STEPHEN GLOVER STRIKES AGAIN

 

          With reference to Stephen Glover’s Daily Mail column for 13^th June 2019: ‘I fear Mrs May’s plan for a green legacy is as doomed as her lost Brexit deal’: I have reasons for agreeing with Mr Glover’s scepticism but from a wholly opposite viewpoint.

          ‘Yesterday,’ he writes, ‘she announced that Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced to zero, or almost zero, by 2050 – an undertaking that has not so far been matched by any other developed country.’

          Of course Mrs May was also going to rehouse the victims of the Grenfell disaster within three months – and they are still waiting after two years. So one takes her ‘green legacy’ with a pinch of salt.

          No: Glover’s argument is that Britain’s emissions are a tiny ‘1.2 per cent – and falling’ of total world emissions. That is, compared to China’s 27 per cent (22 times as much as the British) and those emissions from a rapidly growing India of ‘about 6.5 per cent’. Glover really ought to mention a third country here, the United States of America, which is third largest in population after India and China, if by a long way. But the USA uses up some 25% of the world’s energy with a consumption per capita far outweighing that of the average Indian or Chinese. Moreover its government under President Trump has eschewed the whole idea of world climate change as he rips up environmental protection laws thereby forcing individual states to take their own action - for self-protection, as it were. If things deteriorate this could lead to the worst separation of powers clash in the history of the Republic. But perhaps best not to mention Uncle Sam here, who is Britain’s closest ally.

          ‘My point,’ says Glover, ‘is that nothing we do in this country by way of reducing our emissions – which have already gone down by 44 per cent since 1990, a barely equalled performance, is going to have a discernible influence on the overall situation.’ Never mind that this barely equalled performance was brought about by the barely equalled performance of the decimation of British industry in the Tory years under Thatcher and co. which saw manufacturing reduced to a present 13% of the British economy, giving way to our present predominating services, finance and investment, insurance, entertainment – with irreparable loss in, for example, the north of England, and in Wales. Fifth or sixth-largest economy in the world Britain may be but it is not now an especially important manufacturing economy. The reduction in emissions may be a good thing but it was not brought about by all-wise British social planning.

          The really important point here is that  Britain’s reduced level of emissions is paralleled and dwarfed by British overseas investment in, amongst other activities, mining, fracking and oil drilling, drivers of emissions on a gigantic scale, most of these in the developing world. Britain’s power is capital, not loads of machine goods and services, except financial services. That is why climate activists are demonstrating against BP, not because of its emissions inside Britain but because of its massive polluting all around the world, in the company of others such as Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon and so on – as well as Glencore and other mining conglomerates. Mrs May’s pronouncement and Stephen Glover’s response to it are entirely beside the point. What Britain doesn’t do at home it activates abroad – and both at home and abroad once the gigantic expansion of Heathrow Airport gets underway, around its now waved-through third runway and all the masses of new aircraft discharging emissions wherever they fly, take off and land.

          Speaking of which, I am against Glover inasmuch as it is obvious that Britain is domestically polluted in the cities and in the countryside, which is doing our people, our children (inexcusable asthma disease and deaths amongst the latter due to exhaust fumes) and our wildlife no good at all. We have far too many cars, vans and heavy lorries while rail freight potential lies neglected; we have a potential for tidal power also ignored, at the same time as we are faced with enormous, deadly and increasing methane emissions from more herds of bovines than ever before, within the worldwide growth of what is now referred to as McDonaldisation: vast herds around the globe whose sole purpose is to supply cheeseburgers, and not only to President Trump, would you believe. Even if petrol and diesel are replaced by electric in our transport, who has decided what is to be done about the heavy atmospheric poison emitted by enhanced battery manufacture?

          Apparently we should be complacent about our pollution on the grounds that Britain produces so little of it: but (a) it produces quite enough to poison a not-very-big country, and (b) its overseas investments ensure that the rest of humanity is to be poisoned as well, perhaps at the very least on the same scale as India’s and maybe in time China’s.

          Meanwhile, too, our climate protesters are labelled and treated as ‘terrorists’ and Greta Thunberg – who has the temerity to argue in favour of the interests of our children – being vilified by journalists and others as only, perhaps, a 16-year-old girl with Asperger’s should be. Mr Glover ought to be working, if he can, to persuade his Daily Mail to reverse its position towards being in favour of humanity, not to speak of a beautiful blue planet, the only one we know.

         

OUT OF FINLAND…

 

          I was brought up on classical music because my parents were into it and I had no rebellious siblings to persuade me otherwise. I listened to my parents’ recordings long before I bought my own; I took piano lessons and later gained a modest competence on the clarinet (long since abandoned, alas). I never aspired to a musical career.

          Should one have a favourite style or composer, or does this indicate musical partiality and thus deafness to classical music taken as a whole? Shouldn’t real classics lovers show a willingness to listen to all or most musical idioms, ancient (or medieval) to modern and postmodern? Certainly a professional musician should be open to playing (nearly) all, though players of the older music tend to be specialists.

          But then the emotions come into it. In my experience composers either induce or fit moods. There are Bach, Mozart, Beethoven moods. Chopin moods. Gershwin moods. Vivaldi moods. For instance when I was going through a lovelorn period I could listen to no one but Faure – such a tenderly melodious grasp of the human heart! (Sob! Sob!...)

