Porter’s Pensées

At my age birthdays can bring to mind only one thing – imminent death. I’m now seven years on from my biblically allotted ‘threescore years and ten’, so it’s bound to come soon. Have you noticed – from obituary columns – how many men die in their mid-late 70s? Not that I’m particularly bothered about that – one of the advantages of being a manic depressive is that extinction doesn’t seem to be the worst thing that can happen to one; but I do occasionally wonder about what will follow. Utter extinction is of course – by definition – unimaginable. But I have two alternative scenarios I rather like to play with. One is of my being wafted uncorporeally around our amazing universe to see close up the constellations and planets that have intrigued me since I was a boy. (Dan Dare had a lot to do with this.) I presently have a phone App – ‘Apod’, from NASA – that is giving me a daily and far-off glimpse into this. That’s my idea of Heaven. The other alternative is going back to my beginning, and living the same life over again (and again, and again), but without knowing that this is a repeat, and so unable to correct anything. For a depressive that will be Hell. Maybe it’s where all of us are now? Anyway, as the atheist Emmanuel Barthélemy coolly said on the scaffold in 1853 – see below, https://bernardjporter.com/2018/01/31/emmanuel-barthelemy/ – ‘soon I’ll know if I’m right’. Or not, if extinction is my fate.

I take back what I wrote about Madame Ny. She is the Swedish prosecutor who originally filed for Julian Assange’s extradition from Britain on a disputed and possibly trumped-up sex-crime charge four or five years ago, leading him to seek asylum in the London Ecuadorean Embassy for fear of being re-extradited to the USA on more serious ‘national security’ charges arising out of Wikileaks’s whistle-blowing activities. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2015/01/09/julian-assange-and-the-european-arrest-warrant/; https://bernardjporter.com/2016/09/07/assange-pops-up-again/; and a number of other past entries – keyword search ‘Assange’.) Or at least, some of what I wrote about Marianne Ny. She still seems to me to be a pretty appalling zealot (evidence is in those earlier posts), and her obstinate refusal to fly over to interview Assange in London – which would have hopefully resolved the whole question of his alleged sex crime – has, Kajsa tells me, been roundly condemned in Sweden too.

But, in her favour, it now appears that she was not responsible for the case going on as ridiculously long as it has. According to today’s Guardian, Ny offered to drop the extradition request as early as October 2013. ‘There is a demand in Swedish law for coercive measures to be proportionate,’ she informed London then, very reasonably – and creditably for the Swedish legal system, which I have criticized in the past. ‘The time passing, the costs and how severe the crime is to be taken into account together with the intrusion or detriment to the suspect. Against this background, we have found us to be obliged to lift the detention order … and to withdraw the European arrest warrant. If so this should be done in a couple of weeks.’ That should have enabled Assange to be released from his comfortable captivity. But it didn’t, because the British Crown Prosecution Service stepped in to turn her offer down: ‘Don’t you dare get cold feet!’ (See https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/feb/11/sweden-tried-to-drop-assange-extradition-in-2013-cps-emails-show.) So it was the British government’s doing after all. Extraordinary. But I might have known.

I can only guess at our government’s motive; but it might be because it wants Assange locked away – in the embassy, or, better still, in an American jail – too. Or, alternatively, it may be because the Foreign Office didn’t want another very public battle with the USA over what could be seen as a ‘political’ extradition, after other recent ones involving ‘hackers’, and at a time when May is desperate for a trade deal with Trump. In any case, it’s ‘our’ fault, not ‘yours’, my Swedish friends. Sorry.

I’m sure the German Ambassador in London is right to upbraid us Brits, yet again, for our World War II obsessions. Peter Ammon sees this as one of the factors lying behind Brexit, reminding our nationalists of another period when Britain bravely ‘stood alone’ in the face of German domination. (See https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jan/29/german-ambassador-peter-ammon-second-world-war-image-of-britain-has-fed-euroscepticism.) Of course this is wrong in all kinds of ways; not least in neglecting to take account of the Germans’ huge national change of heart since 1945, reflected in numerous official apologies and memorials to the Nazis’ victims, and in Germany’s present-day liberalism, which in many respects has overtaken ours. (Liberalism and toleration used to be two of the prime factors which distinguished us from them. No longer.) I’m sickened too by the persistence of old ‘Boche’ stereotypes in Britain today, as I was a few years ago – before Germany started winning World Cups herself – by the ‘Two World Wars and One World Cup’ chant that was heard around Wembley Stadium when the teams played together. It’s pathetic; and if it has fuelled the Ukippers, dangerous too.

