the results of ‘the oppressive patriarchy’: see https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jan/21/no-excuse-for-online-abuse-says-professor-in-tv-misogyny-row. The same has happened to women who have stood out against Me-Too’s perceived extremism (or ‘puritanism’), like Catherine Deneuve and my old friend Germaine Greer – though I understand that Deneuve has already been persuaded to row back. (Here’s Germaine: http://www.newsliveupdates.com/feminist-germaine-greer-slams-the-metoo-campaign/.) This indicates – as was suggested by one of my supporters – that the present atmosphere is unconducive to rational debate.

If so, that’s a terrible shame. If we can’t have rational discussion, what’s in store for us? I hesitate to raise the ‘F’ word (for Fascism), but others have. This ought to be the crucial topic for public debate now, given precedence over, for example, the ins and outs of the imperial, the Jewish and the women questions. Fix the engine before deciding where to drive.

[NOTE: This was the outcome of my 3-day rush to complete the LRB’s latest commission. In the end they didn’t like it – ‘not what we wanted’; which was a mere description of the affair, plus some ‘what if’ speculations. Fair enough, but I wished they’d made that plainer when they asked me to do it. I wrote it this way because the book was very superficial – mere reportage of what happened, from the testimony, quoted at length, of those involved. And I reckoned that any reader could find the facts on Wikipedia. Beyond that, there is no analysis in the book, and no context. I may try again with another version. But no ‘what ifs’. Historians are reluctant to join in that game. In the meantime, here’s the original version.]

One of Margaret Thatcher’s most toxic legacies, along with all the others, was her introduction of the idea of the ‘strong leader’ into British politics. That hadn’t been there before. Prime ministers had brought other qualities to the job, like competence, empathy, diplomacy and good judgment. These sometimes worked (Attlee, Macmillan, Wilson), sometimes not. The only comparable ‘leader’ figure before Thatcher was Churchill (‘Winston’ to her, somewhat over-familiarly), but that was in wartime, and he had always liked, at least in public, to give the credit to his ‘people’, rather than himself. Before him, and between him and Thatcher, it’s difficult to think of a British prime minister who relied so much on his own personal qualities of resolution, courage and sheer bravery as Thatcher did during her long years of dominance. That changed the political climate, certainly on the Right. It’s what Tories and the tabloid press have yearned for in their leaders ever since her. They’re still wedded to the Führerprinzip. (Alan Clark used the ‘F’ word too, in reference to her ‘charisma’.) Theresa May’s pitiful efforts to project herself as ‘strong and stable’, and to continue to do so despite humiliating setbacks, reflects that. She has been through fire, but is still bravely soldiering on. That should be a good start, at least, for a Führerin.

Thatcher’s fire was literal. It happened on 12 October 1984 when an IRA time-delay bomb half-demolished the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where she was staying with most of her Cabinet, who were there for the Conservative Party’s Annual Conference. The assumption was, and is, that the bomb was meant for her, but if so it was placed in the wrong room, and she emerged unscathed. ‘The cry went up, “Maggie’s safe!”’ remembered Jonathan Aitken. ‘Such was the relief that strangers shook hands, and clasped each other’s shoulders.’ But one MP was killed, plus four other Tory high-ups, and 34 seriously injured, among them Norman (now Lord) Tebbit and his wife Margaret.

Lord Tebbit has provided a puff and a Preface to Steve Ramsey’s just-published Something Has Gone Wrong. Dealing with the Brighton Bomb (Biteback Publishing, 2018), which is a journalist’s account – no more – of the event seen through the eyes of its victims, the emergency services, the press and the police, from the moment the bomb went off to the arrest and trial in September 1985 of its main perpetrator, Patrick Magee. Tebbit’s injuries were horrendous. (His wife’s were worse. She still can’t walk.) He comes out of this account much as one might expect: stoical (as a former RAF pilot he had been in life-and-death situations before), with quite an attractive line in black humour (‘Are you allergic to anything?’ ‘Only bombs’), and with the political venom for which he was celebrated preserved intact. On returning to the Cabinet in January he told following reporters that he was looking forward to ‘roughing up the Labour Party before too long.’ So, all back to normal.

Thatcher emerges even better. She is presented here as calm and cool after it all, concerned only for the other guests (including her husband, who was sleeping in a separate room), and determined to carry on as usual afterwards. To someone who suggested they abandon the Conference, she replied ‘No way. We are continuing. They don’t beat us.’ This was the theme of the Conference speech she delivered later the same day: that their presence there, despite the bomb, was a sign ‘that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.’ According to her biographer Charles Moore her original draft of the speech had expressly linked IRA terrorism with Trade Union ‘extremism’, but in the end this was only implied.

