Porter’s Pensées

The House of Lords is a much maligned institution, and rightly so in most cases. Just occasionally, however, it fulfils an essential democratic function, by modifying legislation which has been too hastily drawn up in the Commons, or by directly challenging the Commons when it feels the latter is being bullied – by the Press, or party Whips, or a fickle ‘public opinion’ – into actions which the democracy might not, on mature reflection, really want. The Lords’ advantage, of course, is that their members cannot be so easily pressured, by the fear of electoral defeat, into ‘popular’ but unwise measures against their own better judgments; and measures that might – moreover – not remain popular very long. In the current climate over Brexit, where even moderate Brexiteers are being castigated as ‘traitors’ by the likes of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, provoking death threats against them, the Lords might even turn out to be our truly democratic saviours. With opinion in Britain never having been in favour of the ‘hard’ or extreme Brexit that the zealots and the Daily Mail favour, and seemingly turning – slowly – against a Brexit of any kind, we may need to suspend our suspicions of what on the face of it appears a somewhat feudal and moth-eaten institution, and cheer it on. – See https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/dec/16/call-off-brexit-bullies-or-face-defeat-tory-peers-tell-theresa-may#img-1.

After my last ‘Dickens’ post I was sent this. Thank you, Lucy Franco!

Just back from a superb staged version of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol at Folkoperan in Stockholm. It was in English, but that didn’t deter a packed house of Swedes. The story still resonates today – sadly so. The Victorian attitudes towards poverty, capitalism and welfare that Dickens was attacking in the 1840s are still in play on the British Right, and I dare say the American and Continental Rights too; currently bundled together under the name ‘Austerity’. That’s fairly new. Back in the Social-Democratic 1960s we considered Dickens’s works to be historical documents merely, and mocked the Soviets for believing that we in Britain lived in ‘Dickensian’ conditions still. That doesn’t seem quite so silly now. Of course there are no longer any little chimney-sweeps, and Tiny Tim would have been able to get treatment for his crippled leg under the NHS today. But there are the homeless and food banks and Grenfell Tower and the rest of it; and the way Ebeneezer Scrooge – before his enlightenment – regards money, work and welfare is quite close to, say, Thatcher’s, or George Osborne’s, or the Daily Mail‘s. I wonder if any of these, or Theresa May, ever read or saw A Christmas Carol ?

The more times I return to Dickens the more I think that he, albeit in a different genre, is almost on a level with my beloved Shakespeare. Among his many more literary achievements, he more or less invented the English secular Christmas – which is to my mind the best sort. (Or it would be, if it hadn’t turned so consumerist. Kajsa and I are defying consumerism this year by setting ourselves a limit of 100 kronor for each present we buy. A bit Scroogey, perhaps? ‘Bah humbug’.)

Of course Dickens was a Tory. But then it was virtually only the Tories who resisted ‘Political Economy’ (a.k.a. economic liberalism) in his time. Thatcher would have regarded him as a Conservative ‘Wet’.

I’ve never been one of those pedagogues who bothered much about students’ spelling and grammar. Some people just can’t spell. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re stupid. I always used to correct their spelling, but never deducted marks for it, and told them that so long as what they wrote was intelligible, it didn’t matter much. Sometimes, of course, their poor spelling and grammar made nonsense of what they wanted to say, in which cases I marked them down for poor communication – not for spelling and grammar per se. Older and crustier academics were often less charitable in this regard than I was. You found them writing to the Daily Telegraph about it: ‘young people these days, not taught properly, country going to the dogs…’ For me, however, it was the ideas that were important, so long as they were expressed moderately clearly.

