Britain Before Brexit: Historical Essays on Britain and Europe 9781350204751, 9781350204744, 9781350204775, 9781350204768

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Part One Introduction: Britain and the World
1 Britain and Europe: 40,000 bce to the Present
Notes
2 Empire
Notes
Part Two Britons and Europe
3 Britons in Europe: The Nineteenth Century
Notes
4 Britain and Asylum
Notes
Part Three An Orcadian Abroad
5 Samuel Laing, Traveller and Philosopher
Notes
6 The Philistine
Notes
Part Four War in Europe
7 World War I: Gallipoli
Notes
8 World War II: Churchill
Notes
9 The Home Front
Notes
10 On the Margins
Notes
Part Five Peace
11 Hope and Decline
Notes
12 Thatcher’s Time
Notes
Part Six What Now?
13 Secrets and Lies
Notes
14 The Battle for Brexit
Notes
Epilogue: National Identity
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Britain Before Brexit

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Britain Before Brexit Historical Essays on Britain and Europe Bernard Porter

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Bernard Porter, 2021 Bernard Porter has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image: London, UK. 25th March 2017. Protest against brexit in central London. Emin Ozkan/Alamy Live News All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permissions for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3502-0475-1 978-1-3502-0474-4 978-1-3502-0476-8 978-1-3502-0478-2

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For Kajsa

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Contents Preface Part 1

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Introduction: Britain and the World

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Britain and Europe: 40,000 bce to the Present

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Empire

Part 2

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Britons and Europe

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Britons in Europe: The Nineteenth Century

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Britain and Asylum

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Part 3 An Orcadian Abroad

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Samuel Laing, Traveller and Philosopher

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The Philistine

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Part 4 War in Europe

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World War I: Gallipoli

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World War II: Churchill

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The Home Front

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10 On the Margins

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Part 5 Peace

11 Hope and Decline

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12 Thatcher’s Time

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Contents

Part 6 What Now?

13 Secrets and Lies

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14 The Battle for Brexit

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Epilogue: National Identity

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Bibliography Index

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Preface Before Coronavirus there was ‘Brexit’, which hitherto was arguably the biggest thing to happen to Britain as a nation since the Second World War. Brexit was bigger than the post-war dismantling of its Empire, which had been widely predicted and was popularly accepted at the time; and bigger than its entry into what was then called the European Common Market in 1973, because that had seemed at the time to be more of a natural transition, was far more easily negotiated, and was pretty overwhelmingly supported in the national referendum that was called two years later to put a ‘democratic’ seal of approval on it. Hence the unprecedented fierceness of the row that accompanied the referendum held in June 2016 to test whether the people’s view had shifted over the intervening forty-three years, in favour of Britain’s leaving what by now had morphed into the ‘European Union’. That was won by the Leavers (or ‘Brexiters’), by a small majority, to the surprise and even shock of most people, including many of those who had fought on the winning side. That wasn’t the end of the argument, however: Parliament was still constitutionally required to confirm the ‘will of the people’. This was done only after a snap General Election called for early December 2019 secured what was taken to be a Brexit majority; and, beyond that, to approve the terms on which Britain left the EU – never specified during the Referendum debate – and which at the time of writing (January 2021) haven’t been finally settled yet. (Coronavirus is proving a complication.) The row that flared up during this four year interregnum was one of the most divisive and ill tempered in British history for 200 years. Although it is no part of a historian’s task to predict the future, few of us will be surprised if it continues to simmer, destructively, for some years yet. That adds to Brexit’s significance, quite apart from its material effects. That Brexit was predicated, at least in part, on a view of Britain’s history hardly needs saying. The Brexiters’ most persuasive slogan, ‘take back control’, clearly implies this. The British were not only distinct from ‘Continentals’ then (at the time of the 2016 referendum) but – supposedly – always had been. They were liberal, imperial, common-sensical, moderate, practical, eccentric, peace-loving, cricketing, roast beef-eating, ‘free’ – this above all; and a host of other things to which their European neighbours could never aspire. All this of course had ix

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something to do with their geographical situation, which was insular. This meant that their history followed a different path from the Continentals’: mainly in the things it had managed to avoid, like civil wars and revolutions (after 1660), Catholicism, Fascism and art. Hence the policy of ‘splendid isolation’ Britain had pursued, proudly, throughout the nineteenth century; until ‘Brussels’ interrupted its natural historical development and took it into its thrall. If this is an unfair characterization of the way Brexiters saw their history – and it is certainly, nota bene, a grotesque distortion of their nation’s actual history – that is only because it was never spelled out clearly. Some at least of these mooted ‘differences’ between Britain and (the rest of) Europe will nonetheless ring bells. And not all are untrue. I was moved to write – or rather, to compile – this book mainly because of my own self-perception as a ‘European’ as well as a Briton or an Englishman; and my very different understanding of ‘Britishness’ from the Brexiters’. I consider that being an English person doesn’t preclude me from being a European also, in this age of ‘multiple identities’. (I’ll return to this.) I was also distressed by the upsurge of xenophobia in Britain – or in its vulgar press – which Brexit seemed to stir up. Most of that xenophobia was based on, or excused by, a very flawed understanding of British history; which I saw as my responsibility, as an academic British historian, to put right. In fact, I’ve spent my professional career trying to do this sort of thing: to counter popular misreadings of British history. Most of my previous work has been on the topic of British imperialism, which is very much misunderstood, and where I hope I’ve demonstrated that, first: anti-imperialism was deeply rooted in British thought and politics, as well as (and perhaps even more than) imperialism itself (Critics of Empire, 1968); secondly: the British Empire itself was a product and sign of national weakness, rather than of strength or even agency, and the motives behind it far more complex than is generally believed both by its critics and by its defenders, and in any case are not to be confused with its causes (The Lion’s Share, 1975 and five subsequent editions); third: that public support for or even knowledge of the Empire was far shallower than is usually assumed (The Absent-Minded Imperialists, 2004); fourth: that British imperialism, with all its strengths and weaknesses, anticipated the modern American variety uncannily, despite American denials and disclaimers (Empire and Superempire, 2006); and last: that as a result of all these misunderstandings, the Empire and imperialism have been allotted a far greater prominence in British history than they merit, obscuring more vital aspects of and factors behind the country’s development and present-day ‘national identity’ (British Imperial, 2016).

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The present collection of essays seeks to complement this work by turning inward, and outward but less overseas-outward than in my ‘imperial’ writings, to discuss aspects of Britain’s relations with countries closer to hand. Actually that should probably say Britons’ relations, because the book will be quite thin on those aspects of foreign relations that usually feature in discussions of this kind, under the heading of ‘diplomatic history’, which concentrate on the more formal and ‘high political’ aspects of foreign affairs. That’s partly because I’ve written about the diplomatic side before, in my Britain, Europe and the World, Delusions of Grandeur (Unwin Hyman, 1983), and Britannia’s Burden: The Political Evolution of Modern Britain 1851–1990 (Edward Arnold, 1994); both of which books rather ‘bombed’ at the time, but from which readers, if they want, and if they can unearth them, can gather my ‘takes’ on these topics. (You can tell from their titles that they’re not particularly ‘heroic’.) But it is also because I feel that the relations between Britain’s and Europe’s peoples, when they met both on the Continent and in Britain, are equally important, and may even have had an influence on the aforesaid ‘diplomacy’. The essays in this collection, therefore, will highlight certain aspects of these more ‘informal’ relationships between Britain’s and the rest of Europe’s societies, cultures, and values. The end-product will, I hope, show how much more complex Britain’s ‘place in the world’ has always been, than can be characterized by seeing it either as ‘imperial’ or ‘European’, or, indeed, as ‘insular’; and also how simplistic at best, or else entirely false, are most Brexiters’ (and Remainers’, for that matter) views of her national character or ‘identity’. ‘Simplistic’ is probably the key word here. Of course it is natural, and indeed forgivable, to want to reduce any nation’s history to as broad strokes as possible, just in order to be able to grasp it easily. In fact, however, most countries’ histories are disturbingly complex, and perhaps that of Britain – multi-national, multiethnic, multi-faith, unequal, class-riven as she was and still is – most of all. For those who haven’t studied it extensively, and even for some of us who have, our convenient simplifications of it will depend on prejudices – literally, prejudgments – informed by personal background, social situation, education, the propaganda we’re subjected to, and of course what we want or is in our interests to believe. I don’t claim to be above any of this, except to the extent that I can recognize and hope to take account of many of these biases in myself, and am aware – through decades of work in this area - of the difficulties and pitfalls of trying to generalize about British history too much. In fact, one of the lessons or ‘morals’ running through this book will be that political decisions based on too narrow a view of it, any which way, are bound to be wrong, and even dangerous.

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I realize that none of this will have much very impact: people don’t generally get their ideas from books, especially semi-academic books, and by the Brexiters’ despised ‘elitists’; and in any case the die has already been cast in the great Brexit debate, albeit not yet its practical details. But I hope it might still serve to get any Brexiters and Remainers who might accidentally come across it, to reflect on what their politicians have done, or have allowed to be done, in all our names. * The general picture that should emerge from all this is of a pre-Brexit Britain that was rather less ‘exceptional’ in many ways than is popularly assumed, but more so in a few ways that are often not taken into account, and indeed do not apply today. (Nations change.) The original ‘Battle of Brexit’ – the 2016 referendum campaign – was fought over many things, not all of which were strictly relevant to the question that was supposed to be at issue – the relationship between Britain and the Continent. (We shall return to this in the final chapter.) Those that were, however, usually involved a certain view, or views, of the British side (only) of this relationship. Brexit was supposed to affect Britain’s ‘national identity’, which – as in the case of most national identities – was felt to be rooted in its past. I took issue at the time with some of the versions of the past that were being peddled in support of Brexit: the chief ones being that Britain before its entry into the EU was never really part of Europe, but was, first of all, essentially different – an equivalent, this, of the ‘American exceptionalism’ myth; or else was a more global power than could be contained within the geographical boundaries of the European continent – as attested by its imperial past. Boris Johnson is supposed to have exemplified this. Britain had also been, in the view of the Brexiters, ‘independent’ before she joined ‘Europe’: which at this time meant free from the shackles imposed by ‘Brussels’, where its new masters resided and fattened themselves. So, disentanglement from ‘Europe’ was supposed to enable Britain to return to the historical road from which it had been so unceremoniously dragged in 1973, to become its ‘true self ’ again. I don’t dispute all of this. One doesn’t have to in the case of Britain’s ‘exceptionalism’; which is however countered simply by pointing out that every nation is ‘exceptional’ in one way or another – or even several – which means that exceptionalism is not exceptional in itself. Germany is no less distinct from France than Britain is from either. Yet they can sink their differences, and work together. Britain’s overseas empire certainly wasn’t a distinguishing feature of Britain’s alone, with France’s being almost as large, and in some ways more important to her – for example, culturally. Imperialism at this time was a pan-European phenomenon. Then – to progress through our list of Brexit complaints – Brussels is no more

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of an obstacle to Britain’s freedom of action than a dozen other international restraints on it, both formal and informal, and sometimes even invisible; which could in fact be softened with Europe’s support. (Take ‘TTIP’ – shackling Britain to American commercial laws – which the EU has so far enabled the British to resist, but which after Brexit they may be forced to comply with in their need to replace lost European markets with American ones.) ‘No man is an island, entire unto himself ’, wrote John Donne in the seventeenth century; from which it follows that no island is an island, either. National ‘sovereignty’, even for ‘great’ powers, is a myth. Break your ties with your allies, and you may be left less able to fend off other constraints. Which is a reason to clarify – for Brexiters especially – Britain’s past history of ‘sovereignty’ in this regard too. As well as this, I’m not sure that most Brexiters have fully grasped many of the truly distinguishing features of Britain’s history in fairly recent times; that is, some of the core elements of the British ‘national identity’ about which they rabbit on so much. If they had, they would not have made the need to restrict immigration from Europe such an important plank of their policy in 2016, in the face of what had been, in fact, one of Britain’s proudest and most self-defining ‘traditions’ in the past: its open borders. Everyone was let in to the country during most of the nineteenth century, with no passports being required, no customs checks, and virtually no way of getting rid of any who misbehaved. (Not a lot of people know that.) This applied even to what today we would call foreign ‘terrorist’ refugees, who did sometimes misbehave, criminally and violently. I’ve written a whole book about this, The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics (1979), which might surprise any reader who thinks that Theresa May’s infamous ‘hostile environment’ approach (for immigrants) when Home Secretary had the force of ‘tradition’ behind it. That is not to say, of course, that the same policy would do for nowadays. It would be too dangerous, pretty obviously. History cannot be mined for precedents or ‘lessons’ in this way. But it is worth pointing it out to those who may be unaware of the way Britain’s present immigration regime offends against this very essential aspect of what used to be understood as ‘Britishness’, in not-so-olden times. One effect of this openness was to make Britain a far more cosmopolitan country than is often credited by British (or English) nativists, with this – I would contend – being another of her major national characteristics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Refugees flooded into Britain, but so did a large number of other visitors and immigrants, forming substantial little colonies in parts of London (Soho, the Seven Dials), and in other major cities. Some were

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Jews, in the wake of the late nineteenth-century pogroms directed against them in Russia and Eastern Europe around the turn of the twentieth century. A later chapter will provide numbers. Unfortunately we do not have comparable figures for traffic the other way: for Britons moving to the Continent, for work, pleasure or in disgrace, who could also be said to be ‘colonists’, in a small but significant way, and who will form the subject of another chapter. These two groups – incomers and outgoers – could be said to form closer informal ties between Britain and the Continent than the former ever had with its colonies; to which could be added trade, of course, and a thousand mutual exchanges of cultural, intellectual and sporting influences, ranging from European art one way to English football the other, cementing wider Europe’s various peoples together, even when they showed little affection for one another politically and diplomatically. In British literature and newspapers, and also in the displays in the Great Exhibition of 1851, ‘the Continent’ and its happenings featured far more prominently than did – for example – the colonies. This suggests that Britain was always more at one with Europe than she was ‘exceptional’; and where she was different, it was not in the same ways as today. * This book’s main purpose is to illustrate these points, with the help of particular examples. It was not originally written with this general theme in mind, which only occurred to me later. Most of it has been published previously, with chapters having been adapted from pieces I have written over the last fifty years, usually in specialist academic journals, as review articles in literary papers like the London Review of Books, or as public lectures; and in between my major researches into British imperialism and the British secret security services. The exceptions are the initial and final chapters, which are entirely new. All the others have been further revised and edited for this collection. They bear on various aspects of Britain’s ‘informal’ relationship with ‘the Continent’, as it was usually called (as though there were only one continent, and Britain weren’t a geographical part of it), over the past 200 years; but mainly from the British side. I’m sorry for that; my European historical knowledge isn’t bad – I live on ‘the Continent’ for at least half of every year, after all – but it was the prospect of having to read up all the foreign-language literature and documentary sources on the Continental European side of the equation that long ago deterred me from that. (Maybe a young polylingual postgraduate student can take over from me here.) Most of the chapters were researched and written before ‘UKIP’, the original begetter of Brexit, was even a twinkle in the eye of its creator (a respectable academic historian, as it happens), and several years before it became

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taken over by what Prime Minister David Cameron unwisely – and grossly unfairly – characterized as ‘a sort of a bunch of fruitcakes  and loonies and closet racists’ in 2006. Looking over these essays again in the wake of the Brexit tsunami, however, it occurred to me that they all have some sort of relevance (together with my ‘imperial’ writings) to one of the great political-historical topics of today: which is the way Britain’s history is or ought to be regarded in relation to Europe’s at the present time. In its form, Britain Before Brexit closely follows the pattern of my previous collection of essays, Empire Ways (2016), but with this new Anglo-European emphasis. As with Empire Ways, each chapter is self-contained, and mostly based on original archival research in a fairly narrow area, but aiming to convey that research in a readable and even entertaining way. For reasons just given, the book does not claim to be ‘through-written’ (as in ‘through-composed’), although it is roughly chronological in plan, and I have tried to arrange the chapters and to knit them together at the beginning and end of each in order to make them ‘through-readable’; but there will inevitably be a number of big gaps, awkward connexions, seeming irrelevances and dropped stitches. It also will not of course be in any way comprehensive. A full treatment of British-Continental relations over the past two centuries, even limited to the ‘informal’, would require far more research and many thousand more words than I feel I have at my disposal, this late in my life; but also, more importantly, would risk the sorts of facile and misleading generalizations I am above all anxious to avoid. As most of us (ex-) teaching academics are aware, broad survey courses are all very well in their way, and indeed may be indispensable (I’ve taught a number of them); but only if accompanied by more detailed studies – boreholes at various points, if you like – in order to be able to examine the intricacies of the material. (It’s why we have ‘Special Subjects’ in most university History syllabuses.) The essays should be regarded therefore as a series of these boreholes, to be read in conjunction with the general surveys, filling the latter out in certain ways, but also maybe amending some of them, with unusual or glossed-over aspects of modern Euro-British history which are certainly (I would claim) interesting in their own right, and which, whether or not they are thought worth integrating into the general narrative, should modify our view of that narrative, and at least pose questions; which is after all the main thing that should be expected of any historian, or indeed of any other kind of scholar. Only the ignorant, especially journalists and politicians (and especially, perhaps, journalist-politicians), can claim that they know all. The chapters can also of course be read, as they were originally intended to be, independently and out of order.

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There are fourteen of them, flanked by this Preface and an ‘Epilogue’. Chapters 1 and 2 are introductory – and newly written; the first a kind of general historical lead-in, starting in Essex (where I come from) in pre-historical times, and then sprinting though the centuries, and the various layers of immigration they brought to form the ‘British race’, so-called, to the beginning of ‘my period’ (the nineteenth and twentieth centuries); and the second about the Empire, which, however much its centrality may have been exaggerated, obviously cannot be ignored. Then come two chapters on the popular (rather than formal) sides of British-Continental relations: the first on British travellers and emigrants in Europe; and the second on Continental asylum-seekers in Britain in the nineteenth century. Both are based on archival and literary research, the first originally published as a number of journal articles, and the second elaborating on my 1979 book The Refugee Question. Both address the question of Britons’ attitudes to foreigners and vice-versa (xenophobia?), but from unusual directions. The latter may surprise readers who are unaware of how tolerant nineteenthcentury British governments were towards foreign immigrants, even ‘terrorists’, by contrast with today’s ‘hostile environment.’ Then come two chapters revolving around the writings of one Samuel Laing the Elder, a virtually forgotten but significant early nineteenth-century Orcadian, a sojourner in Norway, whose travel books rippled the philosophical and diplomatic waters at the time – J.S. Mill quoted him, and he was the object of a protest to Lord Palmerston from the Swedish Ambassador in London – but are used here to illustrate two important but often neglected aspects of early Victorian life and thought: radical economic liberalism in its most extreme form, and the philistinism – when it came to matters of art – that was associated with it. Both were supposed at the time to mark essential differences between Britain and the Continent. Laing also – but only incidentally to these two main themes – illustrates one fascinating school of nineteenth-century thought about the countries of Scandinavia, which are usually marginalized in British college courses, even those dealing with the history of Europe. The second of these chapters, on Laing’s philistinism, takes up and develops a theme I’ve touched on before in my book on Victorian architecture, The Battle of the Styles (2011), but is mainly new. Part Four focuses on Britain’s two major engagements with the European continent in the twentieth century, which were, of course, the World Wars. Again, its emphasis will be less on national political or military strategy than on the experiences of ordinary British people who fought in the wars, concentrating on the Gallipoli campaign; or who didn’t. Among the latter were the folk enduring

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German bombing on the ‘Home Front’ during World War II; and those living in the Channel Islands, Britain’s stepping-stones to the Continent, and the only part of the country occupied by the Germans during the War; or in more comfortable exile in ‘neutral’ Lisbon. The other chapter in this section takes as its subject Britain’s war leader Winston Churchill, but less with a view to examining his strategies and achievements than with exploring his all-important ‘image’ among, yet again, those ‘ordinary folk’. All these four chapters originated in articles for the London Review of Books, but have been substantially revised. Post-War Britain was forced – albeit reluctantly and painfully – to re-think and then re-negotiate her relationship with Europe. The major reasons for this were the economic damage the War had done to her, and the inevitable diminution of her place in the world in the age of super-states, American capitalist-dominated ‘globalization’, and imperial withdrawal. Much has been written about this (including by me, in the final chapters of the latest edition of The Lion’s Share); but this section (V) does not seek to go over the ‘high politics’ of that ground again. Instead it examines two important cultural manifestations of this period of re-adjustment: first, the dangerous and much-maligned, but still incredibly creative, 1950s, and the particular year (1956) that could be said to mark the turning-point between imperial and the new – albeit as it now turns out short-lived – European Britain; and second the post-imperial ‘revolution’, or ‘reaction’ (it could have been both simultaneously), that Margaret Thatcher either initiated or else bravely rode (I would say the latter) from the 1980s on. The first of these two essays was first printed in the Times Literary Supplement; a version of the second was given as my ‘inaugural lecture’ (as a Prof) at Newcastle University, at the height of Thatcher’s power. The relevance to ‘Europe’ of these chapters is that they illustrate the several ways the British people, and the political establishment of the post-war period, reacted and adapted to their new – and as yet still uncertain – place in the world. Thatcher’s patriotic neo-liberalism (as it would be called now) was supposed, again, to mark Britain off from her neighbours. It doesn’t so much today. Part Six is contemporary: that is to say, contemporary with very recent times. The first and possibly most important of its two chapters steps back from the actual ‘history’ of the past 200 years to pose questions about how reliable most of it is, in view of government secrecy and deception – ‘the British disease’, according to one authority – and the doubts sown in many people’s minds currently about the truth of just about anything they are officially told. Those of course have been hugely exacerbated by certain present-day politicians in both Britain and the United States, particularly the serial liar Boris Johnson (this is not a partisan

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judgment), and the ‘fake news’ merchant who as I write is coming to the end of his time as President of the USA. The result of this popular distrust is of course to fuel even more false versions of history, usually involving ‘conspiracies’ on the part of secret malevolent forces, which make intelligent discussion of most political questions difficult, and have the potential to do immense societal harm (viz. 1930s Germany). My interest in this area goes back to my researches for two more of my books, The Origins of the Vigilant State (1987), and Plots and Paranoia (1989), which took up – and as I now think, wasted – much of my professional time during the Thatcher years. No one now seems as concerned about these things – state surveillance, political policing, privacy – as they used to be. Islamic terrorism may be responsible for that. But it’s important, in any historical writing, to confront this question of reliability head-on. Chapter  14, ‘The Battle for Brexit’, which is entirely new, and is the longest chapter, the most discursive and probably the most seemingly opinionated, is about just that: the controversy over Britain’s continued membership of the European Union that has probably had the most drastic – and some would say destructive – impact on British politics and society of any since 1939. In it several strands from the previous chapters are drawn in, in ways that (again) I hope point their relevance to the overarching (if sometimes allusive) theme of British– European relations. But the most important point made here is that the Brexit battle was never essentially about Brexit, or even Europe at all – apart from for a few fanatics on both sides – as I saw clearly at the time (my original ‘blogged’ reaction is incorporated in this chapter), and as many commentators are taking on board now. (I take no credit for this – scarcely anyone reads my blog. It’s because it now seems obvious.) Which makes it even more important to get away from the narrow debates over whether Britain is a ‘part’ of Europe or not, or whether it is likely to gain or lose from uncoupling herself from that alliance, in order to get a sense of the complexity of the relationship between its peoples and theirs; or even of the elements that make up Britain’s ‘national identity’ – or (I would claim) identities. It is in connexion with this that I feel I should acknowledge a ‘bias’. (‘Biases’ are not the same as ‘prejudices’, which are formed without knowledge.) I regard myself as a critical pro-European, strongly opposed to Brexit (a ‘Remainer’ or ‘Remoaner’, or a ‘traitor’, according to some); which affects me personally, living as I do with a Continental European partner, and so requiring us to travel frequently across the North Sea (although I was already a ‘European’ long before I met Kajsa); intellectually stimulated by the different perspective that this gives me even on my country of origin; and consequently very much aware of my

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European ‘identity’. We all have multiple identities; which is why Prime Minister Theresa May’s notorious statement at the 2017 Conservative Party Conference, that ‘if you claim to be a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere’, expressed no doubt in order to cuddle up to her more extreme nationalist supporters, so dismayed me. It felt like a barb directed at me and my sort, and also at the hearts of many of the best and most ‘British’ Britons over the past 200 years, whose ‘Britishness’ was never that exclusive. The day after the Brexit vote I applied for and was eventually granted dual Swedish nationality: partly for personal reasons; partly because of my great admiration for Sweden in many respects; but mainly because, as a demi-Swede, I shall now be able to flourish a passport that proclaims once again – on the cover – my citizenship of Europeiska Unionen. I hope this will dissipate some of the pity that I know is felt towards me by my good Swedish friends, for coming from such a nation of fools led by clowns. That’s how they see it. (I don’t entirely – the ‘fools’ part, anyway.) This book may show them how we weren’t always like that. It’s my farewell letter to the nation that up to now I’ve always known best, and mainly loved. Finally, there comes a little ‘Epilogue’, originating in some advice I published in a newspaper but directed at the Home Office back in 2012, when it and other agencies were debating what kinds of qualities they would require or seek to instill in immigrants applying for British citizenship. My contribution was clearly not taken on board (when my American son-in-law was applying later, I looked through the material he had been given and one of the historical facts they expected him to know was the name of King Æthelstan’s queen); but it bears on the question of relative national identities, which are of course relevant to the question of Britain’s treaty relationships with anyone; including that with the US which might succeed our European one. Lastly, if this book appears a little disorganized, then that’s because history is disorganized too. * The list of people and institutions whose help I should acknowledge in this enterprise ought to be lengthy, stretching back as it should over my five decades of research into the topics covered here. But the earlier ones have mostly been thanked in the introductions to previous works of mine; including my fondly remembered students at universities in Britain, the US, Australia, Denmark and Sweden. More recently I must record my huge gratitude to Kajsa Ohrlander, my beloved sambo (Swedish for ‘living-together’ partner), who as a scholar herself can be a fearsome but always constructive critic, and has I hope dragged me up to the mark on matters of gender (her academic speciality), as well as being naturally empathetic to the tribulations of a writer. I’ve also learned a lot from

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her family and friends, and of course from my own children, in ways of which they are probably unaware. The same goes for many of the new ‘virtual’ friends I have made through Facebook (I’m a very discriminating ‘befriender’), and as ‘btl’ commentators on my blog (bernardjporter.com). Among UK friends and neighbours I’d like to single out Robin, Sally, Ken, Ellie, Theo, Glen, Philip, John, Diana, Sylvie, Jane and Mike, whose company and conversation I have long valued, and who have managed (so far) to see me safely through the coronavirus episode while being forced to ‘shield’ in Hull, after flights to Stockholm were stopped. (In any case I wouldn’t have fancied getting in a plane, or a train or a ferry, with all those putative virus-spreaders aboard.) A friend offered to take me over from Hull to Stockholm by boat, but then admitted that she would have to learn to sail first. Another suggested I dig a tunnel there; I think she’d just watched The Great Escape. Eventually – last July – I got away, holding my breath on the plane; and have been lucky to be able to shelter from subsequent ‘spikes’ of the virus on our secluded island in the Stockholm Archipelago. Until then, however, I was trapped on one side of the Britain–Europe divide which is one of the themes of this book, all the more distressingly in view of my pro-European proclivities. Last, but by no means least, I must thank my publishers, IB Tauris initially but now Bloomsbury Publishing; and in particular Emily Drewe, Abigail Lane and my copy-editor Lisa Carden; plus the very helpful but anonymous referees whose judgment Bloomsbury sought on the book before taking it on. For permission to re-use material previously published elsewhere, I must thank the editors of the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the academic journals cited at the ends of a couple of the chapters. I have used endnotes sparingly, as readers can generally find citations to sources and quotations by Googling keywords for the better-known ones, or by looking up the journals in which some of these essays originally appeared, most of which are extensively footnoted. In a few cases, I have been prevented from checking and precisely specifying sources at the copy-editing stage by being kept away from my own archive in Britain by the virus mentioned at the beginning of this Preface. (Not everything can be Googled.) In the cases of ‘review articles’, quotations should be assumed to come from the books featured there. Bernard Porter Svartsö, Sweden January 2021

Part One

Introduction: Britain and the World

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Britain and Europe: 40,000 bce to the Present

It may be worthwhile beginning with a quick résumé of certain broad themes in British history, to furnish some background. This chapter will trace Britain’s geographical, social and ‘ethnic’ relationship with Continental Europe from way back. Most of it will probably be familiar to many readers, but it may serve to remind others that the British have never been homogeneous, or in any way cut off from their nearest neighbours.