          The composer who got to me through many more phases than most was: Jean (Johan) Sibelius (1865-1957). For long a concert classic Sibelius needs no help from me! Yet appreciation is not set in stone; Mozart and Beethoven are secure of course; but as we draw nearer to the present we have to sustain the nearer reputations more deliberately. Sibelius is not a controversial composer now but there may be a danger that he will be relegated to a particular niche – partly through the overplaying of certain works at concerts to the complete neglect of others – that belies the sheer dimensions of his achievement. And this at a time when, at least outside Finland and Scandinavia, a large number of his works are being heard by many for the first time that have as much a claim on our attention as those already known. His is such a unique idiom that it deserves a renewed wider interest. (Elgar was long neglected as the Edwardian composer of, say, Pomp and Circumstance No. 2 before a major public rediscovery of his music  opened up from about the 1960s in which Jacqueline du Pre and Ken Russell for BBC Television Arts had a particular hand.) For reasons I’ll come to I believe Sibelius is on the way to finding a whole new audience for a much wider spectrum of his work, already celebrated in his part of the world. (Meanwhile, the commentary for the Naxos CD of Sibelius’s piano music states that Sibelius ‘was not a great piano composer’, and indeed states this twice. What we hear on the CD in question might not disabuse us of this view. But Sibelius at the hands of Glenn Gould for Columbia is another matter altogether. Gould’s interpretation – suitable for a foremost interpreter of Bach on the piano – is precise, steely and at times explosive, rendering the Three Sonatines and ‘Kyllikki’ extraordinarily. It is as if the music opens to Gould like a flower opening to rain. It is fully up to taking on his commanding approach as he is up to its interpretation.)

          When as a young man I was exposed to his 3^rd and 5^th Symphonies and not having heard his music before, I had this strange sensation that I was composing the music myself, as it moved along. No other composer has ever had that effect on me. Perhaps it was a melodic artlessness with the sorts of progressions and transitions, subtle or sudden, that seemed so natural, as if they were the patterns of my own thought processes. Nor is this music light or trite or predictable. On the contrary, these – and other symphonies and tone poems, for example – are seemingly, idiosyncratically  odd, peculiar stuff. But their very peculiarity made them so very personal to me. It seemed that Sibelius was writing music to please solely himself, not only to follow musical conventions as such, and its appeal to him made Sibelius take it anywhere it wanted him to go. Not that it is whimsical or merely crowd pleasing. Nothing very whimsical about Jean Sibelius, though he knew how to please crowds – quite a lot of Sibelius’s pieces were written (apart from anything else to bolster his shaky finances) for the dramatic stage and for the salon - but first to please himself. Sometimes he wasn’t pleased. In which case he suppressed or destroyed or ruthlessly worked over the composition again. Composers do this, of course. But two major symphonies? Apart from his most popular symphony, the 5^th, which he revised twice after its two ‘premieres’ because he knew it was a going concern that needed to be got right, his first symphony (as he decided it was) was not his official 1^st but a massive work for orchestra, choir and soloists – Kullervo Op. 7 – which was his first big success in Finland. After that (note: not a failure with the public!) Sibelius ordered that it should never be performed again. To my knowledge it was never published in his lifetime though performed since; in retrospect it sounds ‘Sibelian’ in parts though I find it turgid. Evidently, (do I give myself airs?) so did he. At the other end of his creative life the same thing happened again. His ‘final’ 7^th Symphony – something just over 20 minutes’ long and regarded by many as no less than the greatest symphony of the 20^th century - was not, in fact, his last though it was the last one anybody ever heard. For some years thereafter he laboured mightily on an 8^th but eventually gave up the struggle and later burned the manuscript in his garden. He lived on till death at 91 in 1957, but he ceased publishing after 1926 when still only 60. Perhaps only then did he feel financially secure, but it seems he stopped working on anything major or original when he ceased being pleased altogether. His muse always sounded a bit erratic and wilful, which is part of his unique attraction as a composer. When he was young it took him down a path he didn’t want to follow, and became an intolerable companion when he was old.

          An unexpected thing to learn about Sibelius is that he wasn’t incredibly Finnish. Of course he was Finnish, born in Finland, but he had difficulties with spoken Finnish because his own tongue was Swedish. And Finnish is about as much like Swedish as Welsh is like English – from entirely different linguistic roots. Sibelius was the progeny of a long-time exodus of Swedes into Finland, for between 1157 and 1809 Finland was ruled by Sweden. He grew up in a Swedish-Finnish family and milieu. Swedes in the main dominated Finnish business and government. Finland was ceded to Russia in 1809 whereupon it became an ‘autonomous’  Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire, with the Tsar as Grand Duke. This state of affairs lasted till the Bolshevik Revolution in Petrograd in 1917, after which Finland finally gained its independence. This means that Sibelius was a Russian subject until he was 52. He is often lined up with ‘national’ composers putting their national idioms at the forefront of classical music: Grieg, Dvorak, Smetana, da Falla, Rodrigo, Enescu, Vaughan-Williams, Dohnanyi and Bartok – a composer much admired by Sibelius who painstakingly researched Hungarian folk idioms which found their way into his greatest music. But, as Sibelius himself said, there is not a single note of Finnish folk music in his own work: he composed everything himself. In this sense it may be difficult to label him a ‘Finnish’ composer, and almost irrelevant in his case.

          But not quite. Though there were class tensions between Swedes and Finns in Finland, Russian rule, hardening in the 1880s and 90s,  brought Finns together whatever their origins. The young Sibelius was passionate for Finnish independence. His Karelia music was sensed by his countrymen as a gesture of defiance. Later, his Finlandia was an anthem for a nation not yet in existence. It ranks with La Marseillaise and The Internationale as one of the most popular anthems in the world. Born into Lutheranism with its long musical heritage (think Bach, for example, and Martin Luther himself) Sibelius was a dab hand at the secular anthem and hymn-like tune: it can be found throughout his music. In his old age he arranged actual Lutheran hymns.

          Even more importantly, Sibelius communed with nature for his inspiration as have others such as, for example, Messiaen and Villa-Lobos. When still relatively young and requiring absolute silence as a prerequisite for composition, he built a house for self and family in proximity to forests and lakes, and within a small community of artists, fairly isolated. When not composing he took long walks in the forest, observing, listening and being inspired by what was the Finnish landscape and wildlife. His ‘Finland’ is the physical Finland itself. This includes its gods and legends – beliefs long before conjured up from the vast, mysterious wilderness. Though Sibelius was no pagan and no mere scene-painter. He draws from nature’s special form of ‘silence’ in the sense meant by Ralph Waldo Emerson in Emerson’s The American Scholar (1838): that the Book of Nature is the fount of knowledge, wisdom and inspiration, far more than all the libraries in the world. And Sibelius was no more a mere naturalist than was Wordsworth, who drew his inspiration also from nature but in the service of Romantic poetry and philosophy.