Recently, however, I’ve been reading some of the ‘BTL’ comments appended to blog posts, and noticed how poor the spelling is there; especially (though not of course exclusively) on the ‘Brexit’ side of the argument. Usually it’s accompanied by pretty stupid content also; and I mean objectively stupid, not simply ideas I disagree with: insults, non-sequiturs, garbled nonsense. I drew attention to one blatant example of this (‘boarders’ instead of ‘borders’ – quite confusing), and was immediately rounded upon by the Brexiteers – for being ‘elitist’, of course. That’s the problem we educated? rational? snobbish? people face. We feed into the current hostility to ‘elites’ in present-day Britain, and also of course in the USA. Trump, Farage and Gove (‘we’ve had enough of experts’) wax fat on this. It’s almost as if any idea put out by an intelligent or ‘elite’ person must be disregarded – and the motives behind it questioned and traduced — for that reason alone. It creates an impermeable barrier, irrespective of the quality of any argument.

What can be done about this? Obviously keep quiet about mere spelling: that may give a rough guide to the worth of the content of a piece, but it does sound elitist, and it’s not important in itself. Beyond that, what? Disguise one’s ‘eliteness’ in some way? Adopt the same language and spelling as the trolls (is that the right word)? Simply ignore them? Give up on ‘democracy’, if it’s as hostile to reason as this?

When I was at school and in my first year at university, almost the only British history we were taught was ‘Constitutional’. That was the sort with the broad liberal theme, about the growth of Parliament and its ascendency over the Executive branch of government: first the Monarchy, then Prime Ministers and Cabinets. It was taught in order to make us all grateful for our peculiarly British ‘freedom’.

If this kind of history is still taught in the future, I imagine that yesterday’s Commons vote, insisting on Parliamentary control of the ultimate ‘Brexit’ settlement, against the wishes of the Executive, will feature as one of its key events. The Daily Mail’s ‘traitors’ – the dozen Conservative rebels who voted with Labour against their Government – will be seen as heroes of Parliamentary democracy, along with De Montfort, Hampden and Pym. I’d like to think that eventually statues will be raised to them in the House of Commons lobby.

Brexiters say they want to repatriate British laws. This is one of the most important of those laws. So they should be pleased. But, as so often happens, the loudest ‘patriots’ are the least patriotic of all.

Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell’s suggestion of moving the Bank of England to Birmingham reminds me of an idea I had a while back:

… to take advantage of the Palace of Westminster’s imminent overhaul to evacuate it and move Parliament around, like the Cup Final while Wembley was being rebuilt. Peripatetic parliaments or king’s councils are not unprecedented. We had them in the early Middle Ages. Other countries still do. That way MPs could re-engage directly with the parts of Britain that feel distanced from Westminster today.

Meeting one year in Manchester, the next in Glasgow (not Edinburgh, given the local competition), another in Swansea, then in Newcastle or even Hull (UK City of Culture in 2017), they would see the shuttered-up shops, the desolation caused by deindustrialisation, as well as the many positive and promising aspects of provincial life. And national journalists would follow them, and report. I’m sure they could find enough big rooms to meet and debate in – even some that might remind them of their old home, such as Manchester Town Hall (a much better building than the Palace of Westminster). Getting away from London for a while could do Britain’s crumbling democracy a power of good. What’s to lose?

That was in https://bernardjporter.com/2015/01/09/peripatetic-parliaments/ – in connexion with the popular alienation from the ‘Westminster bubble’ which I felt (as an adopted Northerner) was partly responsible for the Brexit vote. I still think it’s a good idea. I see my original post has been taken up and quoted by others recently: for example,  https://leftfootforward.org/2017/12/john-mcdonnell-said-parliament-could-move-out-of-london-and-why-not/.

This is not me, I wish it were. I found it hidden away as a comment on another blog post, and thought it deserved wider circulation. I particularly liked the comparison between Nigel Farage and Arthur Daley. (Remember Minder?)

Mike Swain. I could almost feel sorry for the Brexiter ‘ultras’. They’ve been on a real journey, haven’t they? From triumphant, gloating euphoria, back to the swivel-eyed rage tantrums they used to have after reading billionaire-sanctioned stories about straight bananas and jihadi immigrant benefit cheats with 30 kids.

Their world is falling apart; Chicken Licken. An apocalyptic vision where the – now – grey cliffs of Dover tumble solemnly into the sea, as if to weep tears of stone and lament the glorious Britain that could have been. A haunting nightmare where bonfires of cricket whites burn in the middle of village pub pitches, and where goose-stepping Eurocrats issue directives via the proxy of ‘regulatory alignment’ in order to make proud English nationalists drink cold, tasty, crisp beer, and food that doesn’t taste like a combination of wallpaper paste and monosodium glutomate.