* The last part of England to break away geographically from the European continent was Essex, around 10,000 bce . This might be thought ironical in view of the fact that in the European Referendum of 2016, Essex was a heavily Brexitvoting county, by 62.3 per cent. But the Essex Brexiters won’t have been aware of their European origins. Until 12,000 years ago beasts and early men could walk from London to, say, Amsterdam (neither of which of course existed then), without getting their feet wet – muddy perhaps, judging by the Essex coast today – except in crossing the Thames, which ran further north than it does now. Local beasts included rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses and mammoths (one of whom left a molar at Walton-on-the-Naze), as well as wolves and others more familiar to us. The men (and women) were the stone-age type that children are familiar with from their picture books: hairy, hunched over, and probably carrying clubs; and were unlikely to be very closely related to the present-day British – even ‘Essex Man and Girl’ – most of whose ancestors were much more recent immigrants. The first evidence of humans (of a sort) in Britain comes from flint tools dated around 400,000 bce . Those particular humans, however, probably didn’t survive the subsequent ice ages; and signs of continuous human occupation do not surface until just after the land bridge (known to archaeologists as ‘Doggerland’) had been breached, either by slowly rising sea waters, or, as some geologists now believe, by a sudden tsunami. From then onwards there is plentiful evidence of their hunting and then farming activities, in what then was 3

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Britain Before Brexit

a densely wooded terrain; and of continuous waves of immigration from the continent, contributing to Britain’s distinctive – but not that distinctive – ethnic mix. They will have had to come by sea. The sea, remember, was a means of communication rather than a barrier. If you wanted to get from London to Newcastle, it was far easier in a boat. By land, all those trees were in the way. The earliest immigrants came mainly from north-western Europe and Spain: the people who later became Picts, Scots, Irish Celts, the Welsh and Angles. By Roman times – the Roman Empire tried to incorporate Britain in 55 bce under Julius Caesar, but only half-succeeded in 43 ad – they formed tribes and federations (but nothing we can really call ‘nations’) all over the British Isles, the first descriptions of which come from Roman – and therefore heavily biased – accounts. These may have exaggerated their savagery, though it would have been natural to be savage in conditions as they stood then. (Though they had built Stonehenge. Some Victorians refused to believe this, so imbued were they with the idea that everything in Britain before the Romans must have been ‘primitive’.) Tacitus claimed they spoke a language similar to that found in contemporary Gaul (modern France and Belgium), thus maintaining the continental link. The total population of the islands on Julius Caesar’s arrival was probably around a million, though that is hardly better than a guess. The Romans remained in Britain for about 350 years, albeit not always comfortably, with Caractacus, Boudicca and other native Britons launching powerful, but ultimately unsuccessful, rebellions. After the Romans left, by stages as their empire declined and fell centrally, and having had little genetic impact on the people they left behind, so far as we can see (there’s little Italian in the present British DNA), Britain fell into a sharp decline in respect of what the Romans would have recognized as ‘civilization’, with the whole long period, c. 400–1000 ad, dubbed subsequently by British historians the ‘Dark Ages’ in recognition of this. That was when the next waves of immigration/invasion/colonization hit Britain, the most numerous so far as England was concerned featuring ‘Saxons’ – though it is far from clear that they all came from present-day Saxony – which is why the English often call themselves ‘Anglo-Saxons’ today. They are supposed to have pushed the original ‘Celts’ into Wales, where they remain. But there may have been more from Scandinavia, including the ‘Jutes’ early on, and then some pretty fearsome forays by the ‘Vikings’ – generally known in Britain as ‘Danes’ – who eventually came to rule half of the British Isles, until they were thrown out early in the eleventh century: those, that is, who hadn’t been absorbed. The Saxon King Harold’s final victory over the Danes, at Stamford Bridge in

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1066, also however contributed to the next defeat of the English, by the Normans (also originally Scandinavian – ‘North-Men’ – but now living in France), for whom Harold’s army, exhausted after the long march down from Yorkshire to Hastings, was scarcely a match. That began a century or more of cruel Norman domination, whose lasting contributions to British society and culture were feudalism, bureaucracy (the Domesday Book), our present ancient aristocracy, some magnificent cathedrals, and the Channel Islands. Anglo-Saxon Britain lived on, however, in certain proto-democratic institutions that survived, like juries; and as a source of inspiration for the more working-class radical kind of British ‘patriot’, who even in the nineteenth century was still chafing against what was popularly termed then ‘the Norman Yoke’. (Today it’s called the ‘Establishment’.) All of which demonstrates what a motley group we Brits are, ethnically and culturally, and how umbilically tied to continental Europe we used to be. (Dogger is the cord.) This impression is borne out by evidence of the sea-trade that was done throughout this early period, surfacing in archeological ‘digs’ all over the place. Then, of course, there was the binding power of the Church of Rome, subsuming both paganism and native forms of Christianity from Norman times onwards, and even claiming to dictate to kings and queens. This could be regarded as the basis of the first ever formal ‘European Union’, and was one of the reasons for a few Britons’ objections to joining the EEC in the 1960s and 70s: the reminders it carried with it of the old Papist tyranny. The Normans weren’t the last bunch of foreigners to make their marks on Britain in modern times. The first record of Jews in England dates from 1070. Jews were valuable to English monarchs as money-lenders, but were resented and so chronically insecure for the same reason, with a notorious massacre of them in York in 1190, at the time of the Crusades, and a general expulsion of them in 1290. They reappeared as a significant community in the 1650s, and, notwithstanding certain civil disabilities and widespread prejudice – but Catholic Christians had to endure those too – were on the whole better tolerated in Britain than in most other European countries. In 1881 Jews in Britain numbered 46,000, all of them now ‘emancipated’, with full citizens’ rights. Hence the attraction of Britain to those persecuted in Poland’s and Russia’s anti-Jewish ‘pogroms’ in the 1890s, bringing probably a couple of hundred thousand more over as refugees during the next twenty years. That helped to re-stoke antiSemitic prejudice, as we shall see; but they survived as an important – and pretty well-integrated – community thereafter. Other definable immigrant groups were the 50,000 Protestant Huguenots who escaped French persecution after 1685; a number of Royalist refugees fleeing the French Revolution; and then, when that

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revolution failed, several waves of republican, democratic and even communist exiles, forced out of various Continental countries by Royalist repression. By far the largest immigrant group coming to mainland Britain during the 1800s century, however, was the Irish – about 600,000 of them living there in 1861, but not recognized as ‘foreigners’ because, technically, they weren’t. (Ireland was part of Great Britain.) Most of them came over as factory, farm and building labourers. They are still reckoned to count for 10 per cent of British ‘blood’ today. They gave rise to conflicts with the native-born, too. (We’ll come to that.) Lastly, before the mid-twentieth century, tens of thousands of genuine foreigners lived in Britain individually and personally, working constructively, setting up commercial enterprises, engaged in the arts – and a very few as beggars – to the enormous benefit (except the beggars, and most of the radical refugees) of Britain’s commercial and cultural life. The 1871 census, for example, enumerated 33,000 Germans and 18,000 French. Friedrich Engels was one of the Germans. He lived in Manchester, but the bulk of them settled in and around London, giving the latter city the bright cosmopolitan character it has retained to the present day. Only a handful of immigrants, incidentally, came from outside Europe, despite Britain’s colonial links. There were few non-white people to be seen in Britain in the nineteenth century, except in port towns. That’s one difference from today.

* Human traffic the other way, from Britain to the European continent, was almost as great. This is often overlooked in accounts of emigration from the British Isles, for obvious reasons: because the numbers settling in America and the colonies were far larger – around ten million all told between 1815 and 1914 – and of more interest to their descendants, still crowding serious scholars out of the search rooms of the Public Record Office in order to trace their family origins, through ship manifests and the like; and because those who went out simply to visit, explore and trade with Africa, the Middle East and other exotic places led rather more interesting lives. Compounding this is the emphasis that historians often place on extra-European ‘imperialism’ as being at the core of Britain’s historical experience from Tudor times onwards, or even before, which I’ve argued elsewhere – in British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t (2015) – is misleading, at best. In terms of personal acquaintance and activity, Continental Europe was of far more importance to Britons than the more distant regions of the earth: furnishing by far the highest proportion of holiday or touring destinations – a later chapter will focus on these – and even of new homes and jobs. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a number of Catholic Britons

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settled on the Continent as refugees. Later, as pioneers of industrialization from the mid-eighteenth century, Britons played a great part in building factories and especially railways on the Continent – and planting association football there in their leisure hours; and were especially prominent there as medics, servants, jockeys and nursemaids. Numbers are hard to come by, but in France they came to ‘several thousands’ in the early part of the nineteenth century, most of whom will have been pretty well settled, as distinct from simply ‘visitors’.1 That doesn’t compare with the numbers who emigrated to the US and the colonies, but it constituted a significant human link. Then there were the travellers and ‘tourists’, attracted by the Continent’s art, or food, or landscape, or gaiety, or sexual freedom; whose sojourns on the Continent were usually much briefer, but who certainly made their presence felt. We’ll be covering all this in a later chapter. In the meantime, it just needs to be said that Britain was far from being isolated socially – ‘splendidly’ or otherwise – from its European neighbours at any time in its history. Britons also travelled to the Continent in their imaginations – from their reading in newspapers and books, attendance at theatres, or viewing in museums and art galleries – far more than they ‘imagined’ the wider world. The 1851 ‘Great Exhibition’, for example was chock-a-block with European artifacts, despite its being taken as a display of ‘Empire’ by Empire-centred historians in recent years. In fact, the colonies were quite marginal to the show. Austria was more present to most stay-at-home Brits than Australia, and France immeasurably more so than both. The physical presence of Europeans in Britain will have confirmed this. Its spread was highly uneven – mostly in large cities, and in certain areas of those cities, as noted above – but ‘multiculturalism’ was a fact of British life even then. ‘Culturally’ – referring here to what is usually called ‘high’ culture – the traffic was usually the other way. In early modern times, Britain gave to the Continent as much as it got from it, with Shakespeare well known abroad – his acting company toured the palaces there: a lot of the details about Elsinore (Helsingør) in Hamlet, for example, probably came from them; and Shakespeare himself became a European ‘classic’ as well as a merely English one. The Germans even claimed him for their own. (The Scandinavians might also have done so, with his name sounding quite close to the Swedish for ‘actor’ – skådespelare – though I’ve not heard of anyone making this claim.) The lutenist and composer John Dowland had a Europe-wide reputation in Shakespeare’s time, more of one probably than any other English musician before relatively recent times. At a more popular musical level, one finds British tunes harnessed to foreign words

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Britain Before Brexit

or vice versa – it’s difficult to know where the melodies originated – all over the Continent. (And beyond. The ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ was based on an old English drinking song. Listen to the tune and you can imagine its being sung by a drunken sailor.) After that, however, Continental ‘high’ culture raced far ahead of English and Scottish, and became much more of an influence on them than theirs was on the Continent. This was to the regret of British aesthetes but to the positive pride of those in Britain – like Samuel Laing, the subject of a later chapter – who believed that the highest civilization rested on much more practical things. The only two possible exceptions, where Britain contributed positively to Continental intellectual life, were imaginative literature, with Dickens especially having a strong foreign following; and philosophy, of a very practical kind. Scotland was particularly influential in what is called the ‘European Enlightenment’ of the eighteenth century. Otherwise the Brits had the reputation of being relative philistines; as they really were, on the whole.

* This was related to material divergencies on both sides of the English Channel. The great contribution of Britain to European and indeed world history in modern times was its role as the seed-bed of industrial capitalism, which did more than anything else to determine its national identity, in economic, political and cultural terms, from the later eighteenth century on. Capitalism of course went back long before this, and – in the forms of trading and banking – is more closely associated with the Italian city states and the Low Countries than it is with Britain; but its harnessing to large-scale mining and manufacture, with the social adjustments that this required, was very much a British thing. It didn’t completely dominate British society until perhaps the beginning of the twentyfirst century, when it was already in decline; but even in the early nineteenth century Continental visitors could see – and endlessly remarked upon – how pervasive it was. British industrial cities like Manchester and Glasgow, with their deadly smoke and slums, were completely new and alien to them; horrifically so, it appeared to the more sensitive and cultured ones. Of course they could avoid them, for there were still many parts of Britain entirely free of the blight of industrialization, except at a second remove: servicing the cities by growing food for them, or living in their rural retreats off the profits that their investments in the new enterprises – the grim realities of which they rarely saw – brought. It was these leafier (and southern) parts of the country that retained the old-fashioned semi-feudal structures that still linked Britain socially to the Continent: aristocracies, landowners, peasants and royals; contributing to Britain’s somewhat ‘hybrid’ identity, with a capitalist head on a feudal body – or perhaps it was the

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other way around.2 Later in the nineteenth century, when industrial capitalism began to seep into the rest of Europe too (especially northern France, Belgium and the German states), more ties were forged between, first, capitalists on both sides of the Channel – the young Engels was one of them; and second the new industrial working classes, nudged by Engels, as they became aware of the identity of their class interests with those of the proletariats on the other side. But not yet to any great extent. This was when the great divergence between Britain and the Continent made itself felt, although only temporarily. Before the ‘Industrial Revolution’, it is difficult to discern very many essential differences between them. Nearly all European countries had monarchs, usually closely inter-married, as though the royal families of Europe constituted a separate ‘nation’ over and above the recognized ones. At the time of the Prusso-Danish War (1864), with most British subjects supporting poor little Denmark, Queen Victoria felt it necessary to remind her son, the future King Edward VII, of where his loyalties should lie: ‘for remember, Bertie, we are Germans.’3 This particular form of pan-Europeanism (royal interbreeding) persisted well into the twentieth century, and was even valued for the way it was believed it might oil the wheels of international diplomacy. It was reflected, too, in the social make-up of the diplomatic classes of all countries, which in Britain was as aristocratic as in any other, on the grounds that the upper classes got on better with each other than a British bourgeois could with a Graf or a comte. Before around 1800, Britain and the Continent closely resembled each other in other ways too. Both had Reformations, religious and foreign wars, revolutions, Enlightenments, Renaissances, and overseas colonies and empires. None of these significantly marked Britain, or any other country, off from all the rest. ‘Liberalism’, which was the thing Britain considered to be its main distinguishing feature thereafter, had deep roots across the Channel, especially in France. Apart from language, and some minor cultural differences, the whole continent of Europe was – not united, obviously, or there wouldn’t have been all those wars, but – pretty uniform. Or they were at least until the early years of the nineteenth century, when the Industrial and capitalist Revolutions, incomplete as they were, nonetheless transformed Britain enough to distinguish it qualitatively and essentially from its neighbours. Capitalism had changed the nature of its politics, though not necessarily of its political class. Parliament, and even more governments, continued to be dominated by aristos and the upper-middle classes, until the advent of proper democratic parliamentary representation after 1918 – if even then. The upper classes, however, didn’t pursue aristocratic policies, as they did by and large on

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the Continent, having reached a clever arrangement with the middle-middle classes, not formally and perhaps not even deliberately or consciously, by which they (the upper classes) ruled, but at the behest of the middle or capitalist class when it came to economic and political matters. (This suited both the middles, whose ideology put them off ‘governing’ – an unproductive and unprofitable pursuit, unless you were corrupt – and the uppers, who had been bred and trained in their ‘public’ schools for just this task.) In this way, capitalist principles and values gradually pushed the old feudal ones aside; principles of ‘free’ competition (free trade), individualism, monetary profit, the whittling down of the State, and a form of ‘democracy’ restricted to the propertied, who were thought to have the most reliable stake in the new system. These came to define the sort of ‘freedom’ Britain became attached to, which – although Britons believed they were uniquely ‘free’ – was, of course, only one version of many. Capitalism (together with a little luck and some atrocity) also lay behind the great expansion of the British overseas empire during the nineteenth century, now surpassing all the other European empires, and taken to be Britain’s most distinctive national feature thereafter – although in fact France’s came close. Capitalist values could also be said to lie behind Britain’s artistic inferiority in the nineteenth century, by comparison with its neighbours. At least, that can be inferred from the philistine writings of Samuel Laing the Elder, who believed that art was actually inimical to the kind of material progress he and his fellow Liberals espoused. They called that ‘civilization’. On the Continent, civilization was defined in other ways entirely. That was one sign of la différence. The difference didn’t last for ever. By the end of the nineteenth century the industrial-capitalist behemoth, powered by its own internal dynamic, had spread outwards from Britain, into Europe but eventually finding a new special home in the United States (because its progress was less obstructed by ‘feudalism’ there; hence Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the USA); while at the same time it suffered partial reverses in Britain, with some very un-capitalist – almost neo-feudal – notions of ‘welfare’ coming into the picture, provoked by capitalism’s rougher edges and brought on by labour militancy together with – although the connection with anti-capitalism is less clear here – a notable revival of the nonnarrative ‘arts’. By the twentieth century, these particular distinctions between Britain and the Continent had been rubbed down to just tendencies on both sides, with Britain still being regarded, and regarding itself, as more practical and materialistic than the Continent, whose societies were marginally more protectionist, more socially paternalistic, more arty, and so more ‘old-fashioned’ than their island neighbour’s. Adam Smith – of the Scottish Enlightenment –

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was supposed to have furnished the rational intellectual justification for Britain’s new course. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the image of its ‘practicality’ came to be more difficult to sustain, in the face of industrial decline; but the myth of its having been originally powered by the Smithian principles of early capitalism didn’t die, but on the contrary was dramatically revived in the 1970s, leading to Margaret Thatcher’s reversion to what she liked to call ‘Victorian values’ in the following decades. (Thatcher, incidentally, had no truck with ‘art’.) Meanwhile the Continent, although still under threat from the behemoth, managed to continue along loosely ‘welfareist’ lines; especially Scandinavia, which remained an example of how Britain might have progressed if it had not taken that Thatcherite turn in the road in 1979. Thatcher famously insisted that ‘There is No Alternative’ (‘TINA’) to the path she had chosen, thus – no doubt unconsciously – corroborating Marx’s idea of ‘historical inevitability’, as well as implicitly undermining her own agency. But the prosperity and relative happiness of Scandinavia during Britain’s reactionary phase would seem to cast doubt on that. That’s why it still serves as their ‘shining city on the hill’ to many British social radicals.

* Of course the foregoing analysis is grossly over-generalized. I can imagine readers bridling at certain broad statements in it, as I have done even as I’ve made them, and when I recall some of the significant exceptions that I could have mentioned – and will do in later chapters. As a generalization, however – or a series of them – I believe it may be a useful tool to understanding some of the essential differences that have lain between Britain and the European Continent both in the past and in the present; and also the divisions within Britain itself which may muddy these differences, and suggest areas of similarity. Britain’s notoriously ‘semi-detached’ relationship with its neighbours does not arise mainly arise from geography, or ethnicity, or religion, or nationality or even – today – its politics, but from its socio-economic infrastructure. The detachment affects, and always has done, some classes in Britain more than others. That is why the vote in the referendum of 2016 was so very close: which is a far more significant feature of it – the tiny 52/48 per cent margin – than the bare result; and why it stirred up such unprecedented animosities afterwards. Britain has never been a united nation, any more than Europe has been a united continent, except very occasionally and temporarily at times of foreign threat. This is why national ‘xenophobia’ is not a central or essential part of Britain’s identity. Its identities, in fact, were and are what has come to be called ‘multiple’. Overlying, splitting and complicating its ‘British’ identity have always

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Britain Before Brexit

been other and often more important ones: genuine ‘national’ identities, English, Scottish, Welsh, and (Northern) Irish (for Britain is in reality a federation of nations – for now at any rate); regional; religious; arising out of age or education (we saw that in the 2016 referendum); gendered; and so on. Different identities share different value-systems, some of which relate more closely to those found on the Continent than others, helping to create empathy rather than prejudice. ‘Nationality’ is over-emphasized in modern political discourse, its value being mainly to rulers, in order to persuade their subjects, or citizens, to toe particular lines. It can also be a very real menace, as we know to our cost. In the case of Britain’s relations with the Continent, it tends to confuse and distort the main issues. Different sections of British society related to their European neighbours, and vice versa, in different ways. The following essays will try to illustrate some of them. And then of course there was the Empire. This requires a separate chapter, even in a book focused on Britain’s relations with Europe, because it ran through its history like a silken (or some other fabric) thread, and had a bearing at many points on Britain’s and its people’s relationship with their nearer neighbours.

Notes 1 See Fabrice Bensimon, ‘British Workers in France, 1815–1848’, in Past and Present, no. 213 (November 2011). Other figures on these pages are taken from Census Reports for England and Wales. 2 This theme is further developed in my Britannia’s Burden: The Political Evolution of Modern Britain, 1851–1990 (London: Hodder Education, 1994). 3 Jane Ridley, Bertie: A Life of Edward VII (London: Chatto & Windus, 2012), 86.

