Lord Adonis’s letter of resignation to the Prime Minister yesterday was a powerful statement, both about the re-privatisation of the East Coast rail line – the one I use most – which was part of his official brief as chair of the independent National Infrastructure Commission; and also, and more significantly, about the government’s pursuance of Brexit: ‘a populist and nationalist spasm worthy of Donald Trump’. I like that.

As usual, Brexiters have offered no response to it so far other than ad hominem ones. ‘He’s never been elected so what does he know about democracy?’ – That was Ian Duncan Smith.

The letter deserves as wide a circulation as possible, even on this little blogsite. So here it is, lightly edited. The final para is a bit OTT, I feel, but was probably put in to make May feel inadequate. Which is worth doing.

Dear prime minister,

…. However, my work at the commission has become increasingly clouded by disagreement with the government, and after much consideration I am writing to resign because of fundamental differences which simply cannot be bridged.

The European Union withdrawal bill is the worst legislation of my lifetime. It arrives soon in the House of Lords and I feel duty bound to oppose it relentlessly from the Labour benches.

Brexit is a populist and nationalist spasm worthy of Donald Trump. After the narrow referendum vote, a form of associate membership of the EU might have been attempted without rupturing Britain’s key trading and political alliances. Instead, by allying with Ukip and the Tory hard right to wrench Britain out of the key economic and political institutions of modern Europe, you are pursuing a course fraught with danger.

Even within Ireland, there are set to be barriers between people and trade. If Brexit happens, taking us back into Europe will become the mission of our children’s generation, who will marvel at your acts of destruction.

A responsible government would be leading the British people to stay in Europe while also tackling, with massive vigour, the social and economic problems within Britain which contributed to the Brexit vote. Unfortunately, your policy is the reverse.

The government is hurtling towards the EU’s emergency exit with no credible plan for the future of British trade and European cooperation, all the while ignoring – beyond soundbites and inadequate programmes – the crises of housing, education, the NHS and social and regional inequality which are undermining the fabric of our nation and feeding a populist surge.

What Britain needs in 2018 is a radically reforming government in the tradition of [Clement] Attlee, working tirelessly to eradicate social problems while strengthening Britain’s international alliances. This is a cause I have long advocated, and acted upon in government, and I intend to pursue it with all the energy I can muster.

Britain must be deeply engaged, responsible and consistent as a European power. When in times past we have isolated ourselves from the continent in the name of “empire” or “sovereignty”, we were soon sucked back in. This will inevitably happen again, given our power, trade, democratic values and sheer geography.

Putin and the rise of authoritarian nationalism in Poland and Hungary are flashing red lights. As Edmund Burke so wisely wrote, “people will not look forwards to posterity who do not look backwards to their ancestors”.

However, I would have been obliged to resign from the commission at this point anyway because of the transport secretary’s indefensible decision to bail out the Stagecoach/Virgin East Coast rail franchise. The bailout will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds, possibly billions if other loss-making rail companies demand equal treatment. It benefits only the billionaire owners of these companies and their shareholders, while pushing rail fares still higher and threatening national infrastructure investment. It is even more inexcusable given the Brexit squeeze on public spending.

The only rationale I can discern for the bailout is as a cynical political manoeuvre by Chris Grayling, a hard-right Brexiteer, to avoid following my 2009 precedent when National Express defaulted on its obligations to the state for the same East Coast franchise because it too had overbid for the contract. I set up a successful public operator to take over East Coast services and banned National Express from bidding for new contracts. The same should have been done in this case. Yet, astonishingly, Stagecoach has not only been bailed out, it remains on the shortlist for the next three rail franchises….

Brexit is causing a nervous breakdown across Whitehall and conduct unworthy of Her Majesty’s government. I am told, by those of longer experience, that it resembles Suez and the bitter industrial strife of the 1970s, both of which endangered not only national integrity but the authority of the state itself.

You occupy one of the most powerful offices in the history of the world, the heir of Churchill, Attlee and Gladstone. Whatever our differences, I wish you well in guiding our national destiny at this critical time.

Yours sincerely,
Andrew Adonis

That’s told her!

(I’m still working on the ‘What did the British Empire do for them’ post. It may take a while.)

Before I pen my contribution to the current Oxford-centred debate over the evils/benefits of the British Empire – see my last post – here is one I prepared earlier. It’s on a slightly different issue, and arises out of another controversy – about ‘compensation’ for colonial wrongs – but it bears on this one too. In case you missed it: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/04/imperial-blame/.

I have to confess – should it be a matter for ‘confession’? – that I’m entirely in agreement with Jo Johnson, the Tory Universities Minister (and brother of the sillier Johnson), when he opposes student bodies enforcing ‘no-platform’ policies on visiting speakers whose views they disagree with, or even find abhorrent – like the attempted ban on Germaine Greer a couple of years ago for her views on trans-sexuality. (See https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/universities-warned-over-free-speech-by-jo-johnson-bqp2d5np0.) I also strongly disapprove of those – usually students, again – who wish to remove all public traces of historical ‘imperialism’ or other alleged national wrongdoings from our buildings and streets: such as the small statue of Cecil Rhodes over the gate of Oriel College Oxford, which was a recent target. (To its great credit, the College didn’t give in over this.)