          However granite-like the Sibelian image may be, no human being is a Rock of Gibraltar. Sibelius was intermittently an alcoholic with long periods of sobriety. On the eve of the premiere of his Violin Concerto in 1903, the work was still unfinished. A search-party was sent out and tracked him down to somewhere in Helsinki in order to sober him up sufficiently to put the finishing touches on what may be the greatest of modern concertos for the violin (his own instrument). In 1923 he was too drunk to conduct the premiere of his 6^th Symphony and had to be led off the podium in the middle of the first movement. He may have communed with nature but his wife had to put up with his occasional departures to the city for heroic binges, with male companions, perhaps for days at a time. Benjamin Britten said cattily that Sibelius must have written the 6^th Symphony when he was drunk. I wouldn’t have thought Sibelius was Britten’s cup of tea anyhow, and this may have been no more than a snide remark about the symphony, but he was right about the premiere.

          The 6^th is Sibelius’s least-known major work but there are those who consider it his finest. I didn’t understand it much when I first played it, the puzzling thing being   that it gave me a craving to keep playing it until I did. It is a subtle distillation of his maturest expression: like the 4^th denying the listener the satisfaction of mighty climaxes and resolutions. And deliberately so. He announced himself that while other composers offered up ‘exotic cocktails’ his 6^th was a glass of ‘cold, clear spring water’. One would like to think this was what he drank while composing it.

          Sibelius keeps a tension or balance between the classical and the romantic in his music: romantic in range of expression, classical in regard to form and concision. In contrast to Mahler, for example, Sibelius’s symphonies grew shorter as he progressed, after the 2^nd.

          Sibelius came to have a high reputation on the European continent. In 1907 he and Gustav Mahler conversed on the nature of the symphony on equal terms when Mahler was visiting Helsinki. Later, World War I intervened with Germany and Austro-Hungary on the opposing side, as it were. Sibelius’s reputation plummeted in Mitteleuropa. German critics referred to his tone poems as ‘film music’. What cheek! As if any movie could survive under Lemminkainen or Tapiola! By contrast his music found favour in the Anglo-American world. I hazard Americans would have liked  his ‘wide open spaces’ approach while the more withdrawn Brits might respond to his lack of embarrassing sentimentality (ironically, while Elgar’s music is nothing if not nostalgic, there is no nostalgia in Sibelius at all that I can find) – he is emotional, naturally, but not drippy. A favourite contemporary of his was the ‘cool’ Debussy. I have already said that his piano music responds wonderfully to the ‘Bachian’ Glenn Gould. Consider swans. Tchaikovsky’s swans are dancing human beings.  Saint-Saens’s ‘The Swan’ from his charming Carnival of the Animals is romantically conceived, enough for it to be danced as ‘The Dying Swan’ by Pavlova. By contrast Sibelius’s Swan of Tuonela, one of his most popular works, is no more and no less than a swan. Swans may have emotions but not human emotions. Swan-language is not human language and none but other swans understand it (if ‘understand’ is the right word). It is the sheer beauty and majesty of the swan itself, gliding along on an impenetrably gloomy lake, that is so moving, for the swan is itself, non-human, the Other in nature.  I turn to Sibelius with relief when I find myself having had a surfeit of (self-pitying?) late Romantic classical music. One responds to the expansiveness of the outer and inner worlds that he expresses with tears if one is so inclined; but they are not tears brought on by the frettings and sufferings of the ego. In the 1950s the charismatic Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic were influential in restoring Sibelius’s reputation on the continent. A later successor to von Karajan was Sir Simon Rattle, astonished to find that some of his German musicians still considered Sibelius ‘an amateur’. They were put right when exposed to his profoundly moving effect on their audiences! By contrast a musician friend of mine in London had a framed portrait on his piano that I assumed was his father or grandfather. It was Sibelius.

          Sibelius was no amateur moonstruck naif wandering the woods. Musically he was thoroughly cosmopolitan, trained by outstanding teachers in Berlin and Vienna and whose musical antecedents included amongst others Beethoven (of course); Wagner and his Leitmotif; Liszt in turning the young man’s attention to tone poems more than opera; the uncompromising, towering Bruckner; and Tchaikovsky – the last one especially significant in the germination of Sibelius’s 1^st Symphony of 1899. It’s sort of amazing to realize that Sibelius died in 1957 yet had been a contemporary of Tchaikovsky’s for nearly thirty years till the latter’s death in 1893. Since copyright runs out seventy years after the death of the progenitor it means Sibelius will not be in the public domain until 2028! Meanwhile he features in concerts as a classic amongst classics, be they Bach, Beethoven or Brahms. He was entirely familiar with the work of his contemporaries in the European mainstream. His almost-exact contemporary Richard Strauss said of him; ‘I have more skill but he is greater.’

          Subjecting his (‘non-salon’) works to musicological analysis is tricky since he scarcely follows the conventional sonata form of first subject, second subject, recapitulation and so on. Much of the time it’s difficult to know where he’s going in terms of structure; in some cases one has to hear the work in question two or three times before one grasps how he has achieved its unity. But even on first hearing the climactic endings are often powerfully convincing, while individual strokes have an insidious way of sticking in the memory. Not unlike following the plot of one of Raymond Chandler’s detective stories! Or predicting the course of the Mississippi River across a decade. The nature analogy is deliberate. With the discovery of DNA we learned that nature is ordered ‘logically’, intricately and sublimely in its fundamentals or ‘building blocks’ – but look at the diversity and unpredictability of the results!  Unlike one who writes scores for natural history TV programmes, Sibelius is not a purely descriptive or imitative ‘nature’ composer: he is himself a force of nature in the way he uses musical structure to produce seemingly spontaneous effects. No wonder in writing of his major work musicologists so frequently fall into usage of the word ‘organic’ to describe it, that is in the way he generates different themes growing out of each other that form a whole. The 7^th Symphony brings this to perfection. God hurled His creation to the ground, said Sibelius, whereupon it shattered into myriad small fragments. It had been his own destiny  to piece them together again to make a new wholeness.