2

Empire

Even in a book about the relations between Britain and Europe, we can’t ignore the British Empire, which is supposed to have been one of Britain’s great distinguishing features in modern times, and the one that pulled it away from its Continental neighbours both then, and, through its legacy, thereafter. (A number of ‘Brexiters’ at the time of the 2016 EU Referendum clearly hoped that a revival of ‘Commonwealth’ trade would both make up for the loss of free European markets that Brexit might bring in its wake, and also help restore some of Britain’s lost ‘greatness’.) The British Empire was obviously important – speak to any of the millions who came under its rule – and was also the most extensive of the European empires of the nineteenth century. But it was not the only one. Overseas colonies, in fact, were one big thing that nine or ten of the maritime nations of Europe had in common with one another in the nineteenth century; some of them going back to early modern times, others picked up more recently, but coming into greatest diplomatic focus in the later years of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, often called the ‘Age of Imperialism’. It could be argued that the size of the British Empire – covering one-fifth of the habitable surface of the globe, it was claimed – rendered it more of a distraction for Britain than its neighbours’ empires were for them; but they all had their fingers in the imperial pie.1 * The British Empire originated – to cut several millennias’ history short – in humankind’s propensity throughout history to expand: very few human societies have not done so if given the chance; and, in Britain’s particular case, the overseas trade it did with the continent of Europe from prehistoric times onwards. Commerce was always the first and the main connection Britain had with Europe. Stone Age Britain, for example, even imported stones (mainly flints) from abroad, and by the Bronze and Iron Ages there had grown up a flourishing trade in pots and attractive metallic objects from many parts of Europe, and as far afield as modern Turkey. The Roman Empire, as one might expect, gave a 13

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boost to this. For its part, Britain exported mainly tin, animal skins and slaves. With the Viking invasions, Britain became part of the Scandinavians’ impressive networks of trade routes, which stretched from North Africa to Iceland and beyond. The amount of British DNA that has been found in today’s Icelandic population suggests that women may have been another object of barter; unless they were simply kidnapped, or fell in love with their Danish invaders. (Kidnapped seems more likely.) With the Normans came the wool trade out of Britain, and a flourishing wine trade in the other direction. But all this hardly needs saying. Commerce is a normal activity of human societies, when it is not impeded by geography or politics. So far as geography is concerned, what specially enabled Britain’s trade with the Continent from the very beginning were the relatively narrow seas that separated them, which were easier and quicker to traverse than land routes would have been. If they are close enough to continents, islands are rarely insular in this sense. But this also had another effect. Seas led everywhere. Once they had built the boats to sail over to France or the Low Countries or Scandinavia, the British found a wider world open to them. In common with other European maritime nations, they pushed their (bigger) boats out far beyond their own continent, firstly to the Americas, guided partly by old Viking sea-charts, and then around the coasts of Africa to the ‘East’. For Britain this wider expansion started in the sixteenth century, rather late by comparison with its sea-going rivals, Spain and Portugal, who had already taken the ‘best’ parts of the Americas – that is, the gold-rich areas – leaving only the poorer bits for the Brits, together with the French, Dutch and Scandinavians. Being poorer, North America required hard work – digging, sowing and building – to make it profitable; which is what, broadly speaking, differentiated the northern European ‘colonies’ there from the Iberian ones to the south. The word ‘colony’ comes from the Latin word for ‘to cultivate’. That required property over the newly discovered lands, in North America and later in Australasia and southern Africa, which morphed later into Britain’s ‘colonies’, in the modern sense. That marked the beginning of the British overseas ‘Empire’, of trade, settlement and eventually political control, which served as both an extension to and a distraction from its European interests. France and Holland were similarly distracted, but not by so much. By the early nineteenth century, when after a series of European wars Britain had established herself as the leading colonial power in Europe, its Empire was supposed to define it, in apposition to the more self-centred Continent. It was one of the things that contributed to Britain’s sense – which by Palmerston’s time had become a boast – of ‘splendid isolation’: isolated from Europe, that is,

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where all the other leading powers of that time (apart from most of Russia) were situated. But it never was isolated from Europe commercially. Colonial trade was important, not least the sorry trade in slaves from Africa to the West Indies which many economic historians regard as having helped to lay the foundations of Britain’s remarkable late-eighteenth century industrial growth by capitalizing it, and then through the importance of these wider-world connections in furnishing markets for its industrial surpluses; but it never supplanted or even significantly rivalled the trade Britain continued to do with its nearer neighbours. Trade figures bear this out. In the year 1880, which is as good a date as any to place the high point of the Victorian Empire, around 30 per cent of Britain’s trade was done with that Empire, compared with 40 per cent with Europe and 20 per cent with the US. (These are very rough figures. It depends on what you count.) Foreign investment followed the same pattern. Widening the definition of ‘empire’ to include areas of ‘informal’ influence – that is, the non-AngloAmerican wider world – European trade and investment still topped it. It was only in the twentieth century that Britain’s imperial trade began to catch up with its European equivalent, mainly because of the decline in its manufacturing competitiveness relative to Germany’s and the USA’s, which made Continental markets more difficult to penetrate. By the time it came for it to start thinking about joining the European Common Market (later the European Union) in the 1960s, Europe was responsible for only a minority of its trade, which is one of the factors that made it more difficult for Britain than for other members to adjust to the Common Market’s tariff structures. After its entry, of course, the balance of its foreign trade shifted in line with those structures, with increasingly more of it being done with Europe. But overall, and leaving aside that mid-twentieth century readjustment, the countries of Europe were Britain’s major trading partners for most of these years. It couldn’t have done without them. Imports from Europe included timber and leather from Scandinavia and Russia; olive oil; wines (often developed on the Continent by British entrepreneurs to suit British tastes); French ladies’ fashions; foodstuffs that wouldn’t rot in transit, before refrigeration came in; live cattle; art products; and pornography. (In the 1850s the Foreign Office was greatly exercised on finding dirty postcards smuggled illegally from France into English ‘public’ schools.) Out went woollen and cotton clothes, manufactured goods, especially metallic – pots, pans, ‘Sheffield’ cutlery, guns, swords, buttons, buckles, and pins; and, on the somewhat larger side, ships, steam locomotives, and machine tools – the last enabling Continental countries then to make these

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things for themselves. (Initially there were measures prohibiting this, for fear of the competition they would bring, but more enlightened laws passed in the early nineteenth century gave even these export trades the go-ahead.) The bomb that Felice Orsini threw at the French Emperor’s coach in Paris in the Place de l’Opéra in 1858 (see Chapter 4) was made and tested in Birmingham: by Lord Palmerston himself, it was claimed by some paranoid Frenchmen, who had mis-read the manufacturer’s name of ‘Palmer & Son’ on its side. That would have discomfited Richard Cobden and his fellow ‘free trade’ ideologues of the time, for whom one of the major attractions of a free market system was that it conduced to world peace. (National barriers, which is what most wars of that time were about, would not be worth fighting over if they didn’t impede the exchange of muchsought-after goods.) Extra-European trade, though highly important, was complementary to all this. Apart from natural and agricultural products – certain minerals, coffee, tea, spices – the bulk of Britain’s imports came from Europe, and a large – if diminishing – proportion of its exports went there. Besides this, the economic liberals’ insistence on freedom of trade meant that even Britain’s overseas colonies were not regarded as truly ‘imperial’. If ‘colony’ comes from the Latin for ‘to grow’, ‘empire’ derives from the word for ‘rule’ or ‘domination’; and it suited the early and mid-Victorians to believe that this wasn’t what they were really about. Adam Smith had advised against pursuing ‘empire’ in this sense, which made it mildly embarrassing when, in the search for trade, Britain found herself compelled – usually because of local messes created by its merchants and entrepreneurs – to exert dominion over the countries it was trading with. Even in these new ‘formal’ colonies, however, Britons generally remained true to their liberal principles, allowing other European countries entry to their markets on the same open terms it allowed herself. It was this that was supposed to distinguish its network of colonies from a true ‘empire’, in the ancient Roman sense, and allowed it to live with the embarrassment of denying its new colonial ‘subjects’ the universal freedoms it claimed for itself, and indeed believed defined it as a nation, as we’ve seen. It’s for this reason, among others, that the Empire loomed much less largely in Victorian sensibilities than might have been expected, and than many modern scholars (called ‘post-colonialists’) have assumed it must have done, largely because of its apparent size on all those red-besplattered world maps – which in any case did not come into vogue until around 1900. It was, of course, an illusion, even a hypocritical one; which became more and more apparent as the nineteenth century progressed, and as many British started to acknowledge – and even to appreciate – the Empire their overseas commerce

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had accidentally dumped on them. That moment came around 1880, and not before. It required an entirely new way of international thinking on Britain’s part, with public attention distracted for the first time, and for just a while, by all the masculinist adventure, excitement and glamour that imperial expansion gave rise to, accompanied by a kind of imperial proto-fascism, very different from the old liberal spirit, emerging on the edges of the British political Right; but still without pushing either liberalism or Europe entirely into the shade. Europe was still Britain’s main market, its people’s main focus of interest, and the crux of its diplomacy, even when it came to extra-European affairs; which had to be negotiated in Paris or Berlin, in order to cement treaties and the like, even while they were physically conducted with Africans or Indians in ‘the field’. Hence all the major and most prestigious British diplomatic posts, including those concerned with trade, were those in the great European capitals: although the diplomatic class’s liking for the culture and night-life and the company of their own sort of people – most of them were aristocrats – may also have had a say in that. Even New York or Buenos Aires were felt to be deficient in these regards, and the colonies more so. India, as technically an ‘empire’ in her own right, had rather more prestige; but she was under the control of another Department. Paris, Vienna, Rome, St Petersburg and Berlin were the most popular Foreign Office postings. The wider world, after all, could be organized quite comfortably from there. This is why, until the 1880s at the earliest, their possession of an empire did little to greatly distract Britain and Britons from their closer association and connexions with Europe, any more than an ‘allotment’ diverts any allotmentowner’s attention appreciably from his or her home. In fact colonies were regarded rather like allotments, as areas of arable land outside the home from which to supply the metropolitan economy. (This may make sense of the Swedish word for what the British call ‘allotments’, which is ‘colonier’.) It is also why its Empire played a very minor role in Britain’s national culture during most of the nineteenth century, by comparison with Europe. As readers may be aware, I’ve already published a book – The Absent-Minded Imperialists (2004), précised in Chapter 6 of British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t (2016) – which deals with the place of the Empire in British society and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; which is why – and also because it doesn’t bear precisely on the topic of this book – I feel I don’t need to go into it in any great detail here. (Prospective readers of those other books, however, should be warned that their main argument is contentious.) On the other hand a summary might not come amiss, for those unaware of what has been called the ‘empire minimalist’ point of

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view, and against which to set up the main Anglo-European subject of the present book. Those who have read The Absent-Minded Imperialists can skip the rest of this chapter.2 * It’s easy to understand why foreigners especially still cannot credit that most people in Britain in the nineteenth century were not really interested in their Empire, and may not have even been aware of it. From outside Britain it seems to have been a terrific thing, and particularly so from across the Atlantic, where the greatest nation in that hemisphere derived its origin from a rebellion against it. For most foreigners it distinguished and defined Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Maps of the world dating from that period – British maps, at any rate – are believed to have emphasized this, with all that aggressive red paint daubed all over, ludicrously dwarfing the two little red patches that marked merely the centre of this much greater and more significant entity. For us modern Britons also, now we have managed to step outside it (because of its passage into history), it is coming to be seen as of crucial importance in explaining much of our past, and also our present. Hence the huge boom in British Empire studies in recent years. It is this that makes it difficult to understand, or even to accept, that it didn’t always appear like this. As a result, some of us who have been arguing just this – that the Empire was not central to Britons’ perception of themselves while it was still a going concern, or did not, to use a fashionable phrase just now, contribute greatly to Britain’s sense of ‘national identity’ – are sometimes accused of ‘denial’, of resiling against the obvious truth, for a number of possible motives: because we are ashamed of it, and want to put it behind us, perhaps; or because we don’t want to accept responsibility for the problems it has left in its wake; or because we so regret its loss. But the evidence seems to be plain. Britain was an imperial nation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but not, to any widespread or significant extent, an imperial society. You can combine these two things. I would claim that the United States has been doing precisely that for years. Whether you want to call modern American foreign policy ‘imperialism’ or not (and I’ve spent a whole other book, Empire and Superempire (2006), discussing this), I don’t believe that her ‘imperialism’ (or whatever) is rooted in, derived from, a particular or dominant imperial culture. The same was true of Britain in the nineteenth century. If ‘denial’ has any place in this story, then it’s the denial of those, in both nineteenth-century Britain and the US more recently, who claimed then that their nation was not behaving ‘imperialistically’; against all the evidence, you might think, but genuinely nonetheless. Donald Rumsfeld’s famous statement

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that ‘We don’t do empire’ is an instance of this in America’s case; William Ewart Gladstone – though he didn’t express it so pithily – is probably the best British example. In Britain’s case, that claim was based (1) on the fact that it had abandoned what before then had been considered the most characteristic and damning feature of ‘imperialism’ or ‘colonialism’ in the 1830s and 40s – that is, a monopoly of trade to the colonies; (2) on the new dominant economic ideology of the day that taught that free trade was the way of the future, and empires only a drag on that (the increase in Anglo–US trade that followed the War of American Independence seemed to corroborate this); and (3) on the excuses, in relation to the overseas colonies that Britain undoubtedly had, that – to quote Henry Stimson’s similar dismissal of US possessions in the Pacific in the 1940s – ‘these are not [really] colonies but outposts’; or that they were only taken over reluctantly, and so didn’t indicate any imperial ambition; or that they had been inherited (India and the Caribbean islands, for example) from a much less enlightened age, and couldn’t be abandoned now, however much the British would have liked this, because of the ‘anarchy’ that would follow; but would be got rid of as soon as was feasible. The word ‘imperialism’ was never applied to the British Empire at this time (before about the 1880s), because of its association with Napoleon Bonaparte’s tyranny: much as Americans until recently didn’t like to apply to themselves a word that was generally used in connection with Reagan’s ‘Evil Empire’. Indeed, I’ve found very few instances of the phrase ‘British Empire’ being used at this time to describe what we regard as the Empire – Britain’s overseas colonies and dominions of all kinds. Often it was applied to the British Isles alone. Even among those Britons before the 1880s who were interested in particular colonies, very few indeed were interested in all types of colonies – India as well as the ‘settlement’ colonies of Canada and Australia, for example – or regarded the British Empire as a ‘whole’. If you were an enthusiast for Australia and Canada, you were usually opposed to Britain’s (or the East India Company’s) rule over India. Not only that, you were likely to be just as enthusiastic for the independent United States of America, which was the category Australia and Canada seemed to best fit in with, rather than an ‘imperial’ one. Advice on ‘colonial’ emigration, for example, usually featured the US equally with the dominions; and the USA always took more British migrants than the Empire did. On the other side, if you were proud of British India, you hated Australia and Canada: nasty working- and middle-class democratic places. Of course, this was all bull. Nobody today questions that Britain was an ‘imperial’ power throughout the nineteenth century, though they might want to place an adjective before the word ‘imperial’ to soften it a bit – ‘informal’, for example, or ‘reluctant’. The point

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is, however, that not everyone at the time recognized this. This was one of the things that was bound to dilute the British people’s imperial enthusiasm and awareness in early and mid-Victorian times. There’s other evidence – albeit negative – that most Britons cannot have been significantly aware of their Empire for other reasons. It scarcely appears in literature and the arts, for example, before Kipling; far less, interestingly, than in the case of France, where there’s a rich genre of ‘orientalist’ art and writing throughout the century, putting the Brits to shame. Far more British novels that weren’t merely domestic, from Charlotte Brontë, via Thackeray and Dickens, through to John le Carré, were set on the Continent than further afield. The same applied to pulp fiction and periodical articles. Recently a number of ‘cultural scholars’, inspired by the American/Arabist scholar Edward Said, have tried to show that the Empire was there really, hidden between the lines of Britain’s canonical novels or behind the brushstrokes of its paintings; but only because it ‘must have been’, which is always a treacherous argument. One example is the notion, seriously advanced, that when Sir Walter Scott wrote about mediaeval Scotland, he meant nineteenth-century India really. But there’s not a scintilla of evidence for that. Then there’s education. A study of that for the nineteenth century shows that imperial geography and history scarcely ever appeared in school syllabuses at any level, from the famous ‘public’ schools down to the rough ‘elementary’ schools for the working classes. For the former it might be claimed that ancient Roman imperial history – the ‘Classics’ were about the sum of their syllabuses – served as a surrogate for the British version; and that in any case the posh schools weren’t so much concerned with imparting practical knowledge as ‘character’. As for the proles in their elementary schools, for a start their education was very scrappy and superficial in any case – usually just the ‘three Rs’, all they really needed to get through their dull, boring lives; and in the second place it was mainly directed to teaching them their place in society, which was to serve and obey their public-school educated rulers, and so by this means to help bind British society together. It’s important to be aware that this was how Britain was seen as cohering in the nineteenth century: through the relationships that were established between the classes, rather than by means of a sense of ‘patriotism’ common to them all. If patriotism had come into it, then maybe the Empire could have been seen as a possible focus for this. But in fact patriotism was very much distrusted by the upper classes, certainly before Disraeli’s time, being associated mainly with radicalism and democracy (America was the warning there); even the idea of ‘citizenship’ was greatly feared as a dangerously French-

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revolutionary concept – ‘aux armes, citoyens!’ (in fact Britons didn’t officially become ‘citizens’, but remained ‘subjects’, until 1983); and, besides all this, and appertaining to ‘Empire’ more directly, there is evidence that the upper classes were nervous of telling the workers about that, in case they started empathizing with their co-subjects in the colonies, and so took against it. Behind all this, however, was another broad reason why the Empire didn’t greatly permeate British society before around 1880. This was that for most of its life the Empire didn’t need large-scale popular support. Apathy would do. Only a relatively few people were required to service and police it: around 4,000 men as Colonial Governors, District Officers and the like throughout the Empire (about half of them in India), ruling hundreds of millions of subjects, as late as 1900. That’s probably fewer than the number of public servants employed today to run an average English municipality, like Hull (where I live) – though of course it may well be that we Hullites are a particularly ferocious tribe. Even if you add in the European soldiers, policemen, doctors and so on who also ‘served’ in the British colonies in the nineteenth century, it was still a miniscule number, which the higher levels of British society, and the dregs at the bottom that manned the Army, were easily capable of providing without ever having to make claims on society more generally. The Empire was usually acquired and defended, too, without making a terrific dent in Britain’s human resources, at least before the Boer War of 1899–1902; and it cost almost nothing to run (in direct costs, at any rate), because one of its basic principles was that it had to be ‘self-sufficing’. Most of the work was ‘outsourced’, as we would call it today, to private agencies. This is one of the things that those red-besplattered world maps obscure, by the way: the essential thinness of Britain’s imperial control. The implication of this was that it didn’t need most of its subjects to go along with it; just as the similarly inexpensive imperial (or quasi-imperial) hegemony that America used to practice in the world, until recently, didn’t need ordinary Americans to be aware of that. (That’s why 9/11 took them so much by surprise, just as the Indian Mutiny did the British.) We can see, then, that it was clearly possible for Britain to have a huge empire without its people being much aware of it. But that of course doesn’t end the matter. People could still have taken an interest and even pride in their Empire without any strict necessity for it. To find this out we need to examine the ways in which the Empire could have impacted on them – through popular shows, exhibitions and so on (in other words, outside schools and ‘high’ art) – about which there is still room for debate, and, in fact, a debate going on (with John MacKenzie the main advocate of the opposite view to mine). That debate is also

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complicated by other issues: such as what we count as an ‘imperial’ impact – can it be anything exotic? Or whether people who, for example, drank Indian tea were necessarily made aware of the Empire through that? (I think not.) Or the extent to which imperialism could have been subtly inculcated in people via values that were indirectly but nonetheless essentially associated with it: like racism, masculinism, royalism and a number of others that have been suggested. Much of this, of course, depends on how we define imperialism: one of the most problematical words in the English political lexicon, and one that has been muddied even more in recent years by being stretched to cover things like (for example) missionary evangelism, travel, map-making, zoo-keeping, and even the spread of McDonald’s and Starbucks in the world. Lastly, we can never be sure that the lack of any obvious ‘imperialisms’ in any society’s culture is proof of that society’s unimperialness. For example, if architects didn’t go much for ‘orientalisms’ in the buildings they designed for London, which they didn’t, it could have been (and in some cases was, as I’ve shown in my earlier books) because of a very imperialistic disdain for ‘primitive’ or ‘degenerate’ ‘native’ styles. So this is still a highly controversial question. My Absent-Minded Imperialists certainly won’t – and isn’t intended to – settle it finally. Nonetheless, it seems to have surprised many people that the early and mid-nineteenth century Empire left so few overt traces in British society and culture; far fewer than used to be assumed. At the very least, those who believe that Britain’s was a polity and a society that was dominated by the ‘discourse’, as it’s called, of empire in spite of this have got to start building up their case again. * It is easier to build that case for the very end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, I think, than for the period I’ve just written about. It was then that the softer and more ‘absent-minded’ imperialism of the mid-nineteenth century morphed into a harder and more shouty sort: as a result, as I’ve argued in my The Lion’s Share, of Britain’s relative decline in the world, economically and diplomatically, making it more difficult for it to preserve its clout in more relaxed ways. (This is important. Its formal Empire wasn’t necessarily either a sign or a source of strength.) So the evidence of domestic imperialism is quite a bit thicker for that time than for the earlier one. Everyone knows about this: the wild ‘jingo’ demonstrations that took place at the height of the Boer War, for example; and . . . well, just that, really. It is surprising how many accounts of this subject only mention that as proof of the popular imperialism of the time; and even, in some cases, take it as typical of the hundred years before. But of course it was a highly atypical outburst; nothing remotely like it had ever been seen before, back to the

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‘Church and King’ riots of the eighteenth century, or was seen afterwards, until possibly the jingo demonstrations over the Falklands in 1982 (although those weren’t really the same). There have been similar mass expressions of popular feeling in Britain at other times, some of them on an even larger scale; but nearly always on radical, left-wing and even anti-war issues, like the great demonstrations of early March 2003 – the biggest there have ever been in Britain – to protest against the American-led invasion of Iraq. This whole wild Boer War jingo episode of 1900 lasted perhaps just three to six months, after which people seemed to tire of the war, and possibly of the imperialism that had given rise to it. This was partly the result of the ‘body bag’ effect. Historians often point to the turn-of-the-century music hall as more proof of turn-of-the-century workingclass imperial patriotism, but most of the songs sung there were laments about the capture or death or other sufferings of loved ones – ‘Some Mothers Will Lose a Son’, ‘The Boers Have Got my Daddy’, ‘Break the News to Mother’, ‘Who’ll Care for the Children?’ and so on. The casualties certainly undermined imperial confidence. So did the fact, as one commentator put it at the end of the war, that the Boer (Britain’s enemy), seemed such a ‘preposterously little fellow,’ that ‘the work of crushing him . . . was not in itself an essentially pleasant or heroic thing to carry through’. So there were almost no celebrations at the conclusion of that war; and absolutely no more public manifestations of imperialistic feeling in the years between then and the outbreak of the 1914–18 conflict. Instead, people in the country turned back to the other things that exercised them at that time: which were (for the workers) mainly their working conditions and pay, and for women, democracy. That’s what they demonstrated and went on strike and even threatened violence about in the 1900s, especially in the period of what was called ‘the Great Labour Unrest’ of c. 1910–14. So far as the outside world was concerned, their attention turned, for obvious reasons, away from the colonies and more and more to Germany. At the very least all this indicates that there were other ‘discourses’ out there, at certain levels of British society. Of course it was possible to be a part of more than one discourse at the same time: to be both a socialist or a suffragist, for example, and an imperialist. Some definitely were, quite openly. Other radicals may have been imperialists – held typically imperialist attitudes, for example, like towards ‘inferior’ races – without knowing it. That’s another bone of contention just now. What is interesting, however, is that most of the more open and committed imperialists didn’t see it that way. They believed that these other discourses were essentially destructive of the kind of imperialism that they, at any rate, wanted to see the ‘people’ taking on, in this new age, when conditions in the

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world – cut-throat international competition, and so on – meant Britain was going to have to struggle to keep its imperial end up, and so for the first time needed the support of more than just a small number of the elite and the dregs to this end. Hence the enormous amount of imperial propaganda put out in this period, which John MacKenzie has analyzed so well. It’s an open question, however, how effective this was. (MacKenzie thinks it must have been so effective because there was so much of it. For my part, I wonder why there had to be so much of it, if the general population was as imperialistic as he believes.) Still, there can be little doubt that everyone (or nearly everyone) in Britain in this turn-of-the century period was at least aware of the Empire; far more so than they had been previously. It probably follows from this that more were proud of it; but that certainly wasn’t the case for all. ‘Anti-imperialism’ was a persistent thread running through society and politics even through the most ‘jingoistic’ phase of the ‘Age of Empire’, giving rise for example to the most trenchant and influential published attack on imperialism, in the form of J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study (1902), thrown together (a bit like this book) from previously published articles, and later taken up by Lenin (with fair acknowledgement, though he put Hobson down as a ‘bourgeois Liberal’) as the seed of what today is called the ‘capitalist’ or ‘neo-Marxist’ or ‘surplus capital’ theory of imperialism, which is still alive and well on the political Left today. (Lenin’s book was called – hopefully – Imperialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism. Well, it may yet turn out to be that.) Although Britain did not – of course – invent imperialism, it could be said to have invented anti-imperialism: in the sense of opposition to all expansionary empires, rather than just the ones that were oppressing you. (It’s this that disqualifies the American ‘revolutionaries’.) That must modify our picture of Britain as defined by its Empire slightly. Others – probably the great majority of Britons, although there’s no way of telling for sure – were simply left cold by all this imperialistic stuff. The enthusiastic imperialists shouted the loudest; but that may have been because they needed to in order to fill the echo chamber. We shouldn’t confuse noise with popularity or potency, or we’ll be in danger of over-estimating the support in Britain of – for example – the more shouty Brexiters today. For those who embraced the Empire a little more warmly, there were several ways of doing this. You didn’t need to be an imperialist, for example, in the aggressive sense implied by that word. Throughout the life of the Empire there had always been those who regarded it entirely differently: as a liberal, even liberationist, enterprise, dedicated to preparing ‘backward’ peoples for eventual self-rule. The word ‘eventual’, of course, was problematic, as was the arrogant