On the other hand, the Second World War was a crucial event in Britain’s history, as well as in Germany’s of course, and in a lot of other countries’ – even Sweden’s, though she managed to duck out of it. (I’m sorry, but I do get fed up with Swedish friends’ proclaiming their nation’s avoidance of war for 200 years as a virtue.) For those of us who remember it, or its aftermath, it is bound to have left a permanent mark which it’s difficult to shake off emotionally, even if we can reason ourselves free of it. I was four years old when it ended. I remember being carried into air-raid shelters when the German bombers came over – headed for Hornchurch aerodrome, one of the Battle of Britain airfields – and being reassured by my mother: ‘don’t worry, dear, it’s only thunder’. I also think I remember seeing a German parachutist silhouetted against the moon as he leapt from his burning plane; very vividly, this, though I obviously couldn’t have seen it, because although it happened, I was being born at that very moment. (And feet-first. I was a ‘breach’ birth. Eyes came out last.) I was very conscious as a boy of the stark ruination all around me – ‘bomb-sites’ – especially as we travelled into London, and which remained for years afterwards; and of the privation and rationing that lasted for longer. (No sweets.) I was brought up with the image of Churchill as our saviour, though he disclaimed the title himself: ‘the British people were the lion. I only gave him his roar’; and of good brave King George VI, refusing to flee abroad, but instead staying in London while the bombs fell, and – as it happened – the spitting image of my father, whom I loved. The King’s stammer helped: I had a bad one too. I was exhilarated by the knowledge that this was a ‘good’, ‘defensive’ war that ‘we’ had won, and against something unutterably evil: the more so when those pictures of the liberated death camps appeared. So I’m afraid I can’t erase the War from my memory. Or my admiration for Churchill, despite his enormous failings before 1940 (Tonypandy, India), and his sanctioning Britain’s own terrifying (indeed, strictly speaking terrorist) Blitzkrieg at the end of the War, when it was probably unnecessary. Yes, he was an imperialist, a racist, and probably loved war too much for comfort – too much for his own comfort, as it happens; but he was right about Hitler, a generous personality, and his ‘roar’ was essential to the morale of the nation he led; after, of course, it – the nation – had put him into power.

One of the strengths of Darkest Hour, which we saw last night, was that it made this plain. Though it is the Conservative Party that seems to have taken most of the credit afterwards for winning the War, simply because Churchill was a Tory, the film was right to emphasize the fact that he wouldn’t have been put in that position if it hadn’t been for the support of the Parliamentary Labour Party, which insisted he replace Chamberlain when most of the Tory bigwigs – like Halifax, the most likely alternative – were still hankering for a compromise settlement with Hitler. (Some of them quite liked him.) The War cabinet was a genuine coalition, containing Labour and Liberal politicians as well as Tories. And it was supported by the ‘people’. The film’s way of making this point, by staging a conversation between Churchill and ‘ordinary’ folk on an Underground train, has been much criticised on the grounds that it didn’t actually happen; but in essence it was accurate: Churchill had other and more reliable means of testing the morale of the country, recently documented in Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang’s Listening to Britain: Home Intelligence Reports on Britain’s Finest Hour May-September (see https://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n13/bernard-porter/were-not-jittery). Of course this is all a bit much for some to accept, especially cynics and the upper classes; and books have been written to try to show that not all the proles were as loyal and principled as this (the most balanced is the one reviewed here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/bernard-porter/iniquity-in-romford). But in general it’s fair, I think, to describe World War II as a People’s war, much more so than World War I (or than the Iraq War, for that matter, or any of Britain’s imperial wars – perhaps the Falklands episode comes closest): a point re-emphasised by the shots in the film – and of course in the other recent WW2 film Dunkirk – of all those ‘little boats’ sailing out from Kent and Sussex to rescue the entrapped British and Allied armies on the French coast.