          Sibelius’s works are apparently so artless and spontaneous that we may fail – at least on first listening – to realise how tightly structured they really are. The structure that conceals structure. The overall effect is to create a kind of ‘miraculous’ aura about them; listeners are often quite mystified as to quite why a particular work had such a powerful effect on them. For that matter, why is nature so beautiful when one really looks at it? It is surprisingly difficult to say, in so many words.

          It may seem strange for Sibelius to appear on a socialist blog: unconventional he was, and hopeless over his finances. But he was bourgeois to the core, even as a believer in national independence. He lived, and outlived, both in his life and in his music, within and beyond the high bourgeois musical culture of his youth and early heyday.  His legacy transcends his own times, a mark of his greatness.

          No, I’m not hi-jacking Sibelius for socialism but we need him now as much as the Finns needed him to help them realise their identity and celebrate their liberty. I think we can appreciate through his music much more about ourselves vis-à-vis nature and the nature in ourselves than we might have done otherwise. Sibelius weaponised to save the planet? The idea would certainly never have occurred to him. But it’s worth realising that the wilderness that inspired him (however literally or otherwise) is elsewhere being concreted over, ploughed under, or poisoned beyond regeneration. Even swans die when gobbling up bits of plastic.

          A postscript. Sibelius was outwardly taciturn but really quite genial and humorous.   Both these facets are caught in my favourite Sibelian saying:

          ‘No one ever erected a statue to a critic.’

          With a likeness indeed captured in stone, this stern-looking figure is immensely reassuring in all sorts of ways. Right on, Johan, as I would never have said to his face.

          No one, at least till now, has erected a statue to a fracker.

         

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE DILEMMA OF BRITAIN

 

          Although Charles A. Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart had made the first non-stop solo flights from the USA to Europe across the North Atlantic as long before as 1927 and 1928 respectively, there was not – in the 1930s – a regular airmail service between the UK and the USA. This would seem to matter if you think no satellites or Internet in those days: cablegrams only. Overseas airmail delivery from and to Britain back then was under the aegis of Imperial Airways (suitably named) between Britain and India and points along the way. Swift communications by post between Britain and the Jewel in the Crown took precedence over those with the United States of America.

          Protocol demanded that when the King and Queen of England made their historic Royal Visit to North America in 1939, the Dominion of Canada took precedence over the American Republic. Only after Ottawa did the Visit turn southwards to New York to meet the Roosevelts and enjoy a tickertape parade; the American Visit proved a great success nonetheless.

          There was a good reason for all this. During the Depression and world trade autarky Britain escaped much of the consequences of these through an all-important Imperial Preference between Britain and her overseas Dominions and colonies. The British Empire – in a period dire for free trade – actually came into its own in economic importance in the last decade or so of its splendour and extent. The Dominions and colonies featured hugely in the pageant that was the Coronation of George VI in 1937, and not merely for the show. Meanwhile Neville Chamberlain, prime minister from 1937, personally held the United States in total contempt. Part of his reason for appeasing Hitler at Munich the following year was that Chamberlain had little faith in the USA as a potential British ally in any conflict on the European continent. (In the context of the 1930s this view was not necessarily misplaced.)

          Although in the ensuing World War hundreds of thousands of colonial troops vastly augmented the manpower resources of the British army in fighting the enemy (a contribution that went disgracefully unappreciated in the war’s aftermath), the British Empire was on the whole a millstone around Britain’s neck in the war with Nazi Germany. While the Blitz was decimating large parts of London and a host of British cities, with a Wehrmacht invasion still thought possible, Churchill squandered war effort on sending the Eighth Army to North Africa to fight Rommel, his object being to safeguard the Suez Canal in Egypt – the shipping lifeline to India. In 1942 Churchill sent two battleships of the Royal Navy to Singapore while German U-boats in the Atlantic were sinking vital food and other supplies meant for the mother country: his object being to prevent the Japanese from conquering Singapore, then the bastion of Empire in the Far East. The ships were duly sunk and the Japanese conquered Singapore anyhow, the Empire suffering severe loss of face before the Asian millions who had been brought up to believe in British invincibility. British troops sat out the war stationed in India to prevent both an invasion from without and manifestations of rising popular discontent within.

          From 1940 and after the Fall of France in the spring of that year, the British and Churchill were becoming strongly convinced that America must enter the European war.  But Empire raised the question with Americans as to whether they were being asked to save the British Empire as well, an entity that many Americans detested (including President Roosevelt himself). The USA went into the war because Japan bombed its Hawaiian territory at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 while Hitler and Mussolini declared war on the United States a week later thus leaving Uncle Sam no choice. Had the Axis powers not been so accommodating to the British in this unwitting way it is one of the questions of history as to whether the Americans would have joined in the war too late to save Britain, or indeed would have joined in at all. (In June 1941 Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union thus creating a new Eastern Front that many Americans, including one US senator named Harry Truman, thought would pretty well bring down both countries – without US intervention being necessary.)

          Imperialism had been one of three British foreign policy foci over the years and centuries. The other two were: Europeanism and Atlanticism. Balancing these three in tandem had and has never been easy for the British to do.

          Europeanism goes back to the Middle Ages when kings of England derived greater wealth from rich and extensive dynastic holdings in France than from England itself. The Hundred Years’ War put an end to all that. The Spanish Armada of 1588 may have failed disastrously but that was mainly down to the weather: the message was not lost on English rulers and statesmen that a Europe dominated by an overmighty power (Philip II of Spain in this instance) posed a danger to the British Isles, a threat repeated with regard to, successively, Louis XIV and Napoleon. English policy was aimed at as much political fragmentation on the other side of the Channel as possible. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the apogee of foreign policy Europeanism, after more than a century of British military engagement on the continent. The perceived threat after this came from the Russian tsar with his fanatical wish to impose a Russian-style medieval theocracy on everybody. The Crimean War of the 1850s was a British response to an expansive Russia that might ultimately threaten India.