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paternalism that lay behind this idea; but in theory it was useful as a way of reconciling a liberal people to the notion of ruling others, initially illiberally. The most famous expression of this was Lord Macaulay’s in the House of Commons in 1833: that if the day ever came for India, under British tutelage, to demand her independence, ‘it will be the proudest day in English history’. In the early twentieth century a new word – in this context –‘Commonwealth’, was coined to express this vision. Thereafter the British Empire became ‘the British Commonwealth of Nations’, which sounded – and was – very different. (Later the ‘British’ was left off.) Even radical anti-imperialists, like me, could go along with it. It was pictured as a great warm multi-racial family, with almost no mention being made of Britain’s conquest of it, and so with readers (especially schoolchildren) being left to assume, presumably, that India and Nigeria and the others had joined it voluntarily. Between the Wars the comparison that was preferred was less that with the empires of old (Rome, etc.), than with the current fledgling League of Nations. It was its internationalism that was emphasized, rather than its imperialism. That was the ‘Empire’ that most Britons supported during most of the twentieth century. It may have been a far cry from the reality (the Mutiny, Amritsar, the Black and Tans, the Bombay famine, the Kenya Emergency, and so on); but it was far easier than the reality for more liberalminded Britons to swallow. For more positive imperialists – the enthusiastic, gung-ho ones – the advantage of the new packaging and nomenclature was that they could soften the blow of losing their Empire, which happened of course pretty rapidly after the Second World War. Now the process could be painted less as a humiliating defeat than as a culmination: an inevitable result of Britain’s imperial weakness all along, and what Britain had been working towards for some time; and even as an achievement to be proud of, as its successor states adopted – at least temporarily – many of the trappings and some of the principles of British constitutional government, including Parliaments, continued allegiance to the Queen, bewigged judges and – Britain’s greatest positive contribution to world civilization, this – cricket. The downside of this, however, may be that it helped keep alive an illusion that Brexiters like Boris Johnson later leant on: of the Commonwealth’s possible future resurrection as Britain’s refuge from Brussels’ imperial rule. We’ve yet to see how that works out. * That the Empire alienated or even distanced Britain from Europe while it was a going concern, therefore, seems unlikely. The reason for this is that, despite the Empire, what is called the ‘dominant discourse’ in British society never became

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an ‘imperial’ one, properly so-called (that is, involving ‘domination’ of others), but a liberal one: taking that word in its British sense, meaning simply to do with ‘liberty’, rather than its current disparaging American one, which seems to associate it more with ‘licence’. This was what the main theme of its school history books had always been, for example; the growth of British freedoms over the centuries (from Cromwell onwards), against the tyrannical – one might even say imperial – power that Britain’s monarchs had previously exercised over their subjects at home. It was similar to the American story in many ways, except that with Britain ‘freedom’ was seen as having evolved, slowly, rather than being seized suddenly at one revolutionary moment. (It was a Darwinian rather than a Creationist version of the theory.) It was because of this more pervasive myth that most Britons seem to have quite quickly turned against the kind of imperialism that was being bruited around about 1900, becoming disillusioned, for example, with the Boer War; for much the same reason, perhaps, as so many Americans later turned against the Vietnam and Iraq Wars – because they conflicted with their deeper national discourse. It’s also why the more zealous imperialists of those ‘high’ imperial days had always felt so nervous about their compatriots’ true imperial loyalties; not that they believed them to be anti-imperial, exactly, but because they distrusted this wishy-washy sort of imperialism, which was unlikely to encourage the democracy (and Britain was well on its way to full democracy then) to make the ‘hard’ and self-sacrificing measures that would be necessary if Britain was to maintain its worlddomination, in this far more frightening twentieth-century environment. They would have liked to eradicate this discourse. An early attempt to do this was J.R. Seeley’s famous book The Expansion of England (1883), whose explicit agenda was to down-play all this historical nonsense about the growth of Britain’s ‘liberties’, and replace it by an emphasis on, and pride in, its expansion and conquests. (Hence the remark that gave my earlier book its title: to read most of the history texts of his day, Seeley wrote, you would think that the British Empire had been acquired ‘in a fit of absence of mind’.) Some historians assume that Seeley was influential. It is more likely, however, that the underlying liberal discourse of his time – beneath all the ‘jingo’ shouting – was too deeply embedded for his alternative to take any great hold. Liberalism was fundamental to the middle classes’, especially the commercial middle classes’, whole way of being. It was also felt to be important for the working classes to believe, at any rate, that the thing that distinguished their nation from most other nations – made it ‘exceptional’, if you like: another similarity between Britain then and America today – was not its ‘empire’, but its

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liberties, and consequently theirs. The upper classes went along with this, possibly for cynical reasons: there’s no better way of keeping someone under control, after all, than by persuading him or her that they are ‘free’. So Seeley and his successors – Kipling, Curzon, a prolific imperial writer who called himself J. Ellis Barker, but whose real name was J.O. Eltzbacher (he was a German), and all the many other imperial propagandists of the time – were in fact whistling in the dark. (A footnote here. A surprising number of these most zealous British imperialists, not only Elzbacher, were either foreigners, or Anglo-Indians, or Ulstermen, or had been educated in Europe: were not mainstream Britons, therefore. That’s how they had managed to avoid the dominant liberal discourse. It may be significant in this context to point out most recent overt American imperialists – academics and journalists like Niall Ferguson – are foreigners too.) The proof of this pudding must be that when the time eventually came for Britain to relinquish its Empire in the twenty or thirty years after the end of the Second World War – not voluntarily, of course; ideally Britain’s imperial rulers would have liked more time to prepare their colonies for self-government: say a couple of hundred years – there was almost no fuss about it in Britain, except among a few right-wing oddballs; no great domestic political crisis, like in France (Suez was the nearest Britain came to that); and very little sense of hurt suffered by the majority of the British in Britain (as opposed to the British in places like Kenya and Rhodesia). People just went on with their lives. (I remember.) This was for two reasons: first, this ‘soft’, liberal and liberating discourse that had dominated thinking about the Empire for several decades now (so that decolonization wasn’t unexpected, or necessarily unwelcome); and second, the fact that they never had bothered very much about the Empire, ever. It was marginal, inessential. Britons could take it or leave it. That, of course, was what the old ‘committed’ imperialists had always been afraid of. Again, it is difficult for some people to credit this; and a literature has recently grown up maintaining that in fact Britain was more traumatized by these events than it seemed to be, as witnessed, for example, in the racism that has wracked its society at various times since the 1950s, and its ‘semi-detached’ relationship to the European Union: both of which are widely seen (especially in the rest of the European Union) as stemming from its people’s disappointment and resentment at their imperial decline. This is natural: you would have thought that such a big event would have had this kind of effect; just as you would have thought that while it was a going concern the Empire would have impacted domestically more. But we should be sceptical of this too. Obviously there are other reasons that might account for these two phenomena: large-scale immigration, for a start

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(that was unprecedented in recent times); and many things that could be said to be wrong with the EU. Denmark is probably more racist than Britain, and Sweden (where I live) equally Eurosceptic; in neither of those cases can ‘imperialism’ have been a factor – unless you think Denmark is still suffering trauma over the end of the great Viking age, or count Sweden’s world-hegemony in the flat-packed furniture market of IKEA. (The Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter once published a map of what it described as IKEA’s ‘imperiet’.) Certainly we can no longer assume this kind of after-shock in Britain’s case, in the light of the superficiality of the Empire’s impact on Britain before it declined and fell. Later, and after a decent interval, the myth of the Empire may have contributed to anti-European sentiment in Britain, especially on the political Right, as Britain was seen to decline in so many other ways, most of them having nothing to do with ‘Brussels’, but for which the EU was easily blamed; and looking back from which Britain’s imperial past seemed to shine now as a golden age. In politics, myth is nearly always more powerful than historical reality. These particular myths were bolstered by a number of films and TV series appearing in the 1970s and 80s featuring the Empire – especially the raj – generally in a romantic light, and adding to people’s nostalgia. But it is difficult to see this as a genuine popular distraction from Europe. In fact as the British Empire sank beneath the waves of history (leaving behind, as a Governor of Aden once told Dennis Healey, just two legacies: ‘the game of association football, and the expression “fuck off ” ’: that was one way of looking at it), most of its sentimental legacies were to be found at its furthest edges: not in Britain itself, but at the periphery. It had always been the case, I believe, that British imperialism, as a sentiment, was stronger in the settler colonies than it was in the metropole (except among the Irish); evidence of this may be that ‘Empire Day’ was adopted as a public holiday in Canada and Australia long before it was in Britain; which could explain why you find more of its flotsam (to continue the tidal metaphor) higher up the beach than you do in present-day Britain. I was impressed with this in Sydney, Australia, where I taught a few years ago: numerous imperial reminders all over, including a glorious Victorian shopping mall full of references to British and British imperial history (mechanical Big Bens, and so on); and even several shops where you could buy antique but also newly manufactured colonial-style pith helmets. I’ve never seen anything like this in Britain. My favourite example of this, however, is something I discovered when I first visited Austin, Texas, a few years ago: that there is a chapter of the ‘Daughters of the British Empire’ there, and indeed, as I’ve discovered from the internet, in many other parts of the United States. I’m

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sure it’s all meant ironically, doesn’t indicate any genuine residual sympathies for King George III, and is great fun. But it’s also a phenomenon that I don’t think exists, or could exist, in Britain now. If we’re searching for the domestic residue of British imperialism, therefore, it is there, rather than the offices of UKIP, where we should look.

Notes 1 This chapter largely summarizes two of my other ‘imperial’ books: The Lion’s Share: A History of British Imperialism 1850 to the Present (Abingdon: Routledge, [1975] 6th ed., 2020), and British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t (London: IB Tauris, 2016); to which readers are referred for further elaboration and evidence. 2 Which is taken partly from a lecture I delivered at the University of Texas in Austin in January 2007.

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Part Two

Britons and Europe

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3

Britons in Europe: The Nineteenth Century

Back in Europe, which was after all most Britons’ major home – even, spiritually, when they emigrated to the colonies – trips across the Channel from Britain to ‘the Continent’ were not rare.1 The Dover–Calais crossing, after all, is only fourteen miles, although in the days of sail that could be a lot for sensitive stomachs to bear. (Comic novels about intrepid travellers often made much of this.) Many of them were simple visitors or tourists in Europe; usually upper and upper-middle class early on, until Thomas Cook accidentally invented the tourist industry, for poorer people, in 1841. As well as these there were people who should properly be called ‘colonists’, if that term had not already been reserved for people who went to settle further abroad. They went there to set up businesses, for example; or to paint and draw; or merely to escape scandal at home. Lastly, there was the British royal family, whose relatives all lived abroad – ‘remember, Bertie, that we are Germans’ – at least until Edward VII started aping that quintessential English figure, Sir John Falstaff, when he came to the throne. * To begin with, the tourists were short-term visitors who visited the Continent for their holidays, cultural or otherwise, and often published accounts of their travels. (Or the cultured ones did, at least.) They started coming in significant numbers, and from a lower stratum of British society, in the middle of the nineteenth century, facilitated by Thomas Cook’s great new invention: the package tour. Cook was a temperance reformer, who one day in 1841 thought of hiring a special train to take some teetotallers to a conference in Loughborough, and then branched out from there. His first foreign excursion (up the Rhine) was in 1855. By 1870 he was arranging tours to India, the Holy Land and America. They were considerable enterprises. One party of sixty-two tourists he took to Egypt in 1869 was accompanied by twenty-one sleeping tents, two tents described as ‘dining saloons’, and three cooking tents – all these had to be pitched at every stop. They were accompanied by sixty-five saddle horses, eighty-seven packhorses, several mules, twenty-eight asses, fifty-six muleteers, three dragomans 33

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(or interpreters), eighteen camp servants and five watchdogs. Besides this, each tent was made out of heavy sail-cloth, and was fully carpeted, with an iron bedstead, and wool mattresses; and everyone had his or her own tin bath, with hot and cold water brought in in Standard oil tins. Europe, of course, didn’t require such extensive preparations; but the effect was the same; Cook was cocooning his touring parties from the countries they were visiting. Even before this British short-term visitors abroad usually had things made easy and homely for them. They stayed at hotels run by English women: a whole street of them in St Petersburg, the Galernoi Oulitza: Mrs Wilson’s, Mrs Hall’s, Mrs Bowyer’s, and what Murray’s Handbook to Russia describes as ‘an excellent one conducted by the Misses Benson’, at the rate of three silver roubles a day, including a full English breakfast and regular (albeit week-old) copies of The Times. To guide them to the right ‘sights’, they had those Murray’s Handbooks (predecessors of the more famous Baedeker’s guides) to help them, in English of course, which had much the same effect: releasing visitors from having to ask anyone the way to anywhere, for example. The result was supposed to have been the overrunning of Europe by hordes of boorish British tourists who made themselves thoroughly unpopular by, for example, insisting on talking to foreigners in English, and then when they didn’t understand simply talking in louder English (that’s a very old joke); resorting to fisticuffs whenever they came up against an obstreperous gendarme or douanier; and making themselves generally obnoxious. Here’s one description of the breed, by William Makepeace Thackeray. That brutal, ignorant, peevish bully of an Englishman is showing himself in every city of Europe. One of the dullest creatures under heaven, he goes trampling Europe under foot, shouldering his way into galleries and cathedrals, and bustling into palaces with his buckram uniform. At church or theatre, gala or picture-gallery, his face never varies. A thousand delightful sights pass before his bloodshot eyes, and don’t affect him. Countless brilliant scenes of life and manners are shown him, but never move him. He goes to church, and calls the practices there degrading and superstitious, as if his altar was the only one that was acceptable. He goes to picture-galleries, and is more ignorant about Art than a French shoeblack. Art, Nature pass, and there is no dot of admiration in his stupid eyes.

Another fault was their extravagant display of money, especially by those who wished to pass themselves off as ‘milords’, whose effect was invariably to encourage the overcharging of all British visitors. Again, the Brits were notorious for ‘talking loud, laughing, and stamping with their feet while the service is going

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on’ in Catholic churches; and for their hot-headedness. ‘Our countrymen’, wrote Murray, ‘have a reputation for pugnacity’ abroad – for resorting to their fists when obstructed by policemen or douaniers; fist-fighting being particularly associated with the British then. (It was more ‘manly’ than knives or swords.) They often made fools of themselves, in the clothes they wore, or else in their clumsy aping of foreign manners. What was worst of all, however, was the Englishman’s arrogance, which wasn’t confined to the upper classes – who, it was implied, were entitled to be arrogant. ‘Every denizen of Cheapside and the Minories that travels abroad, deems himself immeasurably above “the foreigner”, . . . and struts about like an upstart visiting the servants’ hall.’ This, claimed Thackeray, was the characteristic which, more than anything else, made Britain ‘so magnificently hated throughout Europe’: ‘this amazing and indomitable insular pride.’ (We may be familiar with this stereotype today, but more often applied to American tourists, at least a few years ago, when the US was at as confident a stage of its capitalist development as Britain had been in the mid-nineteenth century. That must have had something to do with it.) It is not a flattering picture of the English tourist abroad, but it’s a common one, in dozens of travel books of the time, including those of the novelist Charles Lever, who lived in Brussels, and who once got involved in a famous public row with Thomas Cook, who objected to his constant sneering at the behaviour of his clients there. It was clearly not entirely undeserved. In the 1840s it was adjudged serious enough for John Murray to insert in a new Handbook he was compiling for France some words of advice to his readers. The Englishman abroad, he wrote: ‘too often forgets that he is the representative of his country, and that his countrymen will be judged by his own conduct.’ Murray’s first bit of advice to him (and one presumes her) was to spend ‘at least some months’ in ‘hard labour with grammars and dictionaries’ before embarking. That advice may not have been widely heeded. Why should it be, when you had your English-run boarding house and your English-language Murray to protect you from the ‘alien’? * It looks bad; but there are some extenuating factors. The first is that British tourists on the Continent did have to put up with a lot: from over-officious douaniers at the ports and borders – this particular form of bureaucracy was virtually unknown in Britain, with passports not being required to enter the country until the 1900s; bad roads; uncomfortable carriages before the railways came; notoriously short beds in Germany, covered in duvets, which Victorian travellers never got used to (there are stories of them being stifled by this form of bedding); the unfamiliar, spicy food; through to gangs of urchins following

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them around in Paris, apparently, yelling insults at them like ‘Jean Bull’ and ‘cochon’ and ‘biftek aux pommes de terre’. In Italy there were banditti; in Paris the danger of being run over (Paris had no pavements for pedestrians); and everywhere the danger of being robbed, swindled or overcharged. All this rubbed visitors up the wrong way. But not all of them. Another ubiquitous comic theme in nineteenth-century novels and travel books featured travellers who became too enamoured of foreign parts: young dandies who returned to clean-shaven Britain (as it was in the 1840s) sporting wispy continental moustaches, for example, and those who made fools of themselves by indulging too enthusiastically in foreign dancing and flirting. The very novelty of foreign places had a seductive attraction for many English visitors, who went for it full tilt, and especially the vices of the Continent; having learned to eat à la Francaise (preserving the English fashion of drinking), to intrigue à l’Italienne, to smoke, take snuff, and swear à l’allemande, and à la mode Hollandaise; they not unfrequently add to this the pride and want of cleanliness of the Spaniard, and almost always get a taste of the spirit of infidelity and the immoral philosophy which were introduced at the beginning of the French revolution, and which have since become so general throughout Europe. These acquisitions, added to a love of novelty, a restlessness of disposition, and an affected contempt for home [are reckoned to make] a pretty accomplished gentleman.

Continental affectations, therefore, could be considered to be smart, at least among a set that was large enough to be widely noticed: which suggests that not every tourist was an arrogant xenophobe. And if there were these two categories, why not others in between: reasonable people who visited the Continent for good sensible reasons, behaved well, and so didn’t furnish such attractive material for comic novelists and satirists? As well as this literary motive for exaggeration, there must have been an element of travel snobbery involved here. ‘Reasonable’ travellers on the Continent were always anxious not to be associated with this new breed of vulgar or innocent tourist, as they were just beginning to be called; and could go to enormous lengths – including staying in the most uncomfortable but ‘unspoilt’ districts and hotels, and running down the Cooks people for all they were worth – to distance themselves from the latter. That may have led them to exaggerate the ubiquity of the worst-behaved visitors. It’s a shame that the latter – not being literary folk – didn’t chronicle themselves. The snobs never mentioned

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the moderate, better-behaved travellers; although to judge from the large number of travel-books the latter wrote, there must have been a fair number of them around. How they avoided each other is something of a mystery. The second and more important extenuating point is that the xenophobia that did exist, was at least discriminating. The Victorians may have scorned foreigners; but that didn’t stop them disliking some less than others. In general, the foreign countries most castigated in novels and travel books are those that are most reactionary by Victorian standards: dictatorial, arbitrary, bureaucratic, backward economically (that is, not yet alive to the advantages of the free market), and tyrannizing over other countries. The country that comes out worst is always Austria, because of its reactionary domestic institutions, the sway it held over Hungary and northern Italy against their will, and (especially) its secret political police. Russia is next. The ones that come out best are usually Belgium, Piedmont and some of the German states, because of their relative liberality. The same is true at other levels. One of the most interesting sources for Victorian attitudes to the Continent is a little book published in 1850, called Near Home, or the Countries of Europe Described, by a Mrs Favell Lee Bevan, which was a kind of nursery schoolbook in geography for Victorian tots. For many Victorians it must have been the earliest source of much of their knowledge about foreign places. It was well regarded when it came out: one reviewer described it as ‘a well-arranged . . . book for children . . . full of useful information, pleasantly conveyed for the most part in the homely monosyllabic Saxon which children learn from their mothers and nurses’ (I think if I were a Victorian father, I’d worry a little about my children picking up monosyllabic Saxon from their nurse); and which had the effect, when it was read to them, of making them ‘clap their little hands with delight’. Of course, it is prejudiced. For a start, it is chock full of religious bias, as is understandable when you realize what its sources were. There’s no sign in the book that Mrs Bevan had ever been abroad herself. Most of her information came from books written by Protestant ministers who had gone to the Continent for the purpose of peddling bibles there, and had sometimes been arrested for it (like George Borrow in Spain): not exactly the most objective of sources. Consequently nearly every page of Near Home contains an attack on the Roman Catholic Church, or on what she calls ‘Mahomedanism’, and its Holy text, the Koran: a book filled with ‘foolish stories, and absurd laws, and horrible lies’. (Had she read it?) The point is, however, that this blatant religious bias didn’t affect Mrs Bevan’s views of the other aspects of the countries she described. She found many kind

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things to say about Catholic countries, and had many unkind things to say about Protestant countries, including Britain, whose people she characterized as ‘not very pleasant in company, because they do not like strangers, or taking much trouble . . . slow to trust people . . . cold in their manners . . . too fond of money, as well as of eating and drinking . . . often in low spirits, and apt to grumble’: all this despite the fact that ‘they ought to be the happiest people in the world, for there is no country in which there are so many bibles’. She thought the Calvinist Scots were dirty, miserable and too fond of their whisky. All this was in contrast to the Catholic Irish, who despite their abject superstitions were ‘The merriest, drollest people in the world . . . kind and good-natured’, and respectful towards their parents. Judgments on the religion of a country, therefore, however biased and unfair they might have been, were kept quite separate from judgments about other national characteristics, and do not seem to have prejudiced those judgments in any way. Mrs Bevan did indeed have some very clear-cut ideas about national characteristics, of a kind which would strike us as being a little simplistic (to say the least) today. In fact, they were simple enough to be put into a kind of catechism, which children were supposed to learn by heart. For example: The gayest nation in Europe are the French. The gravest nation are the Dutch. The most industrious nation are the Germans. The idlest nation are the Portuguese. The dirtiest nation are the Poles. The simplest nation are the Icelanders. The most cunning are the Italians . . .

and so on. These in fact are fairly representative of some of the common stereotypes of the day: which may have been grossly overgeneralized but were not uniformly unfavourable, and most of which appear to have been based, however superficially and second-hand, not on mere religious prejudice but on (other people’s) observation. There were others. The French, for example, were widely seen as a cheerful, humorous, resilient people, with a strain of naughtiness in the relations between their sexes which was as much an object of envy in England as of disapproval; rather superficial in their conversation but attractively and wittily so; capricious in their politics; unnecessarily hostile to the British, it seemed to the Victorians; fond of their wine but never apparently ostentatiously drunk on it; perhaps not very clean: ‘A Frenchman, they say, is only washed twice: once at his birth, and

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then again after he is dead’; and much more sophisticated artistically than the duller English, who in dress and many other things followed their fashions slavishly: all in all an attractive people who could easily be forgiven their two worst faults, which were the way they disported themselves on the Lord’s Day, and the insubstantial nature of their breakfasts. They were also the ‘race’ most seized on as the ‘Other’ that the English liked to define themselves against (not black people), which could be regarded as a kind of closeness. The Germans, before they became united and strong and a threat to Britain, had a rather different image: they were supposed (as they always have been) to work hard by contrast with the English, but to little material effect, chiefly because they were so imaginative, sentimental, romantic and dreamy, luxuriating in grand contemplative schemes and poetic reveries while Englishmen put their rather more limited or stunted intelligences to more practical things; rather unattractive in appearance and dress and manners – one traveller described them ‘fuming tobacco from every pore, hawking and spitting incessantly all over the floor’, sweating, belching and ‘unbuttoning’ themselves during meals – yet admirably home-loving (domesticity was considered a prime virtue in Victorian Britain), always content with their lot and hospitable. The Dutch were admired for their cleanliness above everything: Murray’s Handbook to the Low Countries even claimed – surely mistakenly – that the cows there were trained to grow their tails vertically upwards, ‘with a view of promoting the cleanliness of the animals while in the stall’. The Italians were considered to be artistic and clever; and were very popular with the ladies, who apparently had romantic notions about handsome dark-eyed Italian noblemen forced into outlawry by their principles, and who might seize young female travellers and carry them off struggling to their lairs in the Abruzzi mountains to have their way with them – if they were lucky. (I’m sorry, but this is a genuine theme.) And so on: there are similar little portraits of all the nations and peoples of Europe as they appeared to the Victorians that could be added, which of course reflected the cultural and moral outlook of a certain class in contemporary Britain, at least; but not in a blinkered way, or in a way that always implied British superiority over foreigners. On the other hand, even some of this apparent praise for Continentals might not be quite what it seemed. Most Victorians acknowledged that most foreigners were cleverer than they were; more artistic; more stylish; more attractive, and many other things; but there was always a hint that none of these qualities was really worth having, by comparison with the Briton’s rather duller virtues. ‘Cleverness’, for example, was never a quality rated very highly by the Victorians, who tended rather to despise the Germans for their impractical philosophizing,