I can envision them now, surveying their suburban drives, watching their battered Union flags fly precariously on single threads as the shitstorm of betrayal shreds their shared vision of Brexit. A vision that, sadly, has only ever existed in their heads. A vision that was never on the ballot, yet sold to them by an Arthur Daley character in an Arthur Daley jacket, representing the opinions of an elite band of lobbyists who were already doing a mighty fine job of turning the UK into a deregulated sink-hole of private capital, tax-dodgers, precariat labour and crumbling public services. The fact they won’t’ be getting an opportunity to accelerate that process just yet is no real victory, and more akin to snatching a lesser defeat from the jaws of an even bigger defeat.

Now nobody ‘wins’. No Europtopia. No glorious, new British renaissance ruling the waves of trade and culture. And definitely not the ethnically-cleansed ‘send ’em back’ fascist dystopia the knuckle-dragging flag-worshippers pined for. It’s just a similar, but inferior deal, with a giant bill and no say in the future of trade relations, law-making and infrastructure projects.

And while it’s true you can heal after shooting yourself in the foot, the likelihood is you’ll never walk the same again. You certainly won’t be winning any races either.

Rail renationalisation can’t come soon enough for me. My train to London this morning was 40 minutes late; the train back – the last one of the day – cancelled. I’m on my way to Doncaster now hoping for a connection to Hull there. If not I think they have to get me a taxi back. We’ll see.

I was invited to a meeting of historians at the House of Commons to discuss refugee policy. It was opened by Lord Dubs (Labour), who as a small boy had escaped from Nazi Germany through the Kindertransport scheme. All very interesting and moving; but I felt my expertise in C19th British asylum policy was too marginal to want to waste their time with. (In a nutshell: there was no asylum policy; Britain let anyone – even known terrorists – in. The reasons for this are interesting, and the subject of my ultra-scholarly The Refugee Question in mid-Victorian Politics; but inapplicable to today.)

Two things I learned. (1) There are 60 million stateless persons in the world today. (2) Britain is the only country in Europe that goes in for indeterminate detention of immigrants, and on a Minister’s say-so alone. I smell the sulphurous whiff of Theresa here again.

In connection with this, one Tory Minister (no less) has recently recommended that all returning Jihadis or Islamists be hunted down and shot on sight. Just in case.

As for the Palace of Westminster: what I saw of it didn’t seem to be in as bad a state as has been made out. But of course you can’t tell from the surfaces. They’re already restoring the roof of the mediaeval Hall; and the Big Ben tower is clad in scaffolding. I found it interesting that on a plaque inside, they credited Barry alone with the Victorian building. No mention of Gothic God-botherer Pugin.

There was a train from Doncaster. It’s pulling in to Hull now…

I’ve not yet been to West Ham’s new venue – the former Olympic Stadium in Stratford East – but shall try to do so in order to test for myself the widespread opinion that it is wrong for football (it was built of course for athletics), and hasn’t the atmosphere of the old Boleyn Ground in Upton Park. I’ve written before about the crime that was perpetrated when the millionaires who own the club – one of whom made his money from pornography – dragged it out of the proper ‘East End’ by its roots, in order to compete on a more profitable global scale with the big clubs of Chelsea and Manchester City. (See http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/12/22/bernard-porter/like-the-ancient-romans/#more-20273; https://bernardjporter.com/2016/05/11/goodbye-to-boleyn/; and https://bernardjporter.com/2017/01/07/football-0-capitalism-5/.) That crime, of course, is now irreversible. The old stadium has been torn down, and is currently being replaced by (luxury, I think) flats; leaving a great bleeding hole right in the centre of the culture of the East End which will never be filled in. It’s a bit like taking St Peter’s out of Rome.