          From the late 17^th century on, England developed into an overseas colonial power with its own Atlantic trading system, in competition with France both in the West Indies and in regard to New France: Quebec plus the vast hinterland of North America beyond the Appalachians. An early champion of imperialism was William Pitt the Elder (Lord Chatham) under whom the French were decisively driven from North America. But trying to recoup the costs of this expensive war by extracting money from the American colonists proved unpopular, though the subsequent British loss of its American colonies (though not Canada), while a frightful embarrassment, proved not to be a calamity. After the hiccup of the War of 1812, the last Anglo-American military conflict, Britain and America came to enjoy extensive trading relations, while British capital owned much of what was then a largely agricultural United States making it something of an economic colony if not a political one. Yet even though it grew out of this to become the world’s leading industrial power by the 1890s, the USA financially remained in debt to British rentiers right up to the outbreak of World War I, the financial consequence of which was that these positions were reversed. To pay down war debt the UK had to sell off overseas assets, having to rely on American loans in fighting a war no one had expected would be so devastating and protracted back in 1914. (British bankruptcy was even more imminent in the aftermath of the next World War.)

          Henceforth UK-US relations shifted from being a matter of imperialism to being more objectively Atlanticist, in what later became known as ‘the special relationship’. This did not exactly flourish in the interwar period (e.g. failure to combine forces in a stand against Japan in the Manchuria Crisis of 1931) but came into its own with the Anglo-American alliance against the Axis in World War II. Even then, however, Churchill was uneasily aware of what Roosevelt thought of a British India, and was not reassured by Roosevelt’s increasing closeness to Stalin nor by FDR’s early overtures to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, an oil kingdom hitherto deemed to be under the British aegis.

          It took a post-war Labour government to ease Anglo-American tensions by first granting India independence in 1947 and then (in the person of Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin) inventing NATO. (Atlanticism.) This provoked bitter controversy within the US Congress since the United States had never signed a permanent military pact with a foreign country in its entire history. But President Truman and his Secretary of State Dean Acheson prevailed and the NATO treaty was duly signed by all concerned in 1949.

          Within NATO and with its own Independent Nuclear Deterrent, Britain reckoned it was still a partner on equal terms with the United States (a myth subsequently perpetrated and prolonged by James Bond books and movies). But when it reverted to an imperialist power by attacking Egypt in 1956 over the latter’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, Britain had a rude awakening when President Eisenhower threatened it with financial sanctions if it did not pull out of Egypt. In one blow this destroyed any illusions held by Britain of being not only Atlanticist but also independently Imperialist. You couldn’t be both, in so many words. Even with James Bond on hand.

          With its post-war occupation of a large part of Germany plus its relative economic superiority over the nations devastated by World War II giving it a trading advantage, not to speak of its role in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Britain retained a foothold in Europeanism.

          But things began to change. Germany (like Japan forbidden from maintaining an extensive-expensive military) came to outstrip Britain industrially (again) as it joined with France and other countries to form an economic union that grew in time into today’s EU. The colonies except for tiny enclaves here and there – and not without much bloodletting (e.g. Kenya) – became politically independent if (mostly) formal members of a British Commonwealth of Nations – the ‘British’ has long since been withdrawn from the name – while the ‘special relationship’ became something of a figleaf, even a sham, perpetuated in time by Tony Blair’s ‘poodle’ relationship with President George W Bush over the Afghan and Iraqi wars, and then held up to scarcely-concealed mockery by Donald Trump (at this time of writing we await with interest his variously postponed official visit to Britain this coming June, and also probably his speech before the House of Commons); but in the mockery stakes Barack Obama had got there before him. The US has tended to treat with the EU (with Britain inside) rather than in terms of bilateral US-UK relations.

          After having shockingly been rebuffed by President Charles de Gaulle’s veto over Common Market membership back in 1963, British Europeanists won the day when Britons voted for EEC, later EU membership in the 1970s. Though de Gaulle may have been right: Britain has been a fractious member over the years. In doing so it failed to take a fuller advantage of EU membership in forwarding British interests on the continent, instead harping on the arbitrary and ‘bureaucratic’ nature of a union apparently ganging up on the British and dominated by Johnny Foreigners. The Tory Party never quite reconciled itself to losing the other two ‘traditional’ aspects of British foreign policy in consequence. Indeed the EU was instrumental in the downfalls of three Conservative prime ministers: Margaret Thatcher, John Major and David Cameron, and now with a fourth in the offing (and why not a fifth, after her?)

          Brexit has brought much of this even more into the open. We have a recrudescent Imperialism in a recent Defence Secretary’s announcement of gunboat diplomacy being deployed in the South China Sea against China (once we have an aircraft carrier to do it), and trade ministers spreading the word that Britain can come to triumph alone in world trade without benefit of ‘Europe’ (fuck Europeanism). This is a warmed-up version of the ‘splendid isolation’ that Britain maintained in the early 1900s as being above other nations in needing no alliances or truck with inferior powers. Except that it no longer presides over a quarter of the globe with a navy to match, nor does it now hold the world’s reserve currency, as it did at the time.

          The Atlanticists might have made a stronger showing in an anti-EU atmosphere but for the present occupant of the White House who seems strangely indifferent to any ‘special relationship’ whether with Britain or anyone else. ‘America First’ on his baseball caps makes this fairly clear. In any case the prospect of the UK becoming in effect the 51^st state does not hold a lot of appeal.

          The British ruling classes are still educated up to Oxbridge in the default position of Britain being a world power, which may be why so many politicians, in or out of ministerial office, appear unable to grapple with the real world. Probably our most realistic Foreign Secretary was that working-class orphan Ernest Bevin.

          But the big and perhaps insurmountable problem is a tradition of having had too many foreign options: imperial power, dominator of European developments, bilateral partnership with the United States. Goodness! So much an embarrassment of riches that one hardly knew which one to concentrate upon most without losing the others! And so Britain has finally failed at pursuing all three (we shall see if this changes in June). Perhaps we should try to be a bit more Swiss. Switzerland is a well-ordered small country and not all that bad, really.

          Years ago, Dean Acheson said: ‘Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role.’ This is probably truer now than it was when he said it.