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and to call the Italians’ cleverness ‘cunning’, which has different overtones entirely. The phrase ‘too clever by half ’, after all, is a very distinctively English one, which may not be found in any other language, and indicates the Victorians’ preference for what they liked to call solid practical sense over mere intelligence. It is interesting in this connexion to read Wilkie Collins’s account of why he chose an Italian to be the villain of his famous novel The Woman in White (usually regarded as the first detective story): not, he was at pains to emphasize, because he considered Italians to be more villainous than Englishmen, but because he considered that the crime which formed the plot of the book was ‘too ingenious for an English villain’. As well as this, some of the other fields in which the continent was acknowledged to be superior to Britain were fields in which it was also felt that it was in a way a mark of inferiority to be superior in them. Take art, for example, which every Englishman agreed continentals were far better at than they were. Was it really a manly thing to excel at painting pictures and composing sonatas, when there were so many more serious things to do in the world, like building steam-engines and selling cheap cotton goods, and making money by producing things and employing people? Samuel Laing, whom we will meet in a later chapter, even claimed that ‘high’ art was a mark of retarded development, the product of an earlier stage of civilization, and would come to an end, thankfully, when liberal capitalism had conquered the whole world. This philistinism, which is a well-known aspect of mid-Victorian free market capitalism, as it is, of course, of today’s, was one important reason why very few middle-class folk would ever admit that the Continent was really superior to England. The more superior it was in these respects, the more inferior it must be overall. * To really get to know a country, however, you need to live and work in it. This comprised the next category of Britons living in Europe: the professionals, at every level of society, who were in demand there for their expertise. Many of them worked in industries of various kinds, which is hardly surprising considering industrial revolutionary Britain’s early lead in this field. At the start of the nineteenth century this was discouraged, with laws in operation forbidding the export of machinery and skilled men abroad, so as to weaken the foreign competition. These however were frequently evaded, and were repealed in 1825 (the ban on skilled workers) and 1842 (the ban on machinery), partly for ideological reasons: the doctrine of free trade taught that competition could only be healthy. So thereafter, British contractors were found all over Europe: building railways (Thomas Brassey built many of France’s); setting up factories;

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installing new machines; and teaching Continentals the skills of their trades. There must have been many hundreds of them: capitalists, managers, foremen, factory workers, train drivers. British travellers were forever bumping into them, to their considerable national pride. One visitor to Russia was taken around a new mint in St Petersburg in 1832, which he noticed had been built by Boulton and Watt of London and was still being run by an Englishman. This he said was pretty typical: ‘in nearly all the large institutions of this metropolis the superintendents are Scotch or English’, running machinery imported from England. Another traveller found himself miles from civilization in northern Sweden, in unexplored terrain, as he thought, when he suddenly came across a sawmill run by an Englishman called Dixon – and much more efficiently, he noticed, than the Swedes ran their own. In France in 1906, 2,700 Britons were enumerated who were engaged in industry and mining: and this must have been after the main peak, when foreigners no longer needed British help. Unfortunately it is difficult to get an accurate idea of these solid exiles’ numbers in the nineteenth century; or of their attitudes towards their hosts. Few of them wrote these down. (Samuel Laing, infra, was a rare exception.) And they were clearly not grotesque enough to merit mention in humorous novels. There were other British ‘professionals’ living on the Continent too. The wine trade had its factors in France, Italy, Germany, Portugal and Spain: making sure that the local produce was adapted to the British palate. (Port and sherry were largely developed for the English market, and the champagne bottle was invented in England.)2 British domestic servants were found all over the place; some of them of course in British households abroad, but far more serving the natives. They were found even as far away as Russia, where – claimed one traveller – nearly every upper-class family in Moscow had at least one Englishman or woman on its domestic staff; usually as a governess or nursery maid (in Russia apparently the English were regarded as ‘unrivalled in the duties of a nursery’), but also occasionally as ‘gardeners, horse-jockies [sic], and mechanics’. There seem to have been a fair number of British doctors (like Lever) working abroad, too; again in Russia the chief physician at the Sheremetiev Hospital in Moscow turned out to be an Englishman. That was in addition to the lodging-house keepers, aforementioned, providing homes from home for more transient British visitors. So Brits weren’t exactly thin on the ground in Europe, especially in the warmer and more ‘cultured’ or ‘scenic’ parts. It’s for this reason, incidentally, that we learn less about Scandinavia from nineteenth century travel books, apart from Norway, with its ‘sublime’ mountains and fjords. Laing (infra) was an exception. *

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Lastly, there were the ‘colonists’. Europe is not usually considered by historians as a field for British ‘colonization’; but in almost every respect, apart from the political power Britain’s better-known ‘colonialists’ wielded in countries like Australia and Canada, it should qualify. (The word ‘colonia’ originally simply meant a piece of cultivated ground. Later it was stretched to include settlements abroad, but traces of the original meaning remain, for example in the Swedish word for what Brits call an ‘allotment’, which is ‘kolonilott’.) The numbers of Britons settling and ‘cultivating’ on the Continent – 20,000 enumerated in France in 1851, for example, rising to 40,000 in 1891, though these may include shorterterm visitors – can’t compare with the millions who emigrated to the formal British colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or the even more (it should be noted) who settled in the United States; but what they lacked in sheer numbers they gained in the ties they maintained with the mother country, cementing the relationship. Australia is 10,000 miles from Britain, as the crow flies; France a mere fourteen. Most emigrants to the colonies lost touch with their people at ‘home’ relatively quickly; less so those who settled nearer by, in France or the German states. A day’s post would link a Parisian with a Londoner; it might take four months from Sydney. A search through the printed record of the time makes this abundantly clear. Newspapers at every ‘level’, carried far more European news than Imperial; and for every novel published that was set in the Empire (usually at the very end of the nineteenth century), there were a dozen featuring derring-do on the Continent. ‘Post-colonial’ historians recently, seeing ‘imperialism’ everywhere, have rather obscured this fact. Many of these British settlers formed little communities of their own: which may have inoculated them from the full French (or whatever) ‘experience’. Continental cities, especially capitals, had little ghettoes of Brits surrounding them; as well as some smaller towns that the Brits were felt to have virtually taken over. One such was Pau, in the south of France, with its own C of E church, racecourse and cricket pitch, and dubbed locally ‘la ville anglaise’. The more settled anglais were there for a variety of reasons: running hotels for visiting compatriots, usually the linguistically or culinarily challenged; on official state business in the capitals, on the staffs of embassies; or serving the latter in ancillary roles, as Anglican chaplains, for example, or doctors. Charles Lever, many of whose novels are set on the Continent, went there originally as a physician to the diplomatic community in Belgium. (He is a great source of information about the relations between the British and Continentals, although as a mainly comic writer – rather like Dickens – one suspects that he occasionally exaggerated oddities, on both sides, for effect.) That was to be expected, of course.

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But there were other distinctive British communities abroad. One consisted of aristocrats who had fallen on hard times; or pretentious snobs who found it easier to be accepted as ‘milords’ and ‘miladies’ there. Genuine aristos often felt more affinity with their class-comrades abroad than with their own compatriots, especially those working for the British Foreign Office (as is obvious from their private correspondence), which is why they were chosen for the best diplomatic jobs. It was a question of class-identity trumping national identity. Others, below them in status, were attracted by the rather jollier upper-class scene in France and Italy, for example, than in stuffy England, and of course by the art. That made them somewhat suspect among the stuffier British, for whom jolliness and art suggested immorality, and who were perfectly aware that some upper-class residents were in fact fleeing from hints of scandal at home. This gave some spice to things. At the root of it was the fact that the British aristocracy abroad was too thin on the ground to be too fussy about whom it admitted to its social ranks, and invited to its balls and luncheons: so that errant earls and duchesses who would have been peremptorily ‘cut’ in the streets at home were tolerated there, to make up the numbers. Besides, distance meant that they couldn’t be checked up on so easily. Several writers of the time commented on this lack of discrimination shown by the British upper-classes abroad; even ‘the most rigid censor of morals’, wrote Lever, ‘leaves his conscience [behind] at the Ship Hotel at Dover . . . whatever the cause, he will know at Baden – ay, and walk with – the man he would cut in Bond Street’. Not only moral but also social standards seemed to be relaxed on the Continent. Victorian Britain bred a lot of men and women who aspired to ‘class’, but who in their own country weren’t allowed within sniffing distance of a proper Duke. Coming to the Continent they suddenly found that the pearly gates were open to them. These people were apparently ubiquitous: middle-class snobs with social pretensions, who posed as at least the younger sons and daughters of aristocrats, and were gratified to find themselves accepted as such in Paris or Florence with no questions asked. Some of them were rank villains; or if not that, then semi-bankrupts who had fled abroad to escape their creditors, or because the cost of living was cheaper there, but lived it up in order to sustain an impression of well-being. These were a kind of equivalent to the political refugees whom Britain received from the Continent; refugees of a different sort, fleeing not from political oppression, but from social. That is how Continentals often regarded Britons: as formally ‘free’, but slaves to convention. Apparently this was a new phenomenon in the nineteenth century. In earlier times British residents on the Continent had been a better class of people

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altogether, ‘objects of respect’, as well as rather fewer in numbers. Already by 1823, however, according to a contemporary essayist, this had totally changed. Now ‘the stories against the English are endless’. (We should remember that ‘English’, as the word was used then, generally included Scots and Welsh.) Our essayist listed them thus: ‘rogues, bigamists, vamped up male and female anglers and throwers of the matrimonial net, uncertificated bankrupts, nobodies who here try to be somebodies, flashy smugglers, wandering imposters, . . . tradesmen, adventurers, half-educated boys, . . . low speculators, ruined pigeons and gazetted Greeks’ – a ‘Greek’ was a man who cheated at cards, and a ‘pigeon’ his pathetic victim; on the whole not particularly worthy ambassadors for their country. Charles Lever, from his surgery in Brussels, blamed them for the poor press that Britain invariably got abroad; for how could continentals take seriously its claim to be ‘high-spirited and honourable’, when these were the specimens they saw amongst them in their own countries? ‘It is vain to assure foreigners’, he wrote in 1844, ‘that these people are not known, nor received at home, neither held in credit nor estimation; their conclusive reply is, ‘how is it, then, that they are admitted to the tables of your ambassadors, and presented at our courts?” ’ – to which there was no answer. * This is what can be gathered from contemporary Britons’ written and reported accounts of their personal experiences on the Continent. But are these reliable guides to British attitudes towards Europeans overall? It would be surprising if they were. Nineteenth-century travel writers were atypical, both of Britons generally, and even of those of them who travelled abroad. This is worth emphasizing, if only to counter assumptions made in some literary academic circles that ‘culture’ – in this instance travel books – reflects society. It doesn’t. Culture in its narrow sense (‘high’ culture) was a minority interest in nineteenthcentury Britain. In its broader sense, it was multiform. The nation was made up of a variety of cultures, based on region, class, gender and probably a dozen other factors, which coexisted only uneasily and very often clashed. Travel writers represented only one small part of this mélange. Two important qualifications are that they were leisured, and therefore quite rich; and literary, in order to want to write books. That set them apart from at least 90 per cent of their compatriots. Thereafter one of three other motives generally came into play: a love of art, or of the ‘sublime’, which was closely associated with it; a spirit of enquiry; and an adventurous streak. Nearly every travel writer in the nineteenth century displayed at least three, and sometimes all five, of these characteristics. (We’ll be meeting an exception later on.) It would be difficult

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to find any of them among the millions of factory workers, farm labourers, shopkeepers, financiers, women, and even country gentlemen – not usually the most ‘cultured’ of people – they left behind. That made travel writers a special breed. Even among fellow travellers they were a tiny and uncharacteristic minority. Going abroad has never been confined to leisured literary folk. Most transnational movements in recent history have been less voluntary, for a start, or else motivated by more material considerations than interest and fun. Exiles and refugees far outnumber mere ‘travellers’; as do nomads, migrants, imported slaves, gästarbeiter, industrialists and military invaders. What their views of their host countries would have been in the nineteenth century can only be guessed at. They are only occasionally met with in our travel writers’ narratives. Very few of them published their own accounts. They did not have the time. If they had, it is fair to guess that they would have been different from, and almost certainly deeper than, our literary folks’ surface impressions. They might also have been more representative of their compatriots. As well as this, travel writers were affected by certain conventions arising from the nature of their chosen genre. This could influence not only what they chose to write about, but how. Travel books were written for a market, firstly, and for self-glorification (‘vanity publishing’) in the second place. The market set demands of its own. One was that the subjects of books should be significant, politically or in some other way. They should also be interesting, even fascinating, and possibly sensational; which ruled out quite a lot of mundane description of, for example, foreign customs and institutions that were just the same as theirs. That – together with everyone’s natural tendency in a strange country to notice differences first – encouraged a concentration on the exotic, the delightfully primitive, and the thrillingly awful, to the detriment of the ordinary, which is the main feature of most human societies. Meatballs (köttbullar) are a lot less fun to describe than festering fish (surströmming), so, in many books, Swedish cuisine became defined by the latter. This also fulfilled another function: of impressing the reader with how deeply the author had imbibed the alien culture he was describing. All travel writers were keen to paint themselves as empathetic observers of ‘abroad’; as genuine ‘travellers’ rather than ‘tourists’ – superficial holidaymakers sheltered from acculturation by the trappings of the leisure industry. A certain exaggeration facilitated this. * All this was before national prejudice kicked in; of which there is no better exemplar than the fictional Mr Podsnap in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend

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(1864). Podsnap is the quintessential British chauvinist. At one stage he meets a foreigner at a party, and immediately starts regaling him. ‘We Englishmen are very proud of our Constitution, Sir. It Was Bestowed Upon Us By Providence. No Other Country is so Favoured as This Country.’ ‘And ozer countries?’ – the foreign gentleman was beginning, when Mr. Podsnap put him right again. ‘We do not say Ozer; we say Other: the letters are “T” and “H”; You say Tay and Aish, You Know . . . The sound is “th” – “th” ”!’ ‘And other countries,’ said the foreign gentleman. ‘They do how?’ ‘They do, Sir,’ returned Mr. Podsnap, gravely shaking his head; ‘they do – I am sorry to be obliged to say it – as they do.’

There we have it. Apparently. Xenophobia is supposed to have been a notorious barrier to Britons’ comprehension of foreign cultures from at least the eighteenth century on. Some writers even saw the bolstering of patriotism as one of the functions of foreign travel: ‘the more we become acquainted with the institutions of other countries’, wrote the traveller Samuel Rogers in 1830, ‘the more highly must we value our own’. On the other hand, this was not a universal attitude. Early nineteenthcentury British literature contains plenty of examples of xenophiles, as well as the occasional Podsnap. Our young bucks disembarking at Dover with wispy fur on their upper lips may be an example. Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote about Norway, justified foreign travel on exactly the opposite grounds to Rogers: ‘Mixing with mankind, we are obliged to examine our prejudices, and often imperceptibly lose, as we analyse them.’ The extent to which any travellers really lost their prejudices, of course, is a moot point. But most were more aware of this barrier to their understanding of alien societies than they were of others: like their narrow and atypical backgrounds, and the limitations imposed by the genre. Lastly, there were the limits imposed by their own abilities. British travel writers by and large were not a particularly distinguished or perceptive bunch. Most of them were amateurs, dilettantes or – just occasionally – serious authors, like Dickens and the Trollopes, but writing in what was considered to be an inferior genre. Occasionally their books were not really about their travels, but about themselves. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, published in 1796, for example, is largely a narrative of her inner emotions, following a marital crisis, set against grand scenery. Its climax comes when she bares her breasts to the raging elements, on top of a hill. Others were simply very inferior observers and writers. Sometimes

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accounts of the same country could be blankly contradictory: such as those that described Scandinavian women as universally flat-chested, and others who commented on their bustiness. It clearly depended on whom our authors met. Of course, inferior writers can reflect broader opinions, and sometimes more faithfully than the Dickenses and Trollopes and Wollstonecrafts; but they cannot be relied upon. So they need to be handled gingerly and critically, and maybe simply used to illustrate attitudes that we have better reason to trust, either empirically – from a broader range of evidence; or theoretically and contextually – from what we know or can hypothesize from the general cultures that nurtured them. In fact many of the views about foreign places of the Victorians generally – stay-at-homes as well as travellers – were based not at all on observation, or even prejudice, but on ignorance, fuelled by their own wishes and dreams. Scandinavia is an example. Very few Britons travelled there – too cold? – but that furnished all the more opportunity for them to make things up. The frozen north was believed in some historical circles in Britain to mark the origins of the northern European ‘race’, pouring south out of its forests: the ‘vagina gentium’ of some indelicate accounts – actually of course the prehistoric movement of peoples went precisely the other way; and also the repository of European valour and virtue. This idea had a long pedigree. The notion that the Norsemen had given England its ‘freedom’ for example, or at least its Parliament, can be traced to the seventeenth century. Admiration for Nordic manliness, independence, valour and the rest goes back to the rediscovery of ancient Norse literature in the eighteenth century, and especially apparently Thomas Percy’s free translation of The Death Song of Ragnar Lodbrog (1763), which thrilled the English romantics with its vision of a hero laughing in the face of death. How common these images were outside literary circles is hard to say; but there seem to have been few rival ones, so a little of the ancient free Norse hero will have gone a long way. Other factors probably underpinned them, though these are even more difficult to quantify, such as the fashionable ‘noble savage’ idea of the same period and a common association of virtue with cold. James Thomson’s poem Liberty, for example (1836), described the Swedish ‘genius’ as having been ‘purged and tempered hard by frost’. That probably had something to do with the complementary link between warmth and sensuality, which is what of course lay behind England’s widespread contempt for southern Europeans, and its public schools’ penchant for cold baths. One final element may have been wishful thinking. People need a model of innocence and purity and greatness to sustain them in difficult times. Scandinavia

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was one place that fulfilled this function for the British to a certain extent. (It may do still, with the ‘Swedish model’ of society elevated to that sort of eminence by the besieged Left elsewhere.) The old Norse myths helped; but so did the widespread British ignorance of the region. Ideal societies have always been placed in terrae incognitae. One example illustrates this. It comes from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters. Wollstonecraft did not altogether go along with the primitive-idealist view of Scandinavian society, but that did not stop her wishing she could. For her, however, utopia lay just a little bit further than she was able to travel, to the north. That was what she was told: that the more one penetrated into these icy regions, the more mankind’s unadulterated noble qualities were to be found – ‘independence and virtue; affluence without vice; cultivation of mind without depravity of heart; [together] with “ever smiling liberty” – the nymph of the mountain’. ‘The description I received of them’, she wrote, ‘carried me back to the fables of the golden age’. That comment is suggestive. Did she believe these fabulous accounts? She went on (remember that she was suffering emotionally at this time): My imagination hurries me forward to seek an asylum in such a retreat from all the disappointments I am threatened with; but reason drags me back, whispering that the world is still the world, and man the same compound of weakness and folly, who must occasionally excite love and disgust, admiration and contempt. But this description, though it seems to have been sketched by a fairy pencil, was given me by a man of sound understanding, whose fancy seldom appears to run away with him.

Other Britons’ impressions of foreign countries are just as likely to have been formed by ‘imagination’ and dreams, either utopian, as in this case, or dystopian, often incited by governments; against a background of rank ignorance. So generalization is impossible. Podsnap may have been typical, or not. His views were certainly not ubiquitous. As with all other instances of national or ‘race’ attitudes, they differed according to class, function, circumstances, prior prejudices and a host of other things; and could always change. In any case they may not often have been instrumental: that is, exerting any great influence on Britons’ conduct towards foreigners. Britain didn’t trade with any other nation, or go to war with it, because of popular attitudes towards it. The most the latter did was to provide exotic and amusing material for travel books and novels, even when the reality was rather duller. Lastly: all this is likely to have been as true of other countries as it was of Britain. Britain (and especially England) has long had a particular reputation for

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xenophobia, but there is no evidence that it was worse there than anywhere else. It is likely not to have been, simply on account of all this contact they had with foreigners abroad, as tourists, travellers, workers or settlers. Even a cursory reading of foreign equivalents of the texts used as sources for British attitudes in this chapter is likely to suggest that the French, for example, were every bit as Anglophobe as the Brits were Francophobe. It is possible that the British got this reputation because their novelists – like Dickens – caricatured their supposed national chauvinism so much. Podsnap has a lot to answer for. In reality, and as a generalization, the most xenophobic people are probably those who are most ignorant of ‘abroad’. The isolationist Chinese were this in the nineteenth century. (Many of them thought Europeans were cannibals, couldn’t bend, and would die of constipation if they didn’t have rhubarb.) In Britain, it was the untraveled working classes who were most likely to succumb to this sort of prejudice; like the inhabitants of Hartlepool during the Napoleonic Wars who hanged a monkey under the illusion that he was a Frenchman. (That may be apocryphal, but Hartlepudlians have never been allowed to forget it.) Otherwise Britons’ prejudices in this regard are likely to have been smoothed down by the sheer variety of contacts that so many of them had with the Continent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; both over there and – the subject of the next chapter – in Britain itself.

Notes 1 Most of the references for this chapter can be found in its original version: ‘ “Bureau and Barrack”: Early Victorian Attitudes towards the Continent’, in Victorian Studies, vol.27 no.4, Summer 1984. Another version (with citations) appears as ‘British Colonial Migration in the 19th Century: The Short Route’, in Marie Ruiz (ed.), Bridging Boundaries in British Migration History: Essays in Memory of Eric Richards (London: Anthem Press, 2020). 2 See Henry Jeffreys, The Empire of Booze: British History Through the Bottom of a Glass (London: Unbound, 2016).

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Britain and Asylum

The other way Britons could have met their European neighbours in the past was as visitors and immigrants.1 We have figures for the numbers of Europeans living in Britain during the nineteenth century, although these don’t distinguish between short- and long-term stayers. (Census counts are taken over one 24-hour period every ten years.) The figures are not large: 24,000 recorded for England and Wales in 1821; 50,829 in1851, 84,000 in 1861; 100,638 in 1871; 118,031 for 1881; and 339,436 for 1901, out of a total population of 12 million rising to 32 million over the same period. But with the exception of Americans (around 7,000–8,000), they greatly outnumbered those coming from outside Europe – this is despite the Empire; and in their turn were probably dwarfed by Irish travellers to the mainland, who weren’t technically ‘foreign’, of course. The majority of Continental incomers came from Germany ‘including Prussia’ in 1871 (32,823), and France (17,906): both figures rising steadily but not steeply towards the end of the century. These included ‘seamen’, who were most visible, of course, in port towns. Otherwise London took about 50 per cent of European immigrants, which didn’t leave very many for elsewhere. So, apart from London, and certain distinct areas of London at that – Soho, Seven Dials – Continentals were very thin on the ground in nineteenth-century Britain, noticeable mainly as individuals, or working in particular specialist trades – Italian ice-cream sellers, German industrialists and bakers, domestic servants, musicians (including 381 ‘street musicians’ in 1871) – rather than as substantial groups. That’s how they generally appear in Victorian novels; or otherwise as figures of kindly fun. Many of them contributed significantly and positively to Britain’s commercial and cultural life. Any labour competition – provoking working-class opposition by lowering wages – came from the Irish, not from them. (There were substantial riots directed against the Irish.) So there was very little reason for native Britons to resent literal foreigners living among them, as they are supposed to have done in 2016. * 51

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There was one exception. The ‘refugee’ community in Britain, although – again – fairly small for most of the nineteenth century, was more visible than its strict numbers would suggest – round about 5,000 before the East European Jewish influx of the turn of the twentieth century – because of the fame, or notoriety, that attached to so many of them as individuals, and the threat that some Britons thought they might present to the State. They also tended to meet, drink and smoke in groups – or, again,‘colonies’. Many of them could be portrayed as pretty fearsome: Marx and Engels, of course; Peter Kropotkin; Giuseppe Mazzini; Alexandre Ledru-Rollin; Felice Orsini, Napoleon III’s putative assassin; Emanuel Barthélemy, a double-murderer whose effigy ended up in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors; the German anarchist Johann Most; Martial Bourdin – Joseph Conrad’s Verloc (or Stevie) in The Secret Agent; Louise Michel, aka ‘the Red Virgin’, who Queen Victoria thought should be horse-whipped; and many more: most of them French, German, Polish, (Austro-)Hungarian, or Italian. Foreign governments played on these fears, continuously warning Britain of the dastardly plots their own secret agents had uncovered against it; including one on the life of Queen Victoria that Marx was supposed to be involved in; a socialist conspiracy headed by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, of all unlikely people, to turn the opening of the 1851 Great Exhibition into a bloodbath (the conspirators were cunning: because the Great Exhibition was held in Hyde Park, they were to disguise themselves as trees); and later in the century the plot to blow up the Royal Observatory at Greenwich which Joseph Conrad used as the plot-line of his novel. In fact in this case there was a plot, with the perpetrator blowing himself up before he could reach the Observatory; but that probably wasn’t his target. The best guess at the time was that he was taking his bomb to the docks at Greenwich, to ship to Russia for use by revolutionaries there. Foreigners weren’t the main source in the later nineteenth century of what today would be called ‘terrorism’ – the Irish ‘Fenians’ were pretty active too, if just as incompetent – but there were enough violent anarchists around, depicted in cartoons as swarthy bearded aliens with broad-brimmed hats and holding Christmas pudding-shaped bombs with fizzing fuses, to establish the image in the public mind. And the public mind did take it in. Throughout the later nineteenth century, tabloid newspapers carried stories of anarchists plotting to infect whole communities’ water supplies with anthrax bacilli; and popular novelists predicted their bombing cities from aircraft (which hadn’t been invented yet, but were obviously going to be soon, with dire consequences if they got into the wrong hands). One of these, from 1909, carries a picture of Manhattan being flattened