So I confess I emoted during Darkest Hour. But not in the way some Brexiteers do, if the German Ambassador is right. The moral I draw from the 1940s is not that we’re best ‘on our own’ – we didn’t after all ‘win’ the war on our own – but that anyone – any nation – can become as bad as Germany became then. We may be seeing that now, even among the victors of 1945.

Everyone knows, don’t they? that the ‘Great’ in ‘Great Britain’ refers historically to the fact that it comprises a union of four separate nations, rather than just ‘England’. It has nothing to do with ‘greatness’ in the boastful sense: ‘make America great again’. At Eton, however, they don’t appear to teach this. Both of the silliest members of our ‘Brexit’ gang – Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg – were educated there, and each of them seems to be obsessed with the idea of making ‘Britain great again’ in exactly that misleading sense. Which may be felt to be ironic, if one of the effects of Brexit, in view of the Scots’ opposition to it in the 2017 referendum, is to break up the Union, leaving England (plus Wales, too small to cope on her own, and Northern Ireland, too bigoted) dangerously isolated, and ‘Great’ Britain, properly understood, no more.

Brexit can be seen as a fitting end to the ‘great’ British project in other ways: if, that is, one still wants to insist, after reading my recent book British Imperial. What the Empire Wasn’t (or the earlier one subtitled Delusions of Grandeur), that ‘we’ – previous generations of Brits – ever were the powerful people we thought we were. The flaws in the Empire were obvious, and seriously damaging to the country, for a hundred years before the whole thing came crashing to the ground. Britain’s economic supremacy in the nineteenth century was based on her manufacturing industry and her trade, which began waning from the 1870s onwards, and finally collapsed – as a result of globalisation ridden by Thatcher – a hundred years later. The Empire, partly accumulated (as I’ve argued) as a desperate effort to reverse that decline, was not really a symptom of ‘greatness’ (in our Old Etonians’ sense), but of weakness.

Which is why very few Britons, apart from the usual suspects – mainly Colonel Blimps, white settler-colonialists, and ex-imperial consuls – bothered very much at all about its decline and fall. Compared to what happened in France, for example, British decolonisation provoked no serious domestic reaction – most of what reaction there was, like over the Suez crisis, was cheering it on – from people who didn’t generally see or care about ‘greatness’ in these terms. Those who felt ‘pride’ in their country chose other measures of national achievement: like, in particular, Britain’s ‘standing alone’ against the Nazi menace in the early years of the War, and the ‘welfare state’ created after it. Size and power were not important, and – to the extent that Britain ever had them – are still not greatly missed today.

Diminished as we were, and overshadowed by global forces we had no hope of controlling or even influencing on our own, we decided in the 1960s to pool our resources and national strengths in the larger project which was the ‘Common Market’, later the EU; which was a sensible decision, and one that maximised our remaining world influence and prestige, in co-operation with our neighbours. Then came (or perhaps won’t, if we come to our senses in the next year or two!) Brexit. That can’t make Britain ‘great’. There seems to be very little chance, if any, of our retaining our national reputation, or our prosperity, or even our independence in a realistic sense – taking account, that is, of our new dependency on the world market and on America’s terms of trade – without the protection that comes (or could do) as part of a community of nations. Brexit means taking the ‘great’, or what there is left of it, in Boris’s and Jacob’s sense, out of Britain. If only they could see that. – Or perhaps they do, and are really wanting to make Britain something else.

Following on from yesterday’s post: there has of course been an outcry against Rees-Mogg’s accusations, albeit mainly from ex-civil servants; who, if R-M is right, won’t count. Several have likened  his ‘pre-empting’ the argument in this way – establishing an ‘excuse’ if the Brexiteers don’t get what they want – to the conspiracy theory the Right used to fall back on in 1930s Germany: the ‘stab in the back’ explanation for Germany’s defeat in World War I. (See https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/03/brexit-civil-service-1930s-germany?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+main+NEW+H+categories&utm_term=262846&subid=630649&CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2.) We’re always being warned against too easily falling back on ‘Hitler’ comparisons (it’s known as ‘Godwin’s Law’), and no-one would want to paint Lord Snooty as a putative Adolf; but both in Britain and in America the comparison with the conditions that contributed to the rise of Fascism between the wars is being made more and more often; and, I would say (as a historian), increasingly convincingly. Of course, there are Fascisms and Fascisms…