          But Britain (the first country to abolish slavery) has as strong a radical tradition as any other tradition. It is the birthplace of women’s rights (Mary Wollstonecraft 1759-97). The first mass workers’ movement in the capitalist era was Chartism. It was the home of Marxism, in the persons of Marx and Engels themselves, not to speak of William Morris and (the Irish) James Connolly. Over the 19^th century it built up the world’s most powerful trade unions. Together with the USA it was the home of the suffragette movement. Despite a period after World War II of Left-wing decline, the Labour Party has re-emerged as the biggest social democratic party in Europe. Meanwhile 50% of England is owned by 1% of the population (Guardian 18.4.19). Unemployment is low but productivity is almost the lowest in the Western world, while many are holding down two jobs while struggling to survive on food banks and in-work benefits. Our infrastructures, from Universal Credit to local councils to education to the prison service to the railways to the big-profits-bigger-leakages of the privatised water companies, are in a mess. Brexit has placed Britain’s constitution under strain. The two-party first-past-the-post plus non-elective peers political system has been seen as hopelessly undemocratic for years but no one in authority appears to have the will to do anything about it. This is pointing increasingly towards the one option available of socialism. I say ‘one option’ because no other prospect of change looks very likely. Or rather, there is another option: becoming one big island bank or hedge-funder, which will profit financiers but not please many others. A maritime quasi-Switzerland indeed!

DEAD CATS AND LIVE ISSUES ((Revised)

          Do you recall the banner across the pro-Brexit bus during the Referendum proclaiming £350 million a week for our NHS if Britain left the European Community? It’s just possible that this came from the fertile brain of arch-conservative political publicist Lynton Crosby, since his has now been revealed as the hand behind the Referendum pro-Brexit campaign, together with untold and not altogether accounted-for millions of pounds making it a campaign with lavish resources. This could be sufficient reason for a Second Referendum: that is, if it had not fallen on fertile ground with regard to all those who voted Leave simply to show dissatisfaction with the current status quo in British politics.

          Lynton Crosby is famous (or infamous) for something else: his dead Cat ploy. According to Crosby, if you are wrongfooted by a lethal question from your political opponent, all you need do is pull a dead cat out of a bag and slam it down on the table. (Rabbit, stoat, marmoset – ‘cat’ is zippier.) Your opposition will be so nonplussed by this bizarre turn of events that they will give you breathing space to come up with an answer, or at least a way of diverting the argument into another channel or changing it to a different topic altogether. A Dead Cat is synonymous with diversion away from the class struggle.

          Hitler’s ‘answers’ to the financial and economic problems facing Germany in the early 1930s were basically twofold: the malign consequences of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 (though Hitler left  out Germany’s culpability in starting a world war to begin with), and the so-called 'Jewish Problem' in Germany, which, apart from being non-existent, was completely irrelevant to the German situation and had nothing to do with it; Jews made up a tiny minority of the German population in any case. Anti-Semitism was Hitler’s Dead Cat. Wholly irrelevant and politically lethal at the same time.

          A propos anti-Semitism, this became the Dead Cat for those on the Labour Right to smear Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Left in an effort to destroy the latters’ grip on the leadership of the Party. Helped along by the mass media, this non-issue succeeded in getting many people actually to believe that Corbyn, McDonnell and the Labour Left were suffused in hatred for Jews. Their protest to the contrary and failing to respond with honest contempt (the party has since learned better) was a mistake because to say you are not against Jews must obviously mean that you are, or you wouldn’t be protesting so much. Just this week the Jewish Labour Movement, which falsely claims to represent the true Jewish interest within the Labour Party, has been at it again, declaring that the anti-Semitic Jeremy Corbyn is ‘not fit to lead the Labour Party’, though the Jewish Socialist Group, the Jewish Voice for Labour and other non-Zionist Jews have vigorously denounced the JLM, which is now likely to have to depart from the party altogether. Is it entirely coincidental that the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is fighting a close election just now, and has announced his intention to invade the West Bank? Is the JLM taking its orders from the Israeli ambassador to the UK, which is not implausible since links to the Israeli Embassy in the anti-Corbyn movement have been known to exist. Whatever, it is an entirely irrelevant issue apart from being nonsensical, which is how it gets to become a Dead Cat.

          Prior to all the present Brexit furore, various writers for the Daily  Telegraph were bemoaning the fact that Conservatives were failing to put across in a persuasive way the case for the manifold benefits of capitalism; that is, to promote a positive campaign for Conservatism as a party   with ideas of its own, and not merely basing itself on smearing and slandering Jeremy Corbyn.

          Since there are no such ideas – or at any rate ideas that will seem uplifting and positive to any except hedge funders and CEOs – this initiative didn’t much get off the ground. Instead, a new Dead Cat arrived in the form of Brexit: perhaps Lynton Crosby’s finest achievement even if it politically destroyed David Cameron, the one who unwittingly brought it into being.

          It turns out the Tories don’t need any new ideas: they can simply be more divisive, the hope being that this divisiveness will hurt Labour more than themselves: for even the spectacle of Tories clawing each others’ eyes out acts as a Dead Cat if it diverts the public’s attention from Labour’s election programme, and everything else. Never mind the Health Service, affordable housing, the education system, local councils, the legal system, the prison service, the railways, a privatised water system paying out both huge profits and huge water leakage, the Universal Credit fiasco, the Private Finance Initiative fiasco, the inattention to major upgradings in carbon  emission reduction immediately: the answer to all these is: Brexit! Brexit! Brexit!

          Unfortunately the Stupid Party (JS Mill) has been till now too stupid to see that if anything it is Conservatism that is being shamed and dismembered by all this more than Labour. That is because the Tories run the country as the party of government – ostensibly – while Labour are in opposition and so can’t stymie the works even if they could.

          So Mrs May sought to implicate the Jeremy Corbyn she despises in the outcome to three years of Tory muddle and prevarication by drawing him and Labour into the decisionmaking so that they can be blamed when all goes pear-shaped. In reality, she merely slapped down yet another Dead Cat. Her imminent political demise has been predicted ad infinitum for a long time. If now is that time, we will look to Prime Minister Boris Johnson to bring on his own bevy of Dead Cats in the coming period.