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from a dirigible, which is eerily prescient of 9/11; another has Big Ben’s tower being toppled by a similar assault, from another airship, cheered on by Socialists in Parliament Square. From the Continent itself there were genuine reports of restaurants and theatres being bombed by anarchists, and half a dozen heads of government assassinated: often by people who then fled to Britain. These certainly worried the British ruling class, which set up a special police department – which later morphed into the ‘Special Branch’ – to keep an eye on them. Apparently this body was still subjecting Karl Marx to surveillance two years after his death and burial in Highgate Cemetery. Did the early Special Branch know something we don’t? Surveillance was the least that any vigilant government could do in these circumstances. Continental governments, however, demanded more: in particular, tougher immigration, anti-terrorist and extradition laws. Often they pressed this aggressively. Felice Orsini’s attempt on the life of Napoleon III in Paris in 1858, for example, when at least one of his co-conspirators – Simon Bernard – lived in London, and the bomb that was thrown at the emperor’s coach turned out to have been manufactured in Birmingham, provoked a huge outcry on the Continent, and demands on Britain to join in a ‘war on terrorism’ with its allies. (Again, it wasn’t called that.) At one time, it looked as though the Continental countries would all gang up together to invade Britain if it didn’t take part. Similar demands were made later: after the bloody suppression of the 1871 Paris Commune, for example (when many of the communards fled to Britain); and during the violent anarchist outbreak of the 1890s and early 1900s, during which a secret ‘International [Anti-] Anarchist Conference’ was called (in 1898) to concert European measures against this new threat, which it was demanded Britain attend. Every time, however, Britain resisted further legislation. For some Britons, even the new Special Branch seemed too illiberal – spying on people! – to swallow. The Liberal Prime Minister Gladstone purposely absented himself from the Cabinet meetings – his own Cabinet – which sanctioned it. And for many years, the police did not even let on that it had a Special Branch. Anything even more tyrannical, or ‘continental’, seemed out of the question. * The reason for this was ‘tradition’, which ‘the people’ seemed more devoted to than their governments. That was understandable: if a foreign assassin got through to Queen Victoria, it would be the Home Secretary who would shoulder the blame. For others, however, national pride in the ‘asylum’ Britain had afforded to all shapes and sizes of political dissidents for very many years before then made them reluctant to modify it now. They reckoned they had gained a great

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deal from this enlightened policy – the enterprising Huguenots of the seventeenth century were the example usually cited – and suspended it only in times of war, like the French wars of the revolutionary era, when it was feared (quite reasonably) that their enemies might send in spies and saboteurs in the guise of refugees. Even then only a handful were denied entry, and tens of thousands of French royalists were let in. After the end of the Napoleonic wars the teams changed ends, so to speak, and it was revolutionaries and nationalists who mainly fled to Britain. The reason for that was that Britain was the only safe refuge open to them, apart from America, which was too far away for some – especially those who wanted to hop back quickly to Europe to resume stirring things up there when the political climate changed – and in any case was not quite so liberal in this regard as the famous motto on the Statue of Liberty implies. Britain was. The degree of freedom it accorded to anyone coming in from abroad must seem to later generations unbelievable; or, if not, then naive to the highest degree. First, anyone could come into Britain, for any reason: refuge, work, whatever. The basis of this was that there were no laws that would enable the government to exclude them. Asylum therefore wasn’t a favour granted, but an absolute right. Immigrants did not need to have passports, and were not checked or counted as they disembarked. That is why historians are so uncertain about their numbers. Once in, it was almost impossible for them to be kicked out. The only exception was under the terms of extradition treaties for crimes committed abroad; but every one of these expressly exempted ‘political’ crimes, by which was meant any crime that had a political motive, even if it was an ‘ordinary’ crime too, like murder. For these, foreigners could be tried in British courts; but even there they had the option, if they wanted, to be tried by juries half composed of foreigners like themselves: an extraordinary privilege, one would think, but one that they usually waived, expressing their confidence in the ‘judgement of twelve honest Englishmen’, which usually went down well. (That, of course, was the object.) In fact, the courts treated them very leniently. One French refugee murderer for example, Emanuel Barthélemy, was let off by a judge on the grounds that, being a foreigner, he probably wasn’t aware that murder was illegal in England. (That only worked once; for his second murder, he was hanged. Hence his starring role at Madame Tussaud’s.) When Orsini’s co-conspirator Simon Bernard was tried in London in 1859 he was acquitted, against all the evidence, by a jury of honest Englishmen who resented the pressure that the French government had put on Britain to put him on trial. A little later, when Lord Palmerston tried to bring in a new law to make prosecutions

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of foreign terrorists easier, he was defeated in Parliament for much the same reason, and had to resign as prime minister. If there were prejudice in Britain, then, it was in favour of asylum seekers rather than against them. In 1906 an Act was passed for the first time in eighty years allowing the government to control immigration: that was directed against the more substantial new wave of east European Jews – of which more below. Even this, however, was largely ineffective, and entirely so in the case of political refugees, who only had to claim they were fleeing from persecution to be let in. There were no checks, no holding camps, no tribunals, nothing. In this regard, at least, this was a liberal golden age. How was it possible? It would be retrospectively flattering to think it was because Britain was an especially tolerant society. In fact, it may have been; we have argued before that Britons were rather less xenophobic in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and certainly less anti-Semitic, than most of their European contemporaries. They even hero-worshipped certain refugees, like, most famously, Garibaldi in 1864, who provoked huge demonstrations, but in his favour: on one occasion the queen was greatly put out when she found that he had attracted bigger crowds in Manchester than she had, on a visit she had made there a few days earlier. Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarian freedom-fighter, got as good a welcome in 1851. But, on the other hand, this isn’t necessarily to either man’s credit. Kossuth and Garibaldi were welcomed because they were the enemies of Austria, and a good part of the xenophilia they enjoyed could be regarded as a symptom of xenophobia towards it; and in Garibaldi’s case, the pope. (Though there were unxenophobic reasons for opposing them too. They both ran, after all, somewhat repressive regimes.) There was also a rider to this, which probably explains more than anything else Britain’s reluctance to join with the autocracies in any ‘war against terrorism’. This was that it tended to blame that terrorism on them. If they had not been so autocratic, Britain argued, they would not be under any terrorist threat. The fact that the same refugees who threatened the Continent posed no danger to Britain – none of those rumours of plots against Queen Victoria and the like was taken seriously – was proof of this: terrorism was spawned by persecution, and was harmless in a liberal environment. Palmerston (in his more liberal days, before his fall) used a vivid metaphor to express just this. A single spark will explode a powder magazine, and a blazing torch will burn out harmless on a turnpike road. If a country be in a state of suppressed internal discontent, a very slight indication may augment that discontent, and produce an explosion; but if the country be well governed, and the people be contented,

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The implication of that, of course, was not only that Britain – the turnpike road – was safe from conflagration, but also that Continental conflagrations were the Continent’s – the powder magazines’ – own fault. This is a version of the reaction that was very occasionally expressed in British left-wing circles to the 9/11 attack: America (in this case) ‘had it coming to her’. Blame the victims. It was an argument that also fed Britain’s national amour propre greatly: it was less vulnerable to terrorism because it was better than other countries. To be fair, Britain was also consistent on this point when terrorism did strike England, emanating from American-Irish ‘Fenians’ in the 1880s, to which its main response was to try to put right the wrongs it had done to the Irish by offering them Home Rule. In both cases, the foreign refugee and the Fenian, active counter-terrorist measures were seen as counter-productive, creating exactly the oppressive conditions that gave birth to terrorism in the first place. That was the liberal consensus of this time. Needless to say, it was another thing marking Britain off from the Continent. Lastly, there is the consideration that there was no general problem of immigration into Britain in this period, unless one counted the Irish, or the even more substantial migration of people from the countryside into the new burgeoning industrial cities of the North, the Midlands and Scotland. Apart from these, the numbers of immigrants involved – certainly until the east European influx of the 1890s – was small. They were also highly concentrated, usually in London, which meant that they did not impinge much on the native culture outside. They caused little trouble. (An exception is the Italian refugees who became organ-grinders to earn a living, especially after the introduction of a new super-barrel organ in the mid-1850s: ‘keeping young ladies awake at night’, as one contemporary police report puts it, ‘with their monster organs’.) In fact, refugees in Britain seem to have been fewer in number than those who fled to the much less liberal France. There is a reason for this. France was much more generous towards the refugees materially. She supported them with grants of money. In Britain after the 1840s, there was no such official support for the refugees, and very little private charity, which meant that asylum seekers had either to work or starve. (Karl Marx probably would have starved if he had not had the industrialist’s son Engels to support him.) Many of them found this oppressive. Joanna Kinkel, for example, a German refugee, was full of admiration for Britain’s political liberties; ‘but’, as she wrote home in 1854, ‘one must work terribly hard here’.

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The same of course applied to native Britons at this time of strict economic liberalism, so that this policy cannot be regarded as discriminatory. But it had two effects. One was to put most refugees off coming to Britain; all in fact except the most desperate or extreme of them: too extreme, for example, for France to take. The second was to neutralize a common popular complaint against asylumseekers that has been bandied about (certainly in Britain) often since: that they are ‘scroungers’, living off the host state. That could not be said of these earlier refugees. As well as this, with regard to political refugees in particular, even the most ‘extreme’ and ‘violent’ of them – ‘Propagandists of the Deed’, as they called themselves – posed no real threat to the British state, if the worst they could do was distribute badly printed propaganda in foreign languages (Johann Most); or murder just a couple of people in a country most of whose murders were simply criminal (Emanuel Barthélemy); or blow themselves up, like poor Bourdin in Greenwich Park. One imagines that no one took the fictional plots against Manhattan and Parliament (above) seriously. No one – apart from the barrel organ-afflicted – needed to lose any sleep. All this emphasized the difference, again, between Britain and its Continental neighbours. * That was before the arrival of the Jews. The Jews were different because they did come in fairly large numbers after 1890; tended to congregate together in certain parts of town, so changing those areas’ ‘character’; and very occasionally took up with quite extreme and violent political ideologies. Most were fleeing from the anti-Jewish ‘pogroms’ going on just then in Russia and eastern Europe, and numbered around 250,000 by 1919. That’s a good deal more than any of Britain’s previous immigrant ‘waves’. They settled in the Spitalfields and Whitechapel areas of east London, and also in Manchester, Salford and Leeds. Tailoring was their favourite occupation, usually cheaply (‘never mind the quality; feel the width’), and by means – in ‘sweat-shops’ – which native clothiers felt undermined them. This compounded what were probably some residual anti-Semitic prejudices in London’s East End, which the British Fascist movements of the 1930s also took advantage of. (Not that the East End was the main focus of anti-Semitism. The upper classes were probably the most antiSemitic of all.) Anglo-Jewish relations took a further bad turn with some sensational events in Sidney Street, off the Mile End Road, in January 1911, when a group of Latvian and Russian émigrés had a shooting match with members of the London Police, which ended with the house they were hiding in being burned down; two members of the group dying in the fire. That followed a series of burglaries that

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were intended to finance their revolutionary efforts – probably abroad, but it could have been in England. It gathered further attention, and notoriety, when Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, but itching for some of the excitement he had experienced as a soldier, left his desk and joined the constables who were besieging the building. There he was apparently greeted with cries of ‘Oo let ’em in?’ from bystanders, and calls from established anti-alien organizations like the ‘British Brothers’ League’ to ban immigration entirely; but these were very local to the East End of London, and the agitation soon subsided, proving ineffective against the persistence of the old British sense of pride in their status as a safe refuge for persecuted foreigners. And tales of gross Russian tortures – pulling fingernails out with pliers was a commonly circulated one – easily persuaded people that this particular group of aliens, however dastardly their crimes (which included murder), at least had an excuse, if not a justification, for them. Again, it was the Russians’ fault. As a result, Churchill was able to resist calls for tougher laws quite easily. ‘I must say’, wrote Rodolf Rocker, another anarchist refugee, ‘that in any other country the consequences would have been more serious’. But Britain wasn’t ‘any other country’ then. In the end, the main legacy of these people was the myth they created: one of a number of violent ones that the East End has always delighted in (‘Jack the Ripper’, the Kray brothers, etc.), spiced up in this instance by anti-Tsarism, and the success of ‘Peter the Painter’, the gang’s supposed leader, and something of a Scarlet Pimpernel figure – his real name was probably one of the following: Piatkoff, Schtern, Straume, Makharov or Dudkin – in escaping and so making fools of the despised British police. It became the subject of a number of novels, and of at least two feature films: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man who Knew Too Much (1934; re-made in 1956), and Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman’s The Siege of Sidney Street (1960). These all perpetuated the main features of the myth; but not to the particular detriment of Jews. * The First World War (rather than 1906) effectively ended Britain’s ‘open’ asylum policy, with new restrictions placed on all immigrants, including Jews, in 1919. Its ‘tradition’ of welcoming the persecuted of other countries, however, was not entirely broken during the Nazi period in Germany and Austria, when it absorbed about 80,000 new Jewish refugees and granted ‘transit visas’ to many more, usually for them to continue on to the United States. (Not to Palestine, where Britain took seriously its League of Nations ‘mandate’ to protect the Arabs.) Those who settled in Britain – many in north-west London, parts of which, like Finchley, became quite distinctively Jewish areas – may have

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contributed (unfairly) to the growth of Fascist and Fascist-like movements in Britain, like Oswald Mosley’s ‘British Union’ (although Mosley himself denied that he was properly anti-Semitic). That said, these seem to have waned in the light of Hitler’s most brutal atrocities, which few in Britain wanted to be associated with. As a result the Jewish immigrants assimilated pretty well, and were never marked out as a significant alien group. Of course there was antiSemitism in Britain, as there was (and is) almost everywhere. On the other hand it may have been milder there than elsewhere, throughout history. Britain could boast that Jews had never been persecuted to death there since mediaeval times, and that the middle of the nineteenth century had seen most of the lesser disabilities previously imposed on them, in common with Catholics and Nonconformists, lifted; plus the election of a Jewish-origin (and so still Jewish, in the eyes of those who rated ‘race’ before social and political conditioning) prime minister in 1868. That was something, at least. Despite their relative invisibility, Jews – including newly arrived ones – may have been the most valuable, commercially and artistically, of any minority group in Britain since that time; which unfortunately for them, however, could also work to fuel age-old ‘conspiracy theories’ against them, based on this prominence. The creation of the new state of Israel as a ‘national home’ for them, understandable in view of their diaspora’s appalling sufferings in other people’s ‘homes’, but originally at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs, and then illegally extended, may have revived some degree of anti-Semitism after 1948. It is, however, only too easy – as right-wing Israeli politicians have learned and exploited in recent years – to confuse rational criticism of Israel’s policies with anti-Semitism. That muddies the picture somewhat. * ‘Every civilised people on the face of the earth’, The Times proclaimed in 1853, ‘must be fully aware that this country is the asylum of nations, and that it will defend that asylum to the last source of its treasure, and the last drop of its blood. There is no point whatever on which we are prouder and more resolute.’ That boast was broadly accurate when it was expressed, and remained inspirational, if not quite so accurate, in the century following. But there are qualifications to it that must be made. The first is that Britain at the high point of European immigration (the nineteenth century) could afford to tolerate incomers. As a prosperous, fairly stable (after 1832) and – most crucially – expanding society, economically and imperially, it had the flexibility and resilience to take in all sorts of people without too much damage to its social structures. Besides, the numbers coming into Britain were relatively small, and

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easy to assimilate so long as they were willing to conform: as most of them were, if only out of an unnecessary fear of being turfed out. By the side of the contemporary Irish, and compared with immigration from developing countries from the 1950s onwards, these Europeans were a mere trickle, and of people very like the British themselves. Only the Jews were perceived as in any way ‘alien’, and that perception diminished in time. (Who today, for example, could name the Jewish members of any modern British governments since Disraeli’s time? There have been several.) In a growing economy they were expected to find jobs relatively easily, or else to bring with them skills and enterprises which complemented the native ones. Politically they posed little or no danger – unless it was indirect, through provoking foreign governments from the safety of Britain’s shores. Marx had relations with the leading Chartists, who were joined by a couple of Poles; and the ex-county cricketer HM Hyndman was converted by Marx’s writings to Communism, becoming the first leader of an overtly Marxist British political party in 1881; but otherwise they had little influence there. Scarcely anyone believed that any foreign agitator could influence British working men directly: ‘the first word that he would have to utter,’ claimed one MP, ‘in which the letters th or the letter w occurred, would overthrow any attempt he might be disposed to make inimical to the public peace.’ In general, as The Times put it in 1858, the refugee ‘meets with little notice’ in Britain. ‘He finds no enemies, and makes no allies . . . The refugee in England vegetates in safety.’ One gets the impression that it was this that irritated some immigrants most: like Dostoevsky’s Stepan Trofimovitch in The Possessed, who felt demeaned because he wasn’t targeted by the Secret Police. In the British case, there was no need to target them. In general they were too savvy to make waves. The second point to make in this connection is that, while they tolerated the refugees, Britons did not necessarily welcome them. For some it was an additional feather in their national cap that they were able to tolerate such fearsome and (it was widely assumed) immoral people living amongst them; it demonstrated the strength and solidity of their society far better than if they had confined their sympathy and help to those they agreed with, like foreign liberals and nationalists – of which there were a number. But it also indicates the low cost of toleration at that time, literally, when, apart from a short period early in the nineteenth century, the British state was not expected to support the refugees in any material way, any more than it was expected to support its own subjects. This was the age, remember, of individualism and laissez-faire, when everyone was supposed to fend for him or herself, or be reduced to the workhouse, begging, stealing or starvation. That in fact was the fate of many of these nineteenth-

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century refugees, very few of whom positively enjoyed their exile. ‘They barely exist,’ Viscount Sandon told the House of Lords in 1838. ‘They are scantily supplied with food; they are poorly clad. Far from their homes, and severed from the friends they love, in addition to all their other ills, they are dragging out a wretched existence.’ This, commented the English Republican G.J. Harney, was the full extent of Britain’s much-vaunted policy of free asylum. ‘The exile is free to land upon our shores, and free to perish of hunger beneath our inclement skies.’ Alexander Herzen attributed this to a distinctive identity-trait of Britain’s at this time: which was that it regarded simple poverty as a crime. But in fact it may have been a factor in keeping their numbers down to a manageable size, as effective as legal proscription would have been. * It should not be forgotten, either, that Britain was always a multinational, multi-regional and multi-ethnic society, with people moving fluidly in and out of it, and also within it – from the countryside to the towns, for example – continuously. The Census reports show this clearly. Otherwise Manchester could not have grown ten-fold between 1800 and 1911, and London from one million to seven. Migration was a normal part of life in the nineteenth century, with only some isolated rural areas having static populations. So were ‘ghettoes’ of different ‘races’ or nationalities. From the viewpoint of an ordinary denizen of Leeds in 1850, for example, it could have made little difference if his or it new neighbour was English, Irish or from the ‘Continong’: less so than if they were of a different class or religious denomination; or had come en masse with others (like the Jews of East London). The only serious popular demonstrations involving immigration were directed against Jews in London; or against Irish Catholics; or else featured Irish Catholics fighting with Godless Italians, over the question of Papal infallibility. All these settled down pretty quickly afterwards, to be succeeded – as is usual in these cases – by periods of relative harmony between the different groups. Xenophobic prejudice was far more easily whipped up against people and nations with whom few Britons had any close contact, either in Britain or abroad. This too is a fairly common phenomenon: that people fear the unfamiliar – people and things they can weave myths and nightmares around – rather than the known. The most persistent national phobia during the nineteenth century was directed against the Russians, very few of whom anyone had met or even seen; spearheaded in the 1840s and 1850s by one David Urquhart MP, who had met them, in Turkey, and even accused Palmerston of being an agent of theirs. Other prejudices were provoked by Britain’s wars, against the Chinese, for

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example, and the South African ‘Boers’, but rarely against other Europeans. Usually these hostile prejudices followed those wars, rather than being in any way responsible for them. In general Britain’s foreign policy was guided by national material interest, and primarily its interest in avoiding European wars, rather than by any kind of ‘phobia’. As Palmerston famously put it in 1848, in support of a rational foreign policy: ‘we have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.’ So if Britain went to war against anyone, it wasn’t because Britons didn’t like them. Public opinion, one way or another, had virtually no impact on policy. And besides: Britain had the rest of the world, and particularly its Empire, to cope with.

Notes 1 References for this chapter will be found in my The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [1979] 2008); and Plots and Paranoia: A History of Political Espionage in Britain 1790–1988 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

Part Three

An Orcadian Abroad

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Samuel Laing, Traveller and Philosopher

Samuel Laing the Elder was an early Victorian explorer who is hardly remembered today, except perhaps in his home town, Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands, where there is a library named after him.1 He is interesting in the context of the subject matter of this book, because (a) he was unusual as a traveller, but possibly more typical of his British compatriots than most travellers were; and (b) he recorded his travels all over the European continent, in several thick volumes, in a far more thoughtful and ‘philosophical’ way than they generally did. He may therefore be able to help us understand the connections between nineteenthcentury Britain and Europe better than the pampered cultured types who were my sources for Chapter 3; although of course his is still only one of many ‘takes’ on it. As we shall find, he was hardly an ‘objective’ observer, and for that reason will likely tell us more about himself and his own national and social background than about the countries he visited and described. But that, after all, is true of most descriptive writing, and an important consideration when it comes to elucidating the relationship between (some) Britons and the European continent. * The first thing to note about Laing is that he was not English. He was technically Scottish; but in reality not even that. The Orkney and Shetland Isles, to the north of the Scottish mainland, had never been ‘Gaelic’, but had been part of the Kingdom of Denmark until 1468, and ‘Orcadians’ still regard themselves as more Nordic than Scottish. (In Shetland they burn a Viking boat on the last Tuesday of every January in commemoration of this, in a festival called ‘Up Helly Aa’.) This was an unusual background for a British travel writer. Laing was also peculiar in terms of his age, beginning his travelling career at the age of fifty-six, and publishing his last book (his fifth) aged seventy-two. He did not come from a rich family – his father left him only a huge mortgage, on a moderately large house and estate near Kirkwall – though it did pass for ‘gentry’ in the tiny and somewhat primitive society of that town. He was not particularly learned, dropping out of university (Edinburgh) in about 1797 before completing his 65

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course. He had, as we shall see in the next chapter, a positive antipathy towards culture, in the sense of ‘high art’, which wasn’t therefore one of the attractions of foreign travel for him, as it was for so many other Brits. Between his brief university career and his re-birth as a professional traveller in the 1830s, he worked at a number of occupations: clerk, merchant, soldier (he fought in the Peninsular Wars), the manager of a mine, in the kelp trade (seaweed, a major source of alkali), organizing the Orkney herring industry, and as an innovative farmer. The fact that he had any job at all was slightly unusual among travel writers, who generally came from the leisured class. He harboured political ambitions, and for a few hours in 1833 actually believed he had been elected Member of Parliament for Orkney and Shetland, until it was learned that a storm had delayed the arrival of the votes from Shetland, which had rejected him. If he had become an MP, he would have been a radical: a free trader, fairly democratic, and opposed to the aristocracy. It was shortly after this, and after his kelp business collapsed – ironically as a result of the free-trade measures he championed – that he decided to sell up and set sail for Norway, first of all. That – disappointment – was one of his reasons for going there. Another was economy. He found he could ‘live for half a dollar a day in the way of the country’ around Levanger, near Trondheim, ‘not uncomfortably’. That would be out of the question in Britain. It is worth mentioning in this context that he did actually live in Norway, learning the language thoroughly (he found it quite close to the Scots dialect he spoke), managing a farm there for a period, and even at one stage contemplating ‘closing my days in this country’. This was not just a fleeting visit, to marvel at the scenery. That too distinguishes him from most other travel writers. He was also – returning to the question of motives – free to live abroad, after a family crisis which now left him without dependents. Foreign travel was no novelty to him; he had visited Spain, Holland, Germany and France as a soldier in his youth. Scandinavia is a slightly surprising destination for him at this stage in his life, relatively unknown to Britons as it was, with little being written about it as yet apart from works which, if anything, would probably have put Laing off. (Norway’s main attraction to Britons in the early nineteenth century lay in its landscape, which the Romantics enthused over, but left the common-sense Laing quite cold.) He was probably attracted to it by his awareness of his own Norse heritage, which was visible all around him, in forms ranging from runic graffiti in Orkney’s mesolithic tombs to the great Cathedral of St Magnus, just ten minutes’ walk from his Kirkwall home. There is a Freudian theory of travel which interprets it as a search for ‘the lost world of prenatality’, in which case Norway could be said to represent subconsciously Laing’s racial

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mother’s womb. There are no other convincing reasons that can be discovered for his choice of Norway over other countries: no family or business contacts there, for example, or a material interest; but the cheapness and the runes are probably sufficient explanations on their own. He may also have been attracted by the very isolation of the place. His earlier career indicates that he was an adventurous soul. He could well have positively relished the idea of boldly going where no (modern) Orcadian had gone before. All these circumstances are highly unusual in British literary history. A practical man, a philistine, brought up in the ‘real world’, living abroad for the convenience, determined to become part of the country rather than just a tourist, and then later deciding to write about it: there were not many of those around. This is what makes Laing highly atypical of most British travel writers. He himself was aware, and proud, of the difference. He wrote of it at the very beginning of his first book. The way he put it there was that he was the first travel author of his time to eschew the sublime, and concentrate on the mundane. While most writers, he later wrote, ‘lavish the highest talents on descriptions of personal feelings or adventures, of romantic natural scenery, of striking objects in the sciences or the fine arts’, they rarely bothered with ‘the more humble facts or observations’, which he was in a particularly good position to provide. His whole purpose was ‘To collect ordinary facts of common occurrence in a country, and to draw from them obvious conclusions on the state of its inhabitants’. Exciting this might not be, but it was, he implied, far more useful. And Laing was, as we shall see, nothing if not a utilitarian. * His first remark about Norway – the first that he noted down in his diary, at any rate – was a utilitarian one. It had to do with the distribution of property there, which he had noticed was very different from ‘in feudal countries’. In particular, ‘the Right of Primogeniture never had a footing in Norway. On this account’, he went on,‘the state of the people is an interesting subject of observation’. It was then that he started observing, and writing the notes that would finally appear as his first book. Despite his further observations, however, nothing ever displaced the Norwegian system of land inheritance – subdivision, plus, of course, the famous ‘odelsrett’, which he discovered a little later – at the forefront of his interests and affections. From this single remark sprang a whole social theory, which he used to account both for the happiness of the Norwegians and – as we shall see shortly – for the abject misery of their Swedish neighbours. In a word: the subdivision of land between all the children of a family gave rise to an equality between people which was far healthier than the social divisions

