Porter’s Pensées

Is this Theresa May’s ‘Falklands moment’, several commentators have asked? This refers of course to the way Galtieri’s aggression against the Falklands (Malvinas) Islands in 1982 presented Thatcher with the opportunity to reverse her currently low domestic poll ratings by taking a ‘firm stand’ against him. Many historians attribute both her survival then and her later success to this ‘Iron Lady’ decision. Some of her political opponents suspected that she had deliberately provoked the crisis, or at least avoided settling it more diplomatically, to this end. Unlikely as this is (in my judgment), there can be little doubt that the Falklands War strengthened her immensely, at a time when her domestic political fortunes were wavering. It was a lucky break for her, testing her mettle in a way that – in the eyes of her macho supporters (women as well as men) – made her almost a god. Which is how, of course, she is still regarded in the Conservative Party today, including by the fat red-faced MP who claimed to espy some of her divinity in the face of Theresa May, when she stood up in the House of Commons yesterday to defy Putin , against a deafening background of Tory roars. Some of them looked as if they were wetting themselves; or about to have coronaries. Whether or not they really are as ‘warlike’ as they sounded, they’re certainly enjoying this!

Jeremy Corbyn’s sane and rational response – was it the Russian government? let’s see the evidence first – was predictably howled down by this mob – ‘traitor!’ ‘appeaser!’ ‘communist!’; and has apparently discomfited some of his own party on the backbenches: albeit usually those who have never felt comfortable with him as their leader. Clearly a little thrown by this, Corbyn sought to spell out his position in today’s Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/15/salisbury-attack-conflict-britain-cold-war.  He has some support, of course, especially among those who recall – as he points out in this piece – how often he has been proved right about these things in the past. The question is, politically speaking, how this Russian bru-ha-ha is going to affect his broader popularity, when it comes to the next General Election – if he is still at Labour’s helm then.

It was popular ‘jingoism’ and her ‘macho’ image that was partly responsible for Thatcher’s success in the election of 1983. What we don’t know yet is whether the jingoism that seemed to be displayed in the House of Commons yesterday, and of course in our tabloid press, is still as widespread as it was then. That may partly depend on whether Corbyn’s doubts (they were no more than that) are proved right, or at least plausible, and the Salisbury poisoner was in fact out of Putin’s and the Russian government’s control (Russian mafia? Ex-KGB?); or whether his perfectly justifiable point about Russian oligarchs’ financial contributions to the Conservative party have any purchase. As for May’s ‘macho’ qualities: it may be difficult to see her in the same league as the blessed Margaret in this regard. I don’t think any of us ever saw Thatcher as pathetic.

But she does have the added advantage of her opponent’s – Corbyn, not Putin – having been consistently characterised in the press as just the kind of lily-livered pacifist the political Right and the tabloids profess to despise; and smeared by them very recently as a communist spy himself. That was comprehensively disproved, under the threat of a libel action (https://bernardjporter.com/2018/02/20/a-traitor-in-our-midst/), and indeed appears ridiculous to most thinking people. (A Labour leader on the side of a corrupt capitalist?) But, as we know, mud sticks. That’s why the Right throw it. And it must worry those who are hoping that Corbyn’s more measured and reasonable approach to just about everything, including war scares, might eventually win through.

He was right to question (not deny) Putin’s responsibility for the Salisbury attack, incidentally, even if – as seems more likely than not – it turns out to be true.

Finished my latest book – unlucky no. 13. It’s really just a collection of my old essays, reviews and even a blog or two, most of them previously published in other forms, with an attempt to fit them into a logical sequence with an overriding theme – ‘Britain and Europe’ – which may not be thought to be too convincing. My Empire Ways was in the same mould. Some of it, including its ‘Conclusion’ on ‘Brexit and History’, is new. I still have lots of editing to do. The title – Cosmopolis – is provisional.

One very good publisher has promised to take a look at it; but despite its quality – in my eyes, obviously – I’m not altogether confident of its finding a berth. In which case I’ll try self-publication. It will have to be in hard-copy. I don’t trust electronic publication. What if a sun-burst or something wipes out all our web-based stuff?