For Thatcher, the Brighton bomb was definitely a bonus. It confirmed her ‘Iron Lady’ reputation, already pretty well established by her very personal triumph in the Falklands; and boosted her in the polls. Moore also thinks it strengthened her hand against Arthur Scargill in the ongoing Miners’ strike. One downside could have been that it made her look too unflappable, devoid of human emotion, ‘robotic’, to use the word applied to her present-day successor: something that her great hero ‘Winston’ could never have been accused of. That was how she had got through it all. Ramsey marshals all the evidence he can find to counter this: little cameos of her ‘praying, for some time’ before she went to bed, for example; expressions of concern for injured colleagues; and a general explanation for the impression she gave that ‘she’s quite cold and doesn’t really have any normal human reaction’, again from Charles Moore ‘But that’s not true. She’s a very passionate person. But her passion was very much engaged, in her mind, in doing her job. That’s what she puts her passion into.’ That figures.

Having missed the bomb in the first place, the police and security services seem to have been pretty efficient thereafter, according to Ramsey’s account; which however is entirely made up of the accounts, quoted at length, of the police officers he has interviewed. (This is not a critical or analytical book.) A few people behaved badly, including male hotel guests who didn’t want to give evidence because they had women (‘not their wives’) in bed with them, at least one of whom was a Tory MP – ‘but we promised that we’d keep quiet’. The police’s task was made easier by the fact that there was none of that ‘human rights’ nonsense around then to stop them mildly roughing suspects up, for example; or ‘Health and Safety’ to prevent their rescuing people; and they persevered with their jobs regardless, because ‘we hadn’t been clever enough to invent post-traumatic stress. In those days we just got on with it. It was a different world. We didn’t have all these kinds of pansy type things we have today where everybody’s “Oh-ahh”’. These, of course, were the days before Political Correctness.

They were also the days when memories of the Second World War were still quite sharp in the minds of several of the people involved in the Brighton bombing, automatically triggering responses learned forty-odd years before in the London Blitz; especially the ‘British’ stoicism – ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ – and resistance – ‘they won’t beat us’ – right down to the ‘lovely cup of tea’ to restore morale. Thatcher and Co were almost re-living Britain’s Finest Hour. That’s what gave them so great a boost. Didn’t the IRA cotton on to this? They couldn’t win – terrorism is supposed to terrorize, but it certainly didn’t then – any more than one hopes the Islamicists can win today. It was Thatcher who won, personally, or at least survived; bequeathing to us in the process an ideal of strong and resolute personal ‘leadership’ – the ‘smack of firm government’ – that the political Right misses and still yearns for today. Maybe Theresa May could do with something like this (not a bomb, please) to really test her mettle.

Trump’s retweeting of fake ‘Britain First’ propaganda a few weeks ago, quickly slapped down by Theresa May, who was then re-slapped down by Trump, isn’t by itself evidence of a two-way link between him and our own neo-Nazis. But there’s no doubt that the latter love him, as a fellow nationalist and racist, and have started to regard him as their great overseas hero, much as the British Right before the War regarded Hitler, and British communists used to regard either Stalin or Mao. Hence Nigel Farage’s fawning on him; and hence also the incident last week when a group of far-Rightists disrupted a Fabian Society meeting addressed by London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who has had his own spats with the Donald; with the disrupters waving American flags (the wrong way round, as it happens) and shouting for both Brexit and Trump. There’s an account of it here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/13/pro-trump-supporters-crash-fabian-conference-protest-sadiq-khan/. I imagine that Trump is going to fulfil this role for the British far Right for as long as he stays in power, and even afterwards. (Perhaps as the Risen White Christ?)

I’ve not come across the ‘White Pendragons’ before. From their name they ought to be Welsh. But their leader, portrayed in this video accompanied by a parrot, talks like a Londoner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjoYpUnY-Tk. Watch it, if you can bear to.

Just back from Stockholm: a complicated journey – tunnelbana, flyggbus, plane, train, tube, train, taxi, all the way dragging a case full of heavy Xmas pressies – which always leaves me pretty shagged out. I arrived to find a request to write a piece for the LRB in just three days, including reading the book, which is pretty tight. Hence no posts. I should finish the review tonight (the deadline), when normal blogging service will I hope be resumed.

In the meantime, Facebook reminded me this morning of a message I posted there three years ago, which I thought worth re-posting here. It may be thought provocative. I should perhaps hasten to add that I’m against all monotheisms, which insist that their Gods are the only ones, and so indulge in proselytising or worse. That’s the underlying problem of ‘religion’. I’d like to be free to choose mine – and everyone else to choose theirs – off the shelf, to suit us individually, from a panoply or Olympus of Gods; like the Greeks, the Romans and the ancient Nordics – all far superior to us in this regard.