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which the system of primogeniture inevitably produced. The evidence for this was the smiles on the faces of nearly all the people he met in Norway; contrasted, later, with the sullen looks he later found in Sweden, where he claimed primogeniture was dominant. His book about Norway was published in 1836.2 It was a panegyric, no less. His admiration for the country was unbounded. Often it appears rosetinted. There was no fault to be found there. Even apparent disadvantages were to the Norwegians’ credit, if one looked deep enough. For example: like other contemporary visitors to Norway, Laing was initially taken aback by the subservient role apparently taken by women, but argued in his book that it seemed ‘natural’ there, and masked the much greater domestic responsibilities – requiring more mental exertion – borne by Norwegian women than by their sisters in Britain. Similarly he excused the Norwegians’ desecration of the Sabbath evening – shocking to most Scottish travellers – on the grounds that Scripture was unclear on the point; and he positively commended the country’s lack of any great artistic achievements – the ordinariness of Trondheim Cathedral by comparison with those in France and Italy, for example; the absence of large mansions; and the poverty of Norway’s modern literature – for reasons we shall mention later. This favourable outlook extended everywhere. Where other travellers saw poverty in Norway, he saw ‘simplicity’. Where they saw dirt, he saw less than in comparable Scottish homes. He noticed far fewer drunkards than other visitors, due, he said, to the admirable Norwegian custom of drinking long and slow. On the positive side he praised the Norwegians’ politeness, their lack of pretence, their healthy bodies and their kindness to animals. Laplanders he thought might be related to the Celts, which was a more flattering lineage than some had suggested for them. He even saw ‘something sublime’ in northern Norway’s long winter nights, and ‘exhilarating’ in its cold. On almost every issue where there was scope to criticize the Norwegians, he instead gave them the benefit of the doubt. Quite simply, they could do no wrong. But he was especially taken by their social and political arrangements. ‘The Norwegian people’, he wrote, ‘enjoy a greater share of liberty, have the framing and administering of their own laws more entirely in their own hands, than any European nation of the present times.’ In this they certainly surpassed Britain, and even the United States. They had liberty of the press, ever decreasing taxes, and the freedom to rely on themselves. There was a tremendous feeling of equality about the place, with no servility and very little arrogance. Everyone benefited from this; but, he thought, the country people most of all. ‘If there be a

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happy class of people in Europe’, Laing rhapsodized, ‘it is the Norwegian bonder’, or small proprietor. He is the owner of his little estate: he has no feu duty or feudal duty to pay to any superior. He is the king of his own land, and landlord as well as king. His poorrate and tithes are too inconsiderable to be mentioned. His scat or land-tax is heavy, but everything he uses is in consequences so much cheaper; and he has that which renders the heaviest tax light, – the management of it by his own representatives, and the satisfaction of publicity and economy in its application. He has the satisfaction of seeing from Storthing to Storthing that the taxes are diminishing, and the public debt paying off. He is well lodged; has abundance of fuel; and that quantity of land in general which does not place him above the necessity of general labour, but far above want or privation if sickness or age should prevent him from working. He has also no class above him; nobody who can look down upon him, or whom he or his family look up to either to obtain objects of a false ambition, or to imitate out of a spirit of vanity. He has a greater variety of food than the same class in other countries . . . He has also variety of labour, which is, perhaps, among the greatest enjoyments in the life of a labouring man; for there is recreation in change . . .

and so on. Laing was aware that the picture he was painting would seem ‘extravagant or visionary’ to many of his readers, but he stuck to it. Norway was utopia, or very near it. The reason – predictably – was the subdivision of land. That kept people equal; ensured that the birth rate kept the population to a size the land could feed (Thomas Malthus had also noticed this, on a journey he had made to Norway thirty-five years before); and prevented the growth of at any rate a significant aristocracy. Laing saw this as the natural and original state of human society, as God had intended it, but which was now only to be found in Norway. Why this should have been so also interested Laing. He saw it as a historical survival, partly fortuitous, and partly due to the strength of old Nordic forms of society in early mediaeval times. That had enabled Norway to resist the tide of feudalism, which had engulfed everywhere else. Feudalism, believed Laing, was to blame for aristocracy, inequality, and all the other evils of modern society. One could see this if one contrasted accounts of pre-feudal societies in history, of which the old Norse and Icelandic sagas were among the best. Whether or not it was this that led him to his most famous endeavour, which we have not mentioned yet, although it is certainly his most lasting achievement – his first English translation of Snorri Sturlason’s Heimskringla, a thirteenth-century chronicle of the old Norse kings – it was one of the lessons he drew from Snorre’s

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narrative. Again, he idealized (in his Introduction to his translation) the society it portrayed. This was partly a corrective to more conventional English historical accounts of the Vikings, which painted them as godless, bloodthirsty invaders, murderers and rapists. Laing, by contrast, regarded them rather as he regarded the Norwegians of his own time: as free, vigorous and democratic, and the source, he claimed – not the Anglo-Saxons – of any freedoms that the British still possessed. Every Northman, apparently, was a proprietor. He had a part in the election or at least the confirmation of his chiefs and kings at his various ‘Things’, which Laing seemed to imagine as a kind of House of Commons or parish council meeting. They wrote marvellous poetry and prose works in the vernacular – the speech of ordinary people. Their longboats were marvels of engineering. They lived modestly, not in the obscenely luxurious mansions that feudal lords built for themselves. They had slaves, true (thræls), but looked after them kindly, and allowed them to acquire land. Again: to an outsider this seems a partial view, at best. Laing scarcely mentions the raiding expeditions, the drunkenness, the massacres, the splitting open of men’s skulls with great axes, the burning of people alive in their houses, and all the rest of the Vikings’ more unlovable activities (to modern tastes) that appear on almost every page of even his own translation of Heimskringla. May not this indicate a very selective use by Laing of his historical as well as his contemporary evidence? * The Norway book was followed by A Tour in Sweden. He published this three years later, after a much shorter visit there.3 The contrast between them was remarkable. If Laing is to be believed, no two nations in Europe in the early nineteenth century could have been as dissimilar as Norway and Sweden. Norway was a happy land of sturdy independent yeomen, down to earth, well fed, unpretentious, moral, good mannered; Sweden a country of useless nobles, pettifogging officials, too many priests, an over-dependent middling class, starving and diseased urban paupers, criminals, and (literal) bastards. Laing himself marvelled at this ‘curious contrast’. If Norway was the luckiest nation in Europe, Sweden was the unhappiest. Which made Sweden’s threat to Norway – for Laing believed that Karl XIV Johann was plotting to replace Norway’s political and legal institutions with Sweden’s – something that should concern all liberal-minded Europeans, not just the Norwegians. Suspicion of Sweden’s designs against the country he had grown to admire, compounded probably by the prejudices of his Norwegian neighbours, may have been one of the factors prejudicing Laing against the former. Another was undoubtedly his ideological distaste for its social and political organization. As

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was clearly the case in Norway, this influenced his view of just about every aspect of Swedish life, this time negatively. Just as in Norway he had always put the best gloss on what he had seen, here he seemed only to want to find fault. (This was in 1838, incidentally, and after a tour of only two months.) For example: it is clear that he was made very welcome in Sweden, with excellent transport and roads (Sweden was always famous among travellers for its roads), good inns and no fear of robbers; but he refused to accept that any of this was to the Swedes’ credit. It was only because the power of the Swedish state had made the people afraid to behave otherwise. There was ‘no want of manners’ there; ‘You see no blackguardism, no brutality, no revolting behaviour . . . no immodesty in the streets’, from which, he wrote, the traveller might easily ‘come to the conclusion that the people are the most virtuous in Europe’: if one did not know better. ‘I confess’, he went on, ‘I do not like this . . . I prefer a little Irish blackguardism. The man is much nearer to virtue who appears worse than he is, than the man who appears better.’ The Swedes could not win. In much the same way he found ‘a simplicity of taste’ in Sweden, ‘and an innocence and openness about these people’, which as he himself admitted ‘seems quite inconsistent with that moral degradation and vice which exist beyond all doubt’. The Swedish nobility he found to be educated and cultured, yet also – paradoxically – ‘ignorant and unprincipled’. The middle classes were well read, but only in ‘imaginative’ literature; he found them deplorably ignorant of their own history, for example, where ‘exactitude of fact and date is required’. Among the population at large, adult literacy was close to 100 per cent, and churchgoing ‘exemplary’, yet he thought this only went skin-deep. The poor were better housed in Stockholm than in any British city, and Stockholm itself was a handsome place to look at; but all due to State or civic provision: take the public buildings away ‘and Stockholm remains a poorly built town’. Laing was mightily impressed with the Swedish government’s Department of Statistics, superior by far to any other country’s; until he recollected that such a thing could only be achieved ‘in a population ridden upon by priests and functionaries’. Among a self-respecting people, he wrote, any prying official ‘would be turned out of doors for his impertinence’. The Swedes were damned by their successes, therefore, as well as by their failures. Disapprove of the method of collecting these statistics as he might, however, Laing was not above using them for his most damaging onslaught on the whole Swedish people. This was the part of his Sweden volume that became, briefly, notorious, and even provoked the Swedish ambassador in London (Count Magnus Björnstjerna) to pen a 65-page pamphlet in reply to it. For Laing inferred

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from the figures the Statistical Office provided for him two particularly damning ‘facts’ about Sweden: first, that it had the highest crime rate in Europe; and second, that three out of every ten Stockholmers were born illegitimate. After Björnstjerna’s rejoinder, he revised the latter figure: but upwards, to two in five. ‘In no other Christian community’, he claimed, ‘is there a state of female [sic] morals approaching to this’. Even in wicked Paris the figure was only one in six. As well as this, he could not resist noticing that one out of every sixty adult Stockholmers passing through the city hospital in one year was treated for venereal disease. Hence his truly damning indictment – for that age – that ‘Sweden stands at present at the bottom of the moral scale of Europe’. There still remained the mystery of why things did not look so bad: they knew that there must be thousands of ‘depraved and vicious people’ in Sweden, Laing wrote; ‘But who, and where, is this class?’ He was nonplussed. He asked some of his Swedish acquaintances, who tried to explain to him, patiently, that on the question of crime for example he was confusing figures of convictions with those of offences, and including in his figures thousands of trivial transgressions that would not class as crimes elsewhere: but he remained unconvinced. Though the evidence of his eyes told him otherwise, he felt he could not gainsay the statistical facts. It was far easier to explain them. Readers of Laing’s Norway would already have had a good idea of where he would go from this point on. It was all to do with the Swedes’ social arrangements. The essential differences between the two nations – deriving ultimately from their land laws – were to do with their classes, and the powers that attached to them. Sweden, which had clearly not escaped feudalism, still had an aristocracy, and – worse – one that was supported out of taxes, and able to do almost as it liked. It was from this class, Laing believed, that ‘Much of the immorality of Sweden proceeds’. This was compounded by the way that class governed those below it: intervening everywhere and regulating everything, including people’s work. Most of this regulation was well-intentioned, but also self-defeating. People were conditioned to believe that they should only do what was permitted to them: the opposite to the Norwegian – and also the British – way. ‘With us’, Laing wrote, ‘everything is lawful that law does not prohibit; here the maxim appears to be, that nothing is lawful but what law permits’. This made for ‘an inert dependence [by the Swedes] on their governments for all things’; rather like ‘a soldiery, who, if they fulfil their regimental duties, . . . consider themselves absolved from all other restraints on conduct.’ It took away, in other words, the self-reliance upon which real industry, innovation, and – yes – morality depended. ‘This principle of doing everything for the people and nothing by them’, Laing continued, ‘keeps a nation behind in real civilisation, notwithstanding . . .

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external appearances’. The specific link with morality was that only a free, uncossetted people could learn for themselves what was right. ‘Man must have liberty even to do wrong, or he is but a puppet, without freedom of action as a moral being, without merit in what he does, without self-approbation, or selfrespect.’ The word Laing used for this latter condition was ‘demoralization’, in the original, literal sense of the word. That was what Sweden was, with all its laws and regulations and police and the rest: thoroughly demoralized. This explained many of the visible faults in its society, as well as the dark, secret ones he had had to extrapolate from the statistics: the furtive premarital sex and the invisible crime. Laing was always bumping into the evidence for these: little groups of unemployed men and starving children; petty ‘functionaries’; labourers treated like ‘serfs’; ‘swearing and foul language’ among the workers; gross superstitions – worse, he claimed, than under Romanism, despite the supposed Protestantism of the Lutheran church; the hypocrisy of Sweden’s much vaunted ‘tolerance’ when people were free to reject the state religion but were then prevented from marrying if they did; press censorship; high personal taxation (except for the aristocracy); State-run brothels – ‘scarcely credible’, he opined (was it true?); and – worst of all in view of his Norwegian experience – attempts to stop the subdivision of estates even where families desired it. He found Swedish industry in an abysmal state, unless run by expatriate Britons. At the apex of society he discovered only a parasitic and dissolute nobility, many of them impoverished, childishly fond of titles and distinctions, dangerously alienated from the classes beneath them, and proudly upholding a ‘high culture’ which, when you got close to it, turned out to be merely ‘flashy’ and tawdry. ‘They dance well’, was Laing’s pleasant insult for the Swedish aristocracy. That almost said it all. * The contemporary reaction to these two works was mixed. Laing himself felt gratified by the public reception of his Norway volume. It was, he wrote in his diary, ‘making a considerable appearance in the world’, and being widely praised – ‘I am told’ – by the critics. Sure enough, all the reviews of Norway were favourable, some quite flatteringly so. The influential British and Foreign Review, for example, made a point of commending its trustworthiness and lack of bias. In addition Laing noted how ‘The Liberal party receive it with pleasure’, as bearing out their own philosophy. The Norwegians were delighted at its appearance at this time especially, when they felt their institutions were under threat. The reception of the Sweden volume was more uneven. Some British reviewers simply reproduced its conclusions uncritically. One commented on its

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‘benevolent spirit’. (Can he have been reading the same book?) Others broadly sympathized, albeit with some unease about the way Laing handled his treasured ‘facts’. The Edinburgh Review, for example, which shared his ideological preconceptions, nonetheless felt that Laing’s ‘zeal for his theory’ sometimes ‘betrayed’ him ‘into a forgetfulness of his facts’. An article in the Polytechnic Journal was far more critical on this front, chiding him for total incompetence in his handling of statistics. If the Polytechnic Journal had been a more significant publication it might have wounded Laing fatally, for the statistics it poured most scorn on were the very ones – for crime and illegitimacy – which most impressed everyone else. In Scandinavia, where the book probably made more of an impact than in Britain, reviews did not take quite as nationalistic lines as might have been anticipated. The Swedes were understandably critical. We have noted Count Björnstjerna’s reaction already. (That was published in Swedish too.) On the whole it seems – to this reader – to be as tendentious as Laing’s original. That was perhaps only to be expected. What may be more surprising is the divided opinion of the Norwegian press. Not all Norwegians seem to have shared Laing’s antiSwedish prejudices. Even the Norwegian translator of A Tour in Sweden (it is interesting that this should be the volume that was turned into Norwegian, and not the Norway one) explicitly rejected many of the more extreme charges in the original, and pointed up its prejudices. Overall, the reputation that Laing had quickly established with his Norway book appears to have crumbled slightly with the appearance of his Sweden. Several commentators felt the latter had been rushed. Only radical zealots stuck closely to him. His critics easily found explanations for his errors. As a Scot, he had felt a natural cultural affinity with the Norwegians. With hindsight, we could add to this that his particular Scottish roots – the Orkney connection – cemented that. They may also have given him his lusty distaste for things aristocratic, and for the ‘high culture’ he found in Sweden, which Orkney – with all its attractions – is probably not the best place to nurture an appreciation of. His time in Sweden had been much shorter than in Norway (two months as against two years), rendering his opinions of that place superficial. He went there from Norway, and so with his head already filled with the prejudices of his new Norwegian friends. He happened to hit Sweden at a bad time: a period of political upheaval, irresolute and reactionary government, and popular riots. He was blinded by his radical prejudices to the true facts. He wanted to make a political point, whatever it cost in accuracy and subtlety. He was simply an impressionable fool. There can be no denying either the unreliability of many of Laing’s opinions – whose reproduction here, of course, should not be taken to imply agreement

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with them – or the likelihood that they were, indeed, distorted by factors like these. The last-named in particular were clearly influential. He was an impressionable man (though by no means a fool), and could be receptive and ‘objective’ when it came to matters he did not particularly care about, but on other questions tended to let his first impressions be overly swayed by certain preconceptions. Those preconceptions may have been planted in him by the type of Norwegian he grew to know best – mainly farmers around Trondheim – but a far deeper influence is likely to have been the radical politics he brought with him. At first, he was probably genuinely gratified by the way Norway seemed to justify those politics; his later works, however (including the three more travel books he published after Sweden), do seem to purposely strain to make his political points. The degree to which this tendency invalidates his observations must be for historians of Scandinavia to judge. But it may be that it does not undermine them as much as contemporary critics assumed. No one approaches an ‘other’ without ‘prejudices’, or cultural baggage, of some sort. (That obviously could be said to apply to the historian of the ‘approacher’, too.) One refreshing thing about Laing, which for the historian almost compensates for all his prejudices, is the transparency of those prejudices in his case. That should help us to ‘place’ him in his own culture. And from there it should be possible to come to some conclusions about the relationship between the two (or if Laing is right three) cultures, which if we are lucky might shed new light on all of them. * The fact that Laing was an atypical travel writer does not necessarily make him unrepresentative in a wider sense. This is important to grasp, especially in view of the current proclivity of certain literary scholars to infer general cultural traits from authors who were more typical of their kind. Historians regard that as dangerous, for the simple reason that the literati of nineteenth-century philistine Britain, in particular, really only truly represented themselves. In the field of travel writing, this was bound to be so. Those who could afford to travel abroad, and with the leisure to write about it, were a privileged minority. The fact that they were inclined to go abroad cut them off from the mainstream even more. It probably meant, for example, that they appreciated ‘art’, which very few of their compatriots did. Their travel books reflect this. Those that featured Norway and Sweden, for instance, nearly all preferred the latter, because of its ‘superior’ cultural artefacts. They also regarded Norway as more ‘primitive’: ‘a century behind Sweden’, as one contemporary traveller put it, ‘which is a century below Denmark, and at least another century behind France and England’. (That would place it in 1532.) That, of course, reversed Laing’s order. Laing is out of step in

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this company; but who is to say that he was out of step with a broader constituency of Britons? More of them had backgrounds like his, special though it may have been in some particulars, than like – to take three more typical travel writers at random – Thackeray’s or the Trollopes’. The problem for the historian, of course, is that generally speaking it is only the literati – the Thackerays and Trollopes – who write, and so from whom broader cultural attitudes can be inferred. The practical men and women who hugely outnumber them, and may think significantly differently, are silent, attending to their practical concerns. Which is why Laing is such a boon. Here at last, in this specialized little sub-genre of nineteenth-century English literature, we have one who, for fortuitous reasons – the collapse of his practical concerns – begins to write. He seems an eccentric, but his only eccentricity is to put his thoughts down on paper. Laing will not speak for all or even the majority of the silent ones; but it may not be an entirely unprofitable enterprise to take some account of his very different, deeper voice, amongst the light literary chatter. Laing himself, who despised the chatterers, would certainly have gone along with that. His viewpoint, after all, was not so very uncharacteristic of his place and time. Libertarianism was the growing trend in 1830s’ Britain. So was optimism, born of the belief – which Laing clearly held – that people were all capable of improvement. It depended, he claimed, entirely on their institutions. That is what he tried to make clear to Count Björnstjerna in the reply he published to the latter’s pamphlet in 1840; though it is unlikely that Björnstjerna really cottoned on. Laing is reiterating how deeply immoral the Swedes are: criminals, fornicators, and so on. But, he goes on, he does not want it to be inferred from this that immorality is endemic to them. ‘The Swedish people’, he writes, are not vicious naturally. No people are so. But they are not treated by the governments as free agents. Their time, labour, industry, property, are interfered with, and taken from them by government . . ., by privileged classes, by a greedy . . . nobility living upon the taxes. They have consequently the vices of men who are not free agents – not bred under moral restraint, but under discipline, police regulation, or conventional restraint. In spite of religious and educational establishments, they are demoralized by misgovernment, bad laws, and a faulty structure of society.

Now that tells us enormously more than just about Laing’s views of the Swedes. It tells us about his attitude to government in general: broadly speaking, that it should be minimal; and about his view of what in later days came to be called the relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’, or – at that time – was thought of as

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the question of ‘race’. In a nutshell, he felt that race – ethnicity – was not important; that peoples were as they were not because of their genes, or ‘blood’, but because of their environment and – in this case in particular – their social and political institutions. That surely is a much more significant aspect of Laing’s thought, and consequently of the ethos of the society it derived from, than his superficial Swedophobia. It was certainly more important to Laing himself. He never pretended that he visited foreign countries just to observe and report. Travels were ways of testing general propositions, using the world as a kind of laboratory for a science of human kind. That was a typical characteristic of travel writing at this time, stretching back at least into the eighteenth century. ‘Every authentic and wellwritten book of voyages and travels’, wrote a shipmate of Captain Cook in 1785, ‘is, in fact, a treatise of experimental philosophy’. Travellers used their observations ‘for the purpose of building their systems, or at least, as being the best adapted to the support and confirmation of their doctrines’. That certainly seems to fit Laing. Even an innocent reading of his works on Norway and Sweden reminds one more of a theoretical treatise, or a laboratory experiment, than of a description of the complexities and contradictions of real human life. Laing was testing a hypothesis. He had two test tubes, both filled with an identical solution, which was the Nordic ‘race’. Into one was put the powder called ‘subdivision’; into the other the powder called ‘primogeniture’. Then he observed the reactions. The first came up smelling like roses; the second bubbled and spat and gave off noxious fumes. The contrast was stark. There was only one explanation. It had to be the different land systems that explained it. Nothing else was significantly different about the two solutions (or nationalities); the experiment, it seemed, was perfectly controlled. QED. This was Laing the philosopher. Surveying his work as a whole, and especially from Sweden onwards, he appears a somewhat over-zealous one. His critics may have been right when they charged him with forcing his pet theory unnaturally on the evidence. Interestingly enough, however, this did not prevent his work being taken up by a much greater philosopher, namely John Stuart Mill, who in 1848 incorporated his ideas about land ownership into his Principles of Political Economy. Mill’s high opinion of his work – ‘There is a real faculty of observation & original remark about Laing’, he wrote to Sarah Austin in 1844 – should be respected, coming as it does from such a quarter. Unfortunately Laing later blotted his copybook with Mill by appearing to renege on his original land theory after observing the inconveniences of subdivision in France. But the reference to Journal of a Residence in Norway was never struck out of the

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Principles, and remains there, a testament to Laing’s influence in one small area of British intellectual life, to the present day. So far as ‘influence’ goes, he may be less significant in a Scandinavian context. The row his Sweden book provoked with Count Björnstjerna, which might have had diplomatic repercussions, turned out to be short-lived, and does not appear to have been taken up officially on either side of the North Sea. One of his more sycophantic reviewers suggested that ‘the world will be both better and wiser for his labours’, but it is hard to see this happening. Laing himself believed he had made it better, in two particular ways. The first was to help raise ‘around the Norwegian constitution an impregnable barrier of public opinion which the Swedish monarch and his cabinet are forced to respect’. The second was ‘to open the eyes of the Swedish nation to the demoralizing influences’ of its own social system. ‘To have contributed [even] in the most insignificant degree towards such beneficial movements’, he proudly averred, ‘. . . is a great literary success for such trivial literary productions’. That would undoubtedly be so if it were true, but there seems to be little surviving evidence of it. Laing features marginally in Scandinavian encyclopaedic literature, but as translator and observer rather than an actor in the peninsula’s affairs. So it is as an observer, probably, that his significance will need to be assessed. The difficulty there, of course, remains his ideological bias. But that may not be as disabling as his contemporary critics claimed. In the first place, nations are not only internal constructs, but also exist with reference to others, and so are affected – even partly defined – by their reputations abroad. I can object to foreigners representing my own nation in terms of – for example – its imperial past, or its hooligan present, but there can be no denying that these are aspects of ‘Britishness’ in the present-day world. Insofar as countries and peoples relate to others, myths may be at least as significant as ‘realities’. Laing helped characterize Norway and Sweden in this important respect. Another way of putting it would be to say that he outlined these nations, in terms of their European background. If the outlines he drew – the distinctions between them and others – were bolder than those of other authors, that was because he had a better intuitive grasp of the contemporary social and political environment, deriving from his more characteristic and ‘progressive’ personal background, than those others. It was what made him important as an intercessor. Second – in ‘defence’ of Laing – insofar as his accounts were deficient as objective descriptions of internal realities, it was mainly in exaggerating or caricaturing certain broad trends. It was not as if he mistook things totally. If

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Norwegians were not as ‘free’ as he thought, for example, they were still not less free, according to the (narrow) criteria he employed to define freedom, than the Swedes. His worst offence – if offence there was – lay in his making too much of the contrast; as very often happens, of course, when people come across new things. But this is exactly what can render an outside view so refreshing. It highlights features that may have receded out of the awareness of the natives, simply through familiarity. When he first arrived in Stockholm – and this would probably have been no different if he had never been to Norway – Laing was more struck by its bureaucracy than the Stockholmare were, because unlike them he had not been immersed in it all his life. Hence the caricature. But it is the great value of the best caricatures to highlight genuine truths, which Laing’s undoubtedly did. The Swedish national ethos of the time was bureaucratic, controlling, paternalistic (still is!), and it cannot have been altogether bad either for the Swedes or for others to be made aware of this. Björnstjerna’s objections, arising partly as they did from a total incomprehension of the points Laing was trying to make, only underlined the need. It emphasizes the cultural difference, which Laing took such great pains – and cut so many empirical corners – to point up. * Laing today is not exactly a celebrity, either in his own country or in those he described. If he had wanted to be, he clearly chose the wrong medium. He himself recognized that travel writing was ‘not a work . . . from which much literary reputation can be gained’. It has always occupied an uncomfortable place in English literature, due to the awkwardness of its situation between worlds. As descriptive writing, it suffers from the fact that it is not – by definition – the product of those who would seem to be the most qualified to write about foreign countries, and so is almost bound to be superficial and prejudiced. Who would go to learn about cricket from a Frenchman who had spent one week at Lord’s? In addition, there are certain conventions attached to the genre itself which do not help. Travel books were supposed to be exotic, in order to attract readers. There were few sales to be had from accounts which claimed that foreigners were much like ourselves. There also was not much credit attached to writers who merely described what everyone saw: the tourist routes of Europe, for example, and the famous artefacts. Most nineteenth-century travel books begin by emphasizing how different they are from their predecessors: either in the geography they traverse, or their approach. (This is one characteristic Laing does share with them.) This erodes their value as reportage, in obvious ways.