          Otherwise, imagining a snap election: ‘Vote for the Dead Cat Party!’

          The slaughter of felines may well continue and proliferate under Toryism for some time to come. Has anyone brought this to the attention of the RSPCA?

ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE….OF DEATH!

 

          Saturday’s Daily Telegraph Book Review featured The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, editor of New York magazine, who shows through many facts and statistics that it is already too late to do anything about massive and ultimately fatal climate change. ‘Since 1992, we have done more damage to the planet than in all the millennia before…’ We are, in fact, doomed, and there’s nothing we can do about it. But the message here, according to reviewer Simon Ings, is: ‘the  human spirit persists.

          ‘Wallace-Wells thinks as much. When he thinks of his own children’s future, denizens of a world plunging ever deeper into its sixth major extinction event, he admits that despair melts and his heart fills instead with excitement. Humans will cling pluckily to live on this ever-less habitable earth for as long as they can. Quite right, too.’

          Thus we already have the configurations of the ultimate bourgeois response to the spectacle of capitalism having in effect destroyed the world: look upon this as bringing forth the ultimate sublimity of human heroism.

          So we have gone from climate-change denial to the embrace of extinction. (‘Thanks for pulling up the ladder behind you, Dad,' the children of this author might have said.) Forget about saving the world and concentrate on saving your own soul. Thus the result of several dozens of decades of exposure to Christian theology (as well as some Eastern teachings to the same effect) maintaining the fundamental reality only of the individual human soul, or – in capitalism – ‘rugged individualism’. Just as the response of many to what once seemed the likelihood of mass nuclear destruction was to plan one’s own family bunker with all mod cons and the necessary machine-guns for repelling stragglers. A far better bet than marching on the streets with CND. Thus the eternal dogma of the primacy of the individual as expressed by the ME generation, amongst other ideological manifestations, represented today by the ME’s of the great capitalist and corporate world, who have incidentally  brought about most of the carnage of nature, even simply through share ownership, whether in mining, drilling, motorcar manufacture, intensive agricultural monocultures, chemical companies or energy-hungry electronics. And in the ceaseless search for the cheapest labour on the planet. Anyhow, don’t think anger, or guilt, or fear: think personal beatification through sacrifice of life, like the Christian martyrs of old – and it helps too if you believe in the ‘life’ to come, so that death doesn’t really matter.

          And nor does it matter if societies collapse. Did not our dear departed Margaret Thatcher once inform the world that ‘there’s no such thing as society’?

          Children are growing in number who have a somewhat different take on all this. Protests have erupted from children in over 60 cities in the past week, demanding Change Now! And ‘Hey ho, fossil fuels have got to go.’ This movement appears to be gaining momentum.

          Only kids, of course. The Daily Mail has been quick to point out that ‘the Left’ has ‘hi-jacked’ the movement. So patronise but don’t blame the kids themselves: blame their manipulators, who see this as the chance to bring in socialism. That includes all adults who want to use their own power and knowledge and experience to give strength to the children’s movement, which obviously can’t see all this through on its own. Centuries ago, the Children’s crusade came to early grief trying on its own to save Jerusalem from the Muslims.

          Meanwhile our own Prime Minister Theresa May and her education secretary Damian Hinds have deplored the children bunking off school and not attending to their studies even if many children are saying that they will make up for lost school hours. Nonsense! They should be on the education factory floor at all times if production is to remain profitable. At least May and Hinds have the honesty to blame the children themselves.

          Ridicule and smear are also in order: as written by Ron Liddle in this week’s Sunday Times: ‘Those kids on the march had no idea of the issues surrounding global warming. If they did, they’d have told Mummy not to pick them up in the 4 x 4 once the march had ended.’ What reputable journalist smears children en masse?

          The Labour Party, typically in potentially divisive social situations, sought to adopt a more Guardian approach. As commented by the shadow education secretary Angela Rayner (who didn’t seek to be beastly to the children): she’s ‘inspired’ by the young people taking action, ‘But I hope it can evolve so we can build on its success without the loss of time in the classroom.’ (Morning Star, February 16^th-17^th.) Never mind the loss of time in saving the earth. In other words, stop demonstrating (that is, since it is useless and ineffective if it’s only done on Saturdays or Sundays or in half-term). Feel the passion but don’t act on it in a manner which is in any way disruptive. Where would women like Angela Rayner be today without the Pankhursts?

          Thus we run the gamut of strategies – uncannily like all the invective against any workers’ strike action since time immemorial – for undermining the resolve of children who are perfectly aware of the facts and have a childish wish to live.

          Thank goodness relatively few children read the newspapers, though a fortunate few may have read the Morning Star, the only paper that supports them in full. But they’re all Lefties over there whose ulterior motive in working to save the planet lies in expropriating those who have largely caused its premature decay.

          Which might, with action now, be ameliorated or slowed. Given half a chance, Nature can show astonishing resilience. Look at Chernobyl today. Kids, take a crack at it. Alternatively, look forward to your mass deaths in good time with ecstatic delight.

CORBYN IN SIGHTS
(corrected 14.2.19)

           One has been expecting a general onslaught upon Jeremy Corbyn from the mainstream media for some time, especially since charges that he was a Czech spy during the Cold War, that he has been friendly with (Leftwing) dictators and supported IRA terrorism during the Troubles seem not to have stuck, alas, for lack of proof. And because these charges fly in the face of all that we know of Corbyn’s long career in politics.

          His rabid anti-Semitism has also failed to take hold (especially since he appears to have celebrated Seder last year with constituency Jews) for  the Right-wing Press can never quite decide whether he wields sinister dictatorial powers within Labour or is too weak to combat the insidious anti-Semitism in which the Party is saturated. Since the anti-Corbyn tendency could never quite determine the answer to this conundrum the anti-Semitism story has thrived and waned and thrived again depending on how desperate the Labour Right is to get rid of Corbyn.