Here’s the original post.

‘I’ve never bought into the idea that Islam is a religion of peace and freedom which is being perverted by a few extremists. Here are two good posts I found on a Guardian blogsite this morning [11 Jan 2015]:

The problem, is that many followers of Islam (the majority in fact according to many polls) believe that the Qur’an is the one and only interpretation of God’s will, and to suggest otherwise is blasphemy, punishable by death.

This seems pretty unambiguous:

Qur’an (33:57) – “Lo! those who malign Allah and His messenger, Allah hath cursed them in this world and the Hereafter, and hath prepared for them the doom of the disdained”
Qur’an (33:61) – [continues from above] “Accursed, they will be seized wherever found and slain with a (fierce) slaughter.”

Islam needs a reformation of its holy text to remove such sentiments, ironically, moderate imams and clerics who advocate change of it are gunned down/killed, whatever.

and:

Ironic really that the country of Diderot, Bayle, Voltaire and Descartes, leading lights in the age of Enlightenment and Reason should be plagued by the forces of darkness, intolerance and ignorance.

‘Of course this applies, in varying degrees, to all dogmatic religions or ideologies. It’s just that today it’s Moslems, or self-styled Moslems, who are representing “the forces of darkness, intolerance and ignorance”.’

Today, three years later, one might add Trump and his like.

For a socialist and active anti-imperial campaigner for sixty years – apartheid, Suez, Rhodesia, Vietnam – to be seen to be defending the British Empire will strike some as not only perverse, but also dangerous to his reputation, his career, if he has one, and even to his health. But I am a scholar and a professional historian before I am a political activist, although with my politics informed, I believe, by my knowledge of history, and am safely retired to boot; and so I feel I cannot let the recent furore over the upcoming project on ‘Ethics and Empire’, formulated by the Moral Theologian Nigel Biggar and others at Oxford, pass without comment. I’m also a particular authority on the early history of ‘anti-imperialism’ in Britain – my first book was on Critics of Empire – which is supposedly the cause that fires most of Professor Biggar’s opponents.

The row started after Biggar published a short op-ed in The Times provocatively entitled ‘Don’t feel guilty about our colonial history’ (https:/thetimes.co.uk/article/don-t-feel-guilty-about-our-colonial-history-ghvstdhmy). That in turn was based on an article by Bruce Gilley, an American political scientist, in a prestigious academic journal which began: ‘For the last hundred years, western colonialism has had a bad name. It is high time to question this orthodoxy’. That article, according to Biggar’s piece, provoked 15 members of the journal’s editorial board to resign, a petition demanding its retraction gathering 16,000 signatures, and its eventual retraction after the editor received death threats from Indian nationalists. It didn’t gloss over the atrocities committed in the name of imperialism, but simply pointed out that such atrocities had gone on before the Europeans arrived and continued after they left. So, ‘the notion that colonialism is always and everywhere a bad thing needs to be rethought in the light of the grave human toll of a century of anti-colonial regimes and policies.’ Gilley also pointed to some ‘virtues’ of colonial rule, which ‘often’ included ‘the formation of coherent political communities’, and the institution of ‘order’. Ignore the fact that British imperialism was ‘morally mixed’, Biggar concludes, and ‘our guilt will make us vulnerable to wilful manipulation’, and will encourage ‘the belief that the best way that we can serve the world is by leaving it well alone’. In order to balance this sense of guilt Biggar suggests that we recover some of the ‘pride’ we used to feel in our Empire; the ‘proud’ episode he uses as an example is the Royal Navy’s suppression of the slave trade during the nineteenth century. ‘Pride,’ he concludes, ‘can temper shame’. Only ‘temper’, note; not drive it out.

Biggar’s prospectus for his ‘Ethics and Empire’ project (and John Darwin’s, originally, before he withdrew for ‘personal reasons’), followed along these lines. ‘In most reaches of contemporary academic discourse,’ its ‘Rationale’ begins, ‘the topic of ethics and empire raises no questions to which widely accepted answers are not immediately to hand. By definition, ‘empire’ is imperialist; imperialism is wicked; and empire is therefore unethical. Nothing of interest remains to be explored.’ Further, these assumptions pervade other areas of study, and also our reactions to present-day events, often misleadingly.