It’s all, of course, a symptom of the steady and seemingly inevitable encroachment of capitalist values (yet again: Marx was right!), crushing customary non-money loyalties and allegiances. West Ham are becoming a ‘global’ product, with global (i.e. foreign) players, engaged simply as mercenaries, rather than the Club’s truly representing – as it always used to do – the local area, through locally bred lads. Spectators are treated as mere customers, for profit. That the local ‘Hammers’ are faintly aware of this seems to be demonstrated by a new slogan being displayed at West Ham games just now: ‘We’re Supporters, NOT Customers’. That says it all.

The team that plays in the Olympic (now ‘London’) Stadium is no longer West Ham; any more than Wimbledon FC is still ‘the Dons’, after being moved to Milton Keynes. I suggest that it change its name – perhaps to ‘Stratford Olympic’, which might suit the pretensions of its owners more; and allow a new West Ham United to grow from seed in its old environs. Mind you, that environs probably won’t last very long, socially and culturally, if the flats that are now being built on the old Boleyn site are an early sign of the yuppification of the whole area eventually.

I’m on the edge of divorcing myself from the ‘Irons’ (still called that, from the team – Thames Ironworks – it originated as) after nigh-on sixty years of supporting them; but I thought I should first check the new stadium for myself, out of fairness; and also wait until the team is doing a bit better than it is now. I wouldn’t like anyone to think I was dropping the club because it was losing. It goes far deeper than that.

I’ll need a replacement. (We all have to have our tribes.) I’ve been going to watch Hull City ever since I first moved to Hull in 1968, but can’t really get up much of a warmth for them. (Hull FC is a different matter; but Rugby League isn’t on in the winter.) Tottenham attract me, but that might feel too much of a betrayal, being as they are West Ham’s major and most-hated rivals. Leyton Orient? I’ve been there; it’s nothing. Over the river, Millwall seem to have many of the cultural attributes I’m missing with West Ham, but not the brilliant playing history the Irons had in the 1960s. Besides, ‘sahf of the river’ is foreign parts for an Essex boy like me. Fulham have always seemed friendly, but are are a bit far away (West London), and owned by another capitalist; and since they built their new riverside stand no longer offer spectators the compensation of being able to turn around to watch the Boat Race if the football gets too boring. Obviously I could never conceive of supporting Chelsea. QPR? But that’s West, too.

Bloody capitalism!

The number of people deported or threatened with deportation from Britain has been rising exponentially in recent months. Some of them have lived in Britain, worked, brought up families, and paid taxes for fifty years. Here is a recent example: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/dec/01/man-detained-threatened-with-removal-after-52-years-in-the-uk; but there are many more. I never thought I’d live to see this, in a country that has boasted of its generosity to visitors for centuries, and prided itself on its charitable flexibility when it comes to bureaucracy: i.e., not necessarily sticking to ’the rules’ if those rules occasioned clear injustices.

I suspect it dates from Theresa May’s autocratic tenure of the Home Office, and her anxiety to appease the Tory Right and Ukip by getting the numbers of immigrants down; or, at least – because the expulsion of a handful of fifty-year residents can’t possibly make a significant dent in the total – demonstrating to those monsters that she is ‘tough’. Theresa May is not a nice woman; nor, I would have thought, a truly ‘Christian’ one. I sometimes wonder about her vicar father. Has anyone researched his career and theology?

*

My apologies to the readers – mainly men, I have to say – who were upset by and critical of my decision to withdraw my posts on ‘sexual harassment’. No, it doesn’t mean I’ve changed my views. Or that I’m afraid of being ‘outed’ as a harasser myself. Yes, it did have something to do with the criticism I was getting from women (not Kajsa) who, I maintain, had grossly misread me, and some of whom were close to me – and hopefully still are, despite all this. As one of my (male) defenders wrote, ‘The posts themselves I thought very sensible but the whole subject is very charged at the moment.’ You can say that again. I withered under the scorn. I’m clearly not as brave as I thought I was.

‘Men are from Mars, women from Venus.’ Whoever invented that silly aphorism obviously didn’t know as much about the planets as we do now: Mars dry, cold and sterile, Venus a burning mass of volcanic lava. That figures.