I don’t want any royalties; just the chance to hold my new baby in my arms, after all that labour. And before I succumb to post-natal depression.

Wasn’t it Beatrice Webb who, after a fling with the bold macho imperialist Joseph Chamberlain, decided instead to marry the weedy socialist Sidney Webb, in order to ‘have books, rather than babies’? (I think it was I who discovered that, in her diaries at the LSE in the sixties; but it may not have been.)

It looks pretty likely that the Russian government had a hand in the Salisbury atrocity. But why should Corbyn be excoriated for holding back from blaming Putin directly? In Parliament today the Tories seemed to be accusing him of treachery and ‘appeasement’ for this, though his words were surely strong enough about the actual plot, and there’s as yet no smoking gun. Trump – and it distresses me to write this – was wiser not to point the finger, though that may be for other reasons: because of Russian covert help in his election, for example.

I’d be more prepared to believe that, and in Russian interference in our own Brexit referendum, than in this farcical (if also shocking and possibly tragic) plot: poisoning an ex-double agent – and his poor daughter – in a way that so obviously attracts suspicion to them. These Russkies are clever – chess-players, remember? – and getting a moron elected in the USA and dividing Europe makes perfect sense for them. The Salisbury event only makes sense, for Putin or one of his agencies, as an act of revenge, or of warning to other defectors.

Well, that’s quite possible. As it happens it’s the explanation I would go for. But I wouldn’t act on it yet. It hasn’t been proven. There are others (private Russians, for personal motives? Government agents/agencies out of control?) who could have done the deed. So politicians really should hold their fire until the evidence is clearer. The braying in the Commons today was most unbecoming.

But then the Tories love this sort of thing – shouting at their enemies, especially if they can associate their political adversaries with them too, or can put a wedge between – say – the Labour front and back benches. The event was clearly staged to make May look ‘strong and stable’ – a boost she badly needs; one obsequious Tory backbencher even thought he saw ‘a glint of the Iron Lady’ about her. The red haze they profess to see around Corbyn is extraordinary. I think the Tories forget that Russia isn’t communist now, but corruptly capitalist, so that even the most Left-wing Labour MP isn’t likely to have any ideological sympathy with her. If there’s a link with British politics, it involves the millions that expatriate crooked Russian zillionaires have stashed away in Britain, some of which has gone into Conservative Party coffers. But when Corbyn hinted at that, the Tories feigned shock that he should take such a ‘party political’ line.

As a historian I should point out that Russophobia has been a pretty reliable constant in British history for at least 200 years – and going back long before the Soviet Union. Much has been written on it; starting with JH Gleason’s seminal The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain: A Study of the Interaction of Policy and Opinion (1950). It’s not new. Which isn’t to say that in this case – after calm consideration – it might not be justifiable.

I was on the side of the hooligans, I’m afraid, when they invaded the pitch during West Ham’s defeat at home vs Burnley, and chased the owners out of the directors’ box. One of the protesters’ banners says it all:

https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/flag.

I’ve warned of this: see https://bernardjporter.com/2017/12/06/stratford-olympic-fc/, and the other posts referenced there. When you tear the social heart out of a community, and sell it on the capitalist market as if it were a mere commodity, this is what you get. The sad story of the Irons over the last few years should serve as a metaphor and a warning of what late-stage capitalism is doing to Britain generally.

I applied for Swedish citizenship just after the Brexit vote. It’s taken them nearly two years to get round to me. I’m told it’s because there were so many applications from Brits dispossessed of their European identity by that vote, and with Swedish connexions; on top of other (darker-skinned) refugees. The office was overwhelmed. But I was patient. Yesterday I got a letter from Migrationsverket asking me to send in my British passport. I hope that means I’ve been accepted. I’ll soon be a semi-Swede.

Brexiteers are always going on about ‘taking back control’. Funny; I felt that Brexit undermined that control. When I get my Swedish/European passport, I’ll be in control of my life again. So you can stuff it, you single-nationality Brits. You asked for it.

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.)