          Apparently the Labour Party became controlled by a vicious cabal of anti-Semites when Ed Miliband – a Jew – was elected its leader prior to Jeremy’s succession. At that time the Press made great play with Ed’s apparent inability to eat a bacon sandwich (it is understood that Jews are forbidden to eat pork, so this was quite 'funny')  while Ed’s late father Ralph Miliband (respected Marxist scholar and a former Belgian refugee from Nazism) was emblazoned in Daily Mail headlines as ‘the enemy of Britain’.

          With the collapse of all faith in Mrs May’s zombie Tory government and thus an increasing likelihood that Labour under Corbyn may well come to power, sooner or later, it has finally come time for the Press to unleash the dogs of war on him and throw everything at him that they can possibly find. And so the Mail on Sunday, for 10^th February 2019. In page after page of diatribe we find, amongst other things, that his two ex-wives have a very low opinion of him and his ‘joylessness’ – which according to commentators makes him poor prime ministerial material. One wife said he once forced her to spend a night in a tent, which surely disbars him from any further participation in politics.  And he insisted on a family outing to visit Marx’s grave at Highgate Cemetery: an odd and inhumane thing for a lifelong and dedicated socialist to want to do.

          I would hate to think what any ex’es of mine would have said about me in retrospect; I don’t suppose on the whole that ex-husbands and ex-wives come off well in marital recollection, or their ex-spouses wouldn’t have divorced them. The fact that Jeremy has long been happily married to a third wife and has three fine adult sons who love him is not mentioned in this trashing expedition in the Mail. Are these denunciations the best the Mail can come up with? There must be a lot of cleanly-scraped barrel bottoms stored somewhere.

          As for his ‘joylessness’, I don’t see Theresa May as a barrel of laughs, either, which is part of her problem in politics. Even an entrance of dancing at the last Tory Conference did not exactly result in offers from ‘Strictly’. But we could hardly call Tony Blair or David Cameron joyless. On the contrary, they proved to be urbane, able to speak with easy empathy, personable, jokey and to be one of the chaps, as well as having a reasonable dress-sense and able to use the right cutlery at the annual Lord Mayor’s Mansion banquet. And what Prime Ministers! Still, it is not a proper comparison since Jeremy is not yet a Prime Minister.

          Then I got to thinking: which Prime Minister would we most have liked being married to? Margaret Thatcher? Apart from the devoted Denis and the besotted late Alan Clark I should imagine the majority of male voters, whatever their politics, would have shrunk back from such a prospect. Edward Heath? This confirmed and grouchy bachelor would scarcely seem love’s young dream. What about the philandering David Lloyd George? Or indeed Winston Churchill – not a philanderer but he drank too much and must have been a pain to live with, as the subsequent histories of his children (if not the ‘treasure’ Clemmie herself) would seem to confirm. The Mail on Sunday also accuses Jeremy of being wholly incompetent over his own finances, thus hardly likely to steer the nation to prosperity. We might rejoin that at the least he has been presenting honest and straightforward books to HMRC and is one of the few politicians who even informs the public of what taxes he actually pays. Again, in contrast to Churchill, whose extravagance was not held back by constant threats of bankruptcy and who had to labour mightily to keep a jump or two ahead of the bailiffs. Prime Ministerial material? Forget it!

          Worst of all, perhaps, Jeremy Corbyn cannot, it seems, distinguish the taste between Heinz baked beans and other brands!

          What kind of person can pretend to be the leader of this great country who cannot tell the difference between different sorts of baked beans?

          Well, let’s see how far this devastating onslaught hits home.

         

STOCK TAKE

 

          Going through my back files I find blogs of mine that are unlikely to merit much further attention, for a number are somewhat thinnish, ephemeral in a journalistic  sense or now no longer of so much contemporary interest.

          Since each according to their own taste, however, I’m not deleting anything previously posted. Instead I offer a guide to blogs that I think are worth visiting or re-visiting for one reason or another, either because of subject or quality or both.  A few I consider of some importance. I won’t mention the others not listed here. Or you can be ornery and read only the blogs I don’t list.

          And so I proceed backwards from the present blog as follows:

Selected List – Backwards to 2016

My Plan for Brexit

Saving the Planet

REVIEW:  A Radical History of the World by Neil Faulkner

Sneaky Tories?

‘What If?’

His Dark Materials

Aesthetics: Marxism’s Achilles Heel?  (Warning: a biggy.)

History and Drama (Another biggy.)

A Modest Proposal: a Fable for Our Times

Spinoza Was Right!

Bootle’s Wand

The New Devil’s Dictionary

Look Familiar?

A Marxist at the Movies 4 – Spectacle

Spivvy Banks

Owen Jones and Banks

REVIEW: Fictitious Capital by Cedric Durand

Pangloss Is Back

Crisis? What Crisis?

A Marxist at the Movies 3 – Interlude

A Marxist at the Movies 2 – The Hollywood Eye

A Marxist at the Movies 1 – Jon Boorstin

Concentrating the Mind Wonderfully: Ulysses S Grant

Cardigan Rightwinger Strikes Again

REVIEWS: Out of the Night by Jan Valtin / Decline of American Capitalism by Lewis Corey

‘We get signals the system is under stress’…

Moments in History

At It Again

You Couldn’t Make It Up

Fundits

In Praise of Teachers

Where is This Leading? (2)

A Crisis in Ideology

Re-reading Reading Capital

Where Is This Leading? (1)

What Is Total Revolt? (Warning: a major essay – quite lengthy)

REVIEW: Paul Mason and Armageddon

The Queen, Rationality and Economics

The Conundrums of History

The Historical Materialist and the Concept of History (Warning: of Considerable Length.) For what it’s worth, I consider this the best piece I’ve ever written, and the only one with bibliography. Admittedly the intended readership is academic but I write it as presenting an intellectual boxing-match, a rumble in the Marxist jungle of the late 1970s between the late British historian EP Thompson and the late French philosopher Louis Althusser, both avowed Marxists: who hit the canvas first? Though in fact the two never met and it’s probably just as well they didn’t. I think any ordinary reader can be gripped by a death-struggle even if the material being struggled over is only partially understood. A lot of those who follow the ponies avidly don’t know anything about horses except their form, if that.

+

Various essays on historians and history theorists….