It has been interesting to see both Donald Trump and our very own Jacob Rees-Mogg peddling almost identical conspiracy theories over the last couple of days: identical, that is, in that they both target the bureaucracies of their respective countries. In Trump’s case it’s the FBI and the Justice Department, who are prejudiced and working against him; in Rees-Mogg’s the Whitehall and Brussels civil servants who are predisposed in favour of the EU. Astonishingly, R-Mogg even accuses them – our ‘neutral’ civil servants – of ‘fiddling’ and ‘rigging’ the evidence. I imagine Trump uses similar language. In both instances it’s the ‘deep’ or ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’ or ‘permanent’ state, plotting against the people.

Little else seems to connect these two men, the suave aristocratic Rees-Mogg and the ‘self-made’ Trump: except that both these persona are pretty ‘fake’, in the lingo of today. It was his father who gave Donald his start, financially, and then bailed him out – twice – when he was bankrupt, which makes him hardly ‘self-made’. Jacob’s father was a mere newspaper editor. Echt aristocrats are supposed to have more distinguished lineages than that. Rees-Mogg is also a Roman Catholic, of a pretty fundamentalist type, which makes him odder still (though not alone) in that company. This is probably why he so deliberately plays up to his ‘Lord Snooty’ image (for those who remember the Dandy), and why in Parliament he is widely known as ‘the Member for the Nineteenth Century’. Both of them are very obvious throw-backs to earlier periods in their respective nations’ histories: heroic capitalism and the world of Wooster and Jeeves. But of course neither aristos nor capitalists can make much of a mark politically in these democratic, or ‘populist’, times without having something else going for them; which is why both men have chosen to do battle with an enemy they believe they share with ‘the people’. Civil servants – in both countries – represent the ‘Establishment’, and so are bound to want to obstruct, in any way they can, the departures from conventional policy that are implied by Brexit, and by just about the whole of Trump’s rag-bag agenda. They are also easily blamed for anything that goes wrong, or can be seen to be doing down the ‘ordinary man – or woman – in the street’. That’s because they’re not usually visible, aren’t allowed to answer back, and are usually highly – often privately – educated, which puts them in the despised ‘elite’ or ‘expert’ class. What better way for someone like Rees-Mogg to disguise his own elitism?

It’s odd that it should be the Far Right that takes this line. Historically it has usually been the Right that dismisses all talk of ‘conspiracy’, associating conspiracy ‘theorists’ with nutters who believe – for example – that the British Royal family is a tribe of alien shape-shifting reptiles; or at the very least with Leftists, over-eager to discover plots on the Right against them. Immediately a Left-winger starts talking about an undercover plot to undermine Labour’s Harold Wilson in the 1960s and ’70s, for example, the cry of ‘conspiracy theory’ will go up from the Right, intended to associate him or her with these supposed paranoiacs. That’s one reason why respectable academic historians tend to keep clear of this territory: even when they think there might be something in it. To get tarred with that brush could be curtains for their professional careers.

That’s not the situation among Joe public, however, who is much more receptive to this kind of thing; which is another reason why Trump and Rees-Mogg are trying it on today. That might be out of desperation: both Trump and the Brexiteers are steering into choppy waters now. Another reason is the ad hominem turn their arguments have taken: arguing not so much from the evidence, as on the (supposed) characteristics and characters of the people and groups who take other views. ‘He would say that, wouldn’t he?’ Well yes, perhaps; but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wrong. When Trump tells his supporters the mainstream press is ‘fake’, they’re unlikely to delve deeper to see whether it really is. When Rees-Mogg tells them the Treasury has a habit of deliberately distorting the facts, the people’s underlying prejudices against a besuited and privileged elite will make that seem so plausible as to preclude the necessity of their looking any further. All this contributes to the scepticism and cynicism which are two of the banes of our public life today.

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.