My objections to these claims and practices are the same as those of all traditional liberals, and with the same qualifications as theirs – shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre, for example; and identical to those of most defenders of universities, as essential crucibles of free-thinking ideas. Consequently they should be too familiar to require repetition here. I may even be a bit of an extremist in this regard: Jo Johnson wants to make an exception in the case of far-Right speakers; I wouldn’t, unless they are clearly inciting violence, or the contemporary political atmosphere is particularly febrile. Even that would mark a failure of liberalism, if possibly a necessary and hopefully a short-lived  one.

In this connection I was disheartened by these reports in recent issues of the Daily Mail, sent to me by a friend who has a stronger stomach than I for seeking out pieces in that particular swamp: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5207687/Oxford-home-Tory-loathing-anti-Israel-academics.html; and (later), http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5213269/Snowflake-students-demand-removal-triggering-books.html.  Coming from the Daily Mail, which has been pursuing a vendetta against Left-leaning academics ever since it found out that most university-educated young people voted ‘Remain’ in last year’s EU referendum, one has to take its allegations with a very large pinch of salt. Before I contribute anything more substantial to this discussion, I want to examine the Mail’s allegations more closely. I’m sure there is some truth in them. But how much? Who are these ‘platform-deniers’? How many of them are there? How many senior academics can there possibly be among them? (One can forgive the odd hot-headed young zealot.) Is the wider Oxford academic community taking them at all seriously? – I don’t know the answers to these questions, and genuinely want to find out.

The reason why I feel almost duty bound to stick my oar into this debate is that much of it revolves around the question of ‘British imperialism’, and is conducted by people who regard themselves as ‘anti-imperialists’. That, I’m afraid, is my area of expertise: both the Empire, about which I’ve published several books, and anti-imperialism in particular, which I was (I think) the first to write about (in Critics of Empire, 1968). I’ve desisted up to now because I’ve regarded the modern row about ‘imperialism’, and whether it was a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ thing, to be substantially wide of the mark on both sides; in ways, however, which it will be difficult to explain cogently enough to take its part in this highly simplistic, black-and-white debate. It will require some context and depth.

My most recent attempt to provide this – British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t – came out a couple of years ago, and is pretty concise, but still takes up a whole book. I’ll try to distil it down: first of all, hopefully, in this blog, and then perhaps more widely and publicly. The problem of course is that the more nuanced one is over ‘imperialism’, the more likely one is to be taken as an ‘apologist’ for it. So, for the record: I too have a poor opinion of Cecil Rhodes.

I can’t see this turning out well. Opinions are too inflamed. Not, I suspect, the opinions of the majority of people, who are left bewildered by the whole European debate, and seem not greatly concerned about how it will end. How much discussion is there currently in pubs, classrooms, even homes, of the actual issues of Brexit? And how much real feeling, of the kind exhibited in our press, and on the extremes – mainly the Right-extreme – of the parliamentary political scene?

But it’s not Brexit itself that has unleashed this tsunami of hatred, especially on the Brexit side: all that talk of ‘treason’ and ‘enemies of the people’, for example, in the MSM; and even – at the crazy edges of pro-Brexit opinion – of putting the ‘Remoaners’ in front of firing squads. The real cause is the general condition of the country, and its growing divisions and inequalities, which go back decades before we even joined the European Community. This is what the ‘Brexit’ referendum was really about. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2016/06/16/is-it-really-about-the-eu/.) It’s the Brexit voters who have suffered most from this alienation, and so are the most voluble over the question that this dispute is now focussed on: the issue of Britain’s membership of, or relation to, the EU. It’s all coming to the surface now: racism, hostility to ‘Establishments’ and to politicians generally, anti-intellectualism (Govey); and, underlying all this, disappointed hopes and expectations that the progressive 1940s, ’50s and ’60s had encouraged in all of us. (See my piece in the TLS, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/swinging-fifties/.) Looking for someone or something to blame, their attention has been diverted – by that ill-judged referendum – on to Brussels bureaucracy and immigrants. They’re the scapegoats. Perhaps we should be grateful that this time it isn’t the Jews.

In other Western countries we find much the same thing, albeit with different foci in each case. It must be an effect of late-stage global capitalism, its seemingly inexorable progress through our institutions, and the instabilities and inequalities it is largely responsible for. In some countries a general sense of national humiliation comes into it too: ‘Take back control’; ‘Make America great again’. Historians like me have already drawn attention to the parallel that can be made with the conditions (not necessarily the events) of the 1930s in Europe. This is the sort of soil in which Fascism grows. There are signs of that, too; not only in the rapidly growing explicitly neo-Fascist parties of the present day, but also in the behaviour and policies of Trump, his great fan Farage, and even our comic little British Rightists like Johnson
and Gove. (Remember, Hitler and Mussolini were treated as comic figures once.)

There’s no foreseeable way out of this. If the ‘hard’ Brexiteers win, those of us who feel that we’ve been robbed of one of our crucial (European) identities will never forgive them. If Brexit is reversed, which is possible, albeit unlikely, its champions will never forgive us. Anything in between – a ‘softer’ Brexit – will be met with cries of ‘appeasement’ or ‘betrayal’ from one side or the other. With things getting worse materially for most of us, the sources of resentment will still be there, widening the deep divisions between us. Our shocking press will make the most of them. I’ve known nothing like this before in my longish life; except in my history books. (Though Suez came close.) What does it presage? War? Revolution? Counter-revolution? Civil war?

Probably none of these things. We’re a moderate – apathetic? – people, after all. The Mail, Telegraph, Express and Sun, and their alien owners (‘alien’ because they’re British tax avoiders), don’t really represent us. Hopefully.

From last year:

Jul

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’.