Then on 19 December last year there appeared an ‘Open Letter’, signed by 58 ‘Oxford Scholars’, objecting to Biggar’s article and his ‘Ethics and Empire’ project, on the grounds that they risked ‘being construed as representative of Oxford scholarship’, and as reinforcing the ‘pervasive sense’ that ‘contemporary inequalities… at our university are underpinned by a complacent, even celebratory, attitude towards its imperial past’ (http://theconversation.com/ethics-and-empire-an-open-letter-from-oxford-scholars-89333). Gilley’s earlier piece was seen as advocating ‘a “recolonisation” of parts of the world by Western powers as a solution to misgovernment in the global south,… so fortify[ing] support for overseas military interventions today.’ The letter took issue with Biggar’s characterisation of present-day thinking about imperialism as uniformly negative, and finished by expressing its signatories’ opposition to what they took to be his implication that ‘it should be rehabilitated because some of it was good.’

I hope I’ve summarised both sides of the case fairly here. I have some problems with Biggar’s piece, and a degree of sympathy with some of the opposition’s arguments: for instance, against the idea that the British Empire can be assessed in terms of a balance-sheet of positive and negative motives and effects. ‘Good and evil may be meaningful terms of analysis for theologians,’ write the protesters. ‘They are useless to historians.’ As a historian myself I’d go along with that; but Biggar is, after all, a theologian. His approach is worth considering, at least. Some useful questions arise from it: for example, do ‘evil’ (or negative) effects always stem from wicked motivations? My studies have shown that, so far as probably most empires are concerned, ‘good’ (and Christian) intentions often gave rise to the worst of results – and vice-versa, although to a lesser extent. That’s a simple, but also an interesting and relevant, moral point. I’m also unhappy with Biggar’s idea of ‘pride’s tempering shame’, believing, as I’ve written before, than none of us should feel either pride or blame for anything done by our forefathers (see https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/04/imperial-blame/); and that a better filter through which to observe these things is an objective and value-free one. It may be worthwhile in some cases to remind students about the crimes perpetrated under the aegis of the British Empire, but only in order to counteract excessive reactionary pride in the latter; and, in the same way, to remind the more rabid anti-imperialists of some of Empire’s more positive or neutral sides. And there are plenty of those – radicals who see all imperialism as bad – pace the Open Letterers.

In fact British imperial history is too complex and nuanced to reduce it in this kind of way. British imperialism was weaker and less effective than it appeared from those great (and late) red-besplattered world maps; ruled by a miniscule and generally upright civil service and a larger number of collaborators; its different sorts of colonies governed in a myriad of ways, most of them involving partnership with indigenes or (less happily) settlers; with many colonial subjects being ‘free-er’ than their metropolitan equivalents; acquired in a dozen different ways, not all by force, and a few by local choice; with eventual self-government as its professed ultimate aim most of the time; not always racist – or it would not have wanted to ‘improve’ its subjects; generally aware of the difficulties and perils of ‘improvement’ with regard to non-European cultures, which the British sometimes lauded before their own; and occasionally – just occasionally – appreciated by its subjects, or victims. What happened in the colonies was affected just as much by extraneous factors as by ‘imperialism’ per se: most often by the inexorable growth and expansion of exploitative global capitalism – another kind of imperialism – which the British often rode, but just as often sought to impede, in the supposed interests of their colonial wards. (For more on this see my British Imperial. What the Empire Wasn’t, 2015.) ‘Imperialism’ and ‘empire’ are too simple, reductive and often misleading words to describe all this. (I once suggested at a conference that we historians stop using them for a bit, in order to focus on the realities behind them. It didn’t catch on.)

In any case the ‘Ethics and Empire’ project is supposed to be a vehicle for the discussion of these matters, which, if it brings nuance to them, can only benefit both our historical understanding, and the ways we use the word ‘imperialism’ in modern political discourse. It will certainly bring some useful  lessons to the question of ‘foreign intervention’, which old-style imperialists wrestled with, both practically and ethically,  too. Historical discussions should not be boycotted simply because the initial statement of aims might appear crude, or wrong-headed, or open to misinterpretation, or to imply (only) one hypothesis rather than another. That is a profoundly unscholarly approach, which brings far more shame on Oxford University than Biggar’s ‘Ethics and Empire’ enterprise.

I should add that I’m unfamiliar with the Oxford scene, and unaware of all aspects of the local context to this dispute. Most of the 58 who signed the ‘Open Letter’ against Biggar are not leading imperial historians, and some of them seem to be quite far removed from the field. (What is a musicologist doing there, for example; or an expert on Diderot?) Who are the originators of the protest? I imagine (but don’t know for sure) that they are remnants of the unsuccessful ‘Rhodes statue’ protest of a year or two ago. How representative are they of the Oxford student body, or the Fellows? I also don’t know why John Darwin – the best of our current imperial historians – withdrew from the project. To my mind it seems a highly worthwhile one; illuminating and valuable not only to new imperialist reactionaries, but also – and more so, I would say – to us better informed old Antis.