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Any ground they might make up from a literary point of view is undermined by the fact that so few of them are ‘literary’ in a conventional sense. Most travel books of the time were self-indulgent and – despite the exoticisms – deeply boring. The only exceptions are by writers who are also celebrated in other fields: Smollett, Wordsworth, Dickens, the Trollopes. Even their travelogues are rather looked down upon, as marginal to their main production, little more than hackwork. Here it is the element of reportage that holds them back. One goes to Dickens for his imagination, not for his descriptions of reality. Recently the distinction between ‘great’ and mediocre literature has been narrowed somewhat in academia, under the influence of what is called ‘cultural studies’, but that seems not to have benefited ordinary, amateur, run-of-the-mill travel writing yet. It probably looks too hard work. Nonetheless there is a veritable treasure-trove here for those who seek neither ‘truth’ nor ‘literature’, but something that may be more valuable to the historian than either of these: an understanding of the relations between nations and peoples in the past. Such relations have never been much influenced by either facts or literature, but by perceptions, which travel writers both help to form and reflect. In addition, we are also partly intrinsically defined by our ‘relations’: by how we connect with ‘others’. For a nation, ‘others’ means foreigners. To take an obvious example: it is only by noticing foreign customs that we become aware of the distinctiveness of our own, and consequently of the features that make some of us ‘British’, for instance, rather than merely human. In this way, Laing’s observations of Norway and Sweden can tell us things about contemporary Britain that it would not occur to domestic writers to notice, let alone emphasize. (Hence my own interest in him.) Conversely the very fact that they are filtered by his British culture may shed an original light on the objects of his observations. It will not illuminate the whole picture, assuredly, but it will highlight an aspect of it that might be lost otherwise: like Glenn Gould picking out the middle line in a piece by Bach. Whether that is a light (or line) worth having is up to the Scandinavianists to decide. It may be all familiar, or all nonsense. Even if so, however, it must be valuable to know what familiar and nonsensical things were being said abroad about Scandinavia in the 1830s; and especially by someone like Laing: a more practical, down-to-earth, rough-edged, radical Briton than most of his precious, upper-class, aesthetic compatriots who flounced around the court of the Swedish kings in the early 1800s, flattering them and probably totally misleading them about their place in the world, and in the world that was coming: which in the event turned out to be closer to Laing’s than to theirs.

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Lastly, Laing’s ‘liberal’ way of thinking did not, of course, die with him, but smouldered on in Britain long after his death, leaping into flame again 150 years after his ‘Norway’ volume: as described in Chapter 12 of this book.

Notes 1 This chapter is based – with permission – on a paper, ‘Virtue and Vice in the North. The Scandinavian Writings of Samuel Laing’, published in The Scandinavian Journal of History, volume 23 (1998). 2 Journal of a Residence in Norway, during The Years 1834, 1835, and 1836; made with a View to Inquire into the Moral and Political Economy of that Country, and the Condition of its Inhabitants (1836) (hereafter Norway). 3 A Tour in Sweden in 1838; comprising Observations on the Moral, Political and Economical State of the Swedish Nation (1839) (hereafter Sweden). Laing went on to publish three further travelogues: Notes of a Traveller (1842); Observations on the Social and Political State of the European People (1850); and Observations on the Social and Political State of Denmark, and the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, in 1851 (1852).

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6

The Philistine

Britain’s cultural relationship with its Continental neighbours in the nineteenth century was uneven.1 In most areas of ‘high’ art, the Continent far outshone it. Possible exceptions are the narrative arts – novels, poetry, writing of other kinds – and, though this might be contentious, architecture. We are making value judgments here, but also following the common opinion of contemporaries, who frequently remarked on the cultural barrenness of their nation, by comparison with ‘abroad’. There can be little doubt that it was pretty barren in certain areas. Compared with its neighbours, and with its own past, Britain was something of a cultural desert during most of the century, and particularly between the 1840s and the 1880s. After Turner the visual arts were at a pretty low point, unless we want to squeeze in some pre-Raphaelite paintings. With the possible exception of Tennyson, there were no first-class British poets between the young Wordsworth and Hardy; no composers before Elgar; no serious playwrights before Pinero; and no notable sculptors at all. There were no great British philosophers besides John Stuart Mill, and not a fraction of the number of scholars in other fields that most continental countries, including some far less populous than Britain – the German mini-states, for example – could boast. Higher education, except in Scotland, was simply not taken seriously. These assertions may set some philoVictorians’ hackles rising, and of course they rest on artistic and cultural opinions which are subjective. But consider the competition. Where were Britain’s Balzac, Wagner, Schumann, Berlioz, Brahms, Bruckner, Schopenhauer, Ibsen, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Verlaine, Marx, Manet, Nietzsche, Zola? There is at any rate a prima facie case here for suggesting that there may have been something about the Victorian British soil that did not suit the growth of plants of this kind. Which was why any artistic soul stuck in that soil travelled to the Continent to get his or her fix. Irrespective of whether or not the foregoing is a fair characterization of the state of artistic and intellectual culture in Victorian Britain, many of those artistic 83

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souls would have gone along with it. Their whole class was afflicted by what in present-day Australia is called ‘cultural cringe’. It got to the point, indeed, where they simply would not listen to British singers, pre-convinced that they were bound to be rubbish; which is why so many of the latter decided they needed to feign foreignness in order to survive.‘The English artist struggling all but hopelessly against the town’s indifference has but to displace the consonants or multiply the vowels of his name to be a fashion and a success. . . . Mr Brady may sing to empty benches, while il Signor Bradini would “bring down the house”.’ (That is Charles Lever.) The same reason explains why Britain felt it had to compensate for its lack of great native composers by importing foreign ones, starting with Handel, and including Haydn, Mendelssohn (Victoria and Albert’s great favourite) and Wagner. A little later, when it finally got one – in the person of Edward Elgar – he utterly despaired of the taste of most of his compatriots. Elgar’s German friends, who were the first to appreciate his music, went along with this: as August Jaeger once wrote to him, ‘England ruins all artists!’ Another leading composer – Delius – went to work in France. It was the soil, again. It wasn’t that there weren’t people in Britain who appreciated good music, only that they were convinced they couldn’t write or perform their own. That’s why they felt they needed to go to Europe for their ‘art’, or else to buy it in from abroad. They had the money, after all. For those who regretted this situation, that was part of the problem. Britons were too busy making money to bother with art. For some, this went back to capitalism. Many cultured Victorians placed the blame there, although not always in so many words. They included Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Augustus Welby Pugin, John Ruskin and William Morris: all of them fundamentally hostile to the capitalist-utilitarian spirit of the age. Those who had imbibed this spirit were hopelessly blind to things of beauty, sentiment, speculation, imagination, the spirit; anything, in other words, which could not be expressed in terms of material utility. There is a great deal of Victorian criticism from the pro-culture lobby along these lines. Dickens’s ‘Gradgrind’ in Hard Times is the best-known personification of it, lambasting what he calls ‘fancy’. Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

It used to be thought that this was a grotesque caricature, even for its time. But there were schools in Britain founded on these principles. And in a considerably

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diluted form the anti-‘fancy’ – that is, anti-art – tendency, or ‘philistinism’, spread far wider than Gradgrind’s schoolroom, into British culture generally, being one of the things that distinguished mid-Victorian Britain from ‘abroad’. * While this upset the artier people, like Dickens, Arnold and the rest, most Britons clearly didn’t worry about it too much. They were too busy, unlettered, poor and oppressed to be fully aware of it. And there were others who seem even to have gloried in it. It is difficult to know how many these were, because one of the characteristics of philistines is that they tend not to write very much, which means that we don’t have their recorded musings on art, culture and the rest of the world of ‘fancy’. Even the brighter of them were too busy doing more worthwhile work, like mass-producing useful things, making themselves richer and increasing the nation’s wealth, to waste their time with words. But there is an exception. We have met him before. He’s our intrepid Orcadian traveller, Samuel Laing the Elder. The value of his testimony, in the context of a book about Britain’s relations with Europe, is that his ideas about ‘art’ were honed in a European context. And although he is clearly in a tiny minority among travel writers, he may express the British side of that relationship rather better than the literati and aesthetes whom those travel writers mainly represented. His background has been sketched in already. He was a practical man, with strong radical opinions, which he took with him Norway in the 1830s when things went wrong for him back home. It was then that he started writing the first of his five substantial travel books, at the age of fifty-six which is old to be starting a literary career. He began in Scandinavia, then travelled down through Denmark, the German-speaking countries, France and northern Italy, commentating at length on the ‘moral, political and economical state’ of all of them. His works are not as well known as they possibly ought to be, but for understandable reasons. As travel books they were duller than those that described the dramatic scenery, beautiful artworks and attractive and eccentric inhabitants of the places they featured; while as works of philosophy – which is how he saw them – they were written in a form that did not lend itself to the rational development of ideas. His works are a strange, hybrid mixture of travelogue and philosophizing, with the philosophy being prompted by his observations of things abroad. They are unstructured, unsystematic, rambling, repetitive and sometimes inconsistent. In this chapter some of Laing’s ideas have been marshalled into a rough logical pattern, but that is not how they appear in the books. It is not surprising, therefore, that posterity has missed or ignored him. Some of his contemporaries, however, were more impressed.

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One was the reviewer of his Norway book in the Westminster Review, who went so far as to describe him as ‘next to Humboldt . . . the first of living travellers’, which was praise indeed. What this reviewer particularly admired was one particular and distinctive aspect of Laing’s approach. ‘We can safely promise the reader who purchases this modest octavo’, the review concluded, ‘that he will find in it more useful information, and more rational amusement, than in a dozen quartos of modern fabrication’. There speaks the authentic voice of Gradgrind. (Did Dickens, one wonders, ever read Laing?) It was the clue to Laing’s strength. His forte was facts, and in particular what he called the ‘ordinary facts of common occurrence in a country,’ from which conclusions about its social, economic and political condition could be drawn. That was where he differed from other travel writers, who lavished, he said, ‘the highest talents on descriptions of personal feelings or adventures, of romantic natural scenery, of striking objects in the sciences or fine arts’, but without ever enlightening their readers on how things really were. Laing never fell into that trap. Once he nearly did. He was on a boat sailing up the Gulf of Finland. The hills around him, the water lapping against the bows, and a beautiful young woman strumming a guitar nearby, had him dreaming romantic thoughts. But he pulled himself together, reflected on how so many travellers were misled into ‘ridiculous’ impressions by such influences, looked around him dispassionately, and realized how ordinary the landscape was ‘in sober reality.’ That is his only recorded near-lapse. On every other occasion he seems to have remained in full, rational control. We have seen how much he loved Norway, and disapproved of Sweden by contrast. It all had to do with the former’s free, unbureaucratic, independent, egalitarian way of living, which he put down to a form of landownership which distributed wealth equally, and militated against the acquisition of vast fortunes. At that time – and this is something that is not easily credited today – this was meant to be one of the products of free market capitalism: economic and social equality; to the extent that John Stuart Mill, who wrote one of the basic textbooks of ‘Political Economy’, professed that if this turned out not to be capitalism’s natural tendency, he would become a ‘socialist’. It also helps explain why workingclass radicals also espoused free enterprise in the early nineteenth century, before its internal contradictions (if that’s what they were) began to show through. One obvious effect or symptom of this was Norway’s poverty in respect of great mansions, palaces, cathedrals, works of art, literature or universities. (They all belonged to Denmark.) But Laing regarded that as no loss at all. On the credit side, ordinary Norwegian houses were ‘strong, sturdy, and clean; perfect adjuncts to the happy, simple life’. There was no need for all the rest. Later he came to

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regard all the rest as positive evils. That was when his real philosophical philistinism first emerged. It seems to have been first suggested to him by his experience of Sweden, which he treated almost as a kind of foil to Norway, as we have seen. Sweden did have great mansions (slott) and works of art, and even a musical culture of sorts. Laing however was impressed by none of this. The furniture and ornaments he found ‘flashy’ and ‘flimsy,’ and in general far worse made – if you looked beneath the veneer – than the Norwegians’ much simpler and more honest craftsmanship. The trouble with the Swedes’ literature was that it was too imaginative, almost entirely bereft of ‘exactitude of date and of fact’ (Gradgrind again); with the result that ‘fancy is more exercised than judgment’ among its readers. The fact that even workers appreciated the arts, as was apparently the case, meant that they had time for them, which meant in turn that there was too little useful work for them: again, the sign of an over-regulated and stagnant economy. The same applied to education, which was probably more ‘perfect and efficient’ in Sweden than almost anywhere else in the world: yet with no discernible benefit to ‘the moral condition of the people,’ which (by Laing’s criteria) was low. But that was not the end of it. Culture and education were not only unadmirable in themselves. They were fundamentally unprogressive, and they could do actual harm. They distracted folk from more worthwhile pursuits. They diverted industry into making useless luxuries for a few rich people, instead of furnishing necessities for everyone. They emphasized superficial show over solid quality of manufacture, which is why all the furniture in the great slott (pl.) was so badly made. They fed on inequality, bureaucracy and parasitism, and helped to perpetuate them in turn. At bottom, and despite appearances, they marked a low stage of human development; far lower, for example, than Norway had achieved. This was because, as Laing put it, ‘the taste of a people for neatness, finish and perfection, in every thing they use, is of far more importance to civilization, and betokens a much higher social condition, than a taste for the fine arts’. So, he asked in his next travel book: ‘What, after all, is the real value, in the social condition of man, of the fine arts?’ He had probably suspected the truth all along. If not, then his travels since Sweden – in France, Prussia, Switzerland, and Italy – brought it home to him. The arts had been ‘too highly estimated, – raised by prejudices inherited from a period of culture far behind our own, into a false importance’. They contributed far less to ‘the wellbeing, civilisation, and intellectuality of mankind’ than what he had now come to call the ‘useful arts’. What had Raphael, Michelangelo and the rest ever really done for the world?

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‘The Arkwrights, the Watts, the Davys, the thousands of scientific inventors and producers in the useful arts, must rank before you.’ The lisping amateur hopping about the saloons of the great, may prattle of taste, and refined feeling in music, sculpture, painting, as humanizing influences in society . . .; but the plain, undeniable, knock-me-down truth is, that the Glasgow manufacturer, whose printed cotton handkerchiefs the traveller Lander found adorning the woollyheads of negresses [sic] far in the interior of Africa, . . . has done more for civilization, has extended humanizing influences more widely, than all the painters, sculptors, architects, and musicians of our age put together.

On another occasion he pointed out that it was ‘not the musician, the fiddler, fifer, or bagpiper, who has humanized the Hottentot’ – which was probably true. It was for this reason that Rome, ‘the seat of the fine arts,’ nevertheless ranked far beneath Manchester, for example, in the scale of civilization; and why Scotland and the United States should not be regarded as inferior to Italy and Bavaria – rather the reverse – for their having not a single ‘good picture, or a good statue, or a good palace within their bounds’. Art was nothing. This was ‘Monstrous Vandalism’, no doubt; ‘but true’. The argument from utility is a familiar Victorian one. Laing’s originality lay in the fact that he took it to far greater extremes in relation to the fine arts and higher education than anyone before or probably since. The provision of handkerchiefs for ‘woolly-headed negresses’ was only one way in which the ‘useful’ scored over the ‘fine’ arts in the utilitarian stakes. Another was the fact that they provided jobs. This idea was elaborated in his penultimate travel book, published in 1850; in which he seemed to go back a little way on his early principle of the subdivision of land. One of the reasons for that was that he found land being too subdivided in France, which reduced peasant proprietors there to an economic condition in which they were unable to afford even the products of the ‘useful’ arts. The effect of that was to block the manufacture and circulation of industrial goods, which he regarded as ‘the lifeblood of society’. The same unfortunate result could be produced by the diversion of productive capacity into the arts. Again, it was a demand problem, this time originating among the middle class. If it was a ‘cultured’ middle class, on the Continental pattern, it would be likely to want to spend its surplus on statues and fine buildings and the rest. The drawback to that was that it was a less productive use of that surplus than if it were spent on more useful goods. Statues and the like generally employed ‘a comparatively small number of workmen to produce them’. Demand which was based on ‘lower’ tastes, however, ‘sets a-going much

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more labour and skill.’ That had a valuable political spin-off. The more workmen were kept in employment making useful things for the middle classes, the more they would feel a community of interest with them. In Britain, happily, that was the situation. ‘The very lowest labourer or handicraftsman knows that he lives by the prosperity and daily expenditure of his employers.’ It was this ‘that knots together our lower and upper classes, . . . more closely than on the Continent’. Probably that was one of the reasons for Britain’s stability during Europe’s recent year of revolutions. As well as everything else, philistinism could be regarded as a prophylactic against insurgency. That was the material argument for it. The moral arguments were even stronger. One was that art wasted time. This was harmful both negatively, because it diverted energies from ‘far more important and manly occupations’, and positively, because of what it diverted those energies in to. This applied not only to the fine arts, but also, for example, to the culinary ones. One of the things Laing noticed abroad was the great superiority of continental cookery to England’s ‘perpetual mutton chop and mashed potatoes’, which mirrored the situation in the arts. Again, however, that was no real advantage to the continentals. Britain’s ‘greater simplicity and frugality of diet’ was one of the things contributing to its national prosperity, because it took less time and money to prepare; ‘and time and labour, be it remembered, are the basis of all national wealth and prosperity’. The same applied to what he called ‘gaiety’. The Continent was full of this: ‘carnivals, holidays, wakes, popular games, public amusements’ and so on. It was yet another symptom of its inferiority. Britain had used to be gay too, once upon a time, but no longer. ‘England was merry England when the people were serfs.’ There seemed to be a correlation between gaiety and ‘a very low and debased social condition’. And that was true of art generally. The more Laing travelled around Europe, the more this correlation rang true. It came to seem like a general scientific law, which could be expressed mathematically – ‘Laing’s Theorem’, perhaps: a nation’s art and culture were in ‘inverse ratio’ to its political and social morality. This is how Laing elaborated it: The countries in the highest state of moral and intellectual culture at the present day, and the classes in those countries the most cultivated, morally, intellectually, and religiously, know little or nothing about the fine arts, have no taste in them, and are in no way indebted to them. The countries in the lowest state of moral, religious, and intellectual culture – Italy, for instance, and Bavaria – are those in which the taste and feeling for the fine arts are most generally diffused.

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He gave examples. Probably the sharpest came from Bavaria, where he recounted the experience of a Protestant clergyman who was imprisoned ‘and actually stripped naked and his body inspected by a surgical officer’ prior to a lashing, for refusing to kneel in the presence of a Catholic priest carrying the host. ‘Such is the spirit of government’, he observed, ‘in Munich, the centre of the fine arts in Germany, the capital in which the Aesthetic is cultivated as the true means of civilisation!’ It just went to show. None of this was by chance. The two things were connected. Art was detrimental to the civic virtues. In Germany, for example, the wide diffusion . . . of a taste for the enjoyment of the fine arts, has weakened the feeling and taste for the enjoyment of the somewhat more important objects in social life – civil liberty, freedom of mind, action, and industry, good government, and constitutional checks upon its folly and extravagance. . . . The esthetic civilization has civilized the people of Germany out of common sense, out of a right appreciation of the social and moral value of the things before them, out of independence, industry, civil and political liberty.

It did this in a number of ways. It weakened the mind, for example, by subjecting it to ‘vague sensation’, and nourishing ‘passive, rather than active, habits in the individual’. It ‘deteriorated’ men’s characters by giving them ‘a false object in life,’ which was liable to undermine their habits of industry, and much else. It could turn impressionable young minds to ‘prohibited interests and objects,’ which is what made political censorship necessary on the Continent, unlike in ‘our free and competition-driven social state’, which allowed the young – thankfully – too little spare time to devote to subversive thoughts. On the other hand – and maybe not altogether consistently – by nurturing ‘effeminate habits of thinking, and acting, and living for amusement’, art encouraged people ‘to submit to any misrule or social evil that does not interfere with the individual’s personal gratification of his amateur tastes’. (The idea of ‘effeminacy’ in connection with the arts and the contrast with ‘manly’ industry crop up frequently in Laing’s writings.) He also implied that art – and for some reason Beethoven’s sonatas in particular – was physically debilitating; though that was probably the least of his worries. The chief one was that the Continental’s taste for the fine arts was pushing out his taste for much worthier qualities, and had become, as Laing put it, ‘his substitutes for civil and political liberty, domestic habits, industry, and skill in the useful arts, energy of character, perseverance, and all that distinguishes the Englishman’. Art was not the only culprit. Higher learning had liberal-capitalist blood on its hands too. It was Germany, again, that convinced Laing of this. Germany was

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celebrated for its universities, and for the large number of young men who passed through them. The contrast here with Britain was stark. Youths who would already be at work there, ‘and considering themselves in their proper vocation if they are earning fair wages by their industry’, in Germany went to university instead, where they devoted themselves to scholarship, science or even (horror of horrors) the arts. On the surface this seemed to point to the Germans’ intellectual superiority. That, insisted Laing, was not so. The workshop or the counting house, which was where most English middle-class school leavers went, was a far better intellectual training than any university. ‘Giving their minds entirely to their trade or business, thinking of nothing else, and strangers to philosophy’, they emerged into the real world ‘with minds well exercised’ and ‘full of good sense and practical judgment’. ‘Our Humes, Cobdens, Brights, have had no other schooling.’ In Germany, it was very different. At university, young men fell under the influence of ‘men of speculative philosophic minds, professors, scholars . . . without practice, judgment, or decision in the management even of the most ordinary business of society’. From them they imbibed ‘wild theories and speculations in religion, philosophy, and political and social science’. At the end they ‘came out of their training philosophers, theorists, dreamers’, turned up their noses at honest industrial or commercial occupations, and elected to become civil servants or politicians instead. This was a waste. It was also, claimed Laing, potentially ‘dangerous to the state’. Most of Germany’s 1848 revolutionaries were university men. Higher education clearly made its products dissatisfied and wild. (‘Has socialism or communism’, Laing wrote in 1852, ‘any other origin?’) The only consolation – the reason why the 1848 revolutions had failed – was that higher education made men impractical and incompetent, too. It was a matter of regret to Laing that the Scottish universities were very little different from the German in this regard. (Perhaps this explains his own failure to persevere with his Edinburgh degree.) South of the border, things were better. If you had to have universities, probably the best kind to have were the English, ‘which do not profess to teach any thing at all’. (He sent his own boy to Cambridge.) The ideal solution, however, was to do without them entirely. It was difficult to think of any function they could usefully fulfil. There were things that needed to be taught to young men (and perhaps women), but they could all be catered for long before the tertiary stage. A private letter of 1823, relating to Laing’s local grammar school in Kirkwall, defined this ‘elementary knowledge’ as: ‘reading Caesar and Virgil in Latin and the first five chapters of St. Matthew in Greek; the extraction of the Square Root with the elementary branches of

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Arithmetic such as Decimals; and . . . basic Trigonometry’. That was all that was necessary; ‘the basis of everything useful’. (To us, it might seem a lot.) Beyond it, ‘life’ was the best educator of any man. In the ‘main requirements of true civilization’, Laing wrote, ‘the school-educated have no decided advantage over the world-educated; over those who have acquired their knowledge, judgment, tastes, habits, by experience and their own reflection and their own commonsense’. The main error and the downfall of the Continent were to think otherwise. But it would not always be so. Germany, for example, was showing signs then of beginning to recover from the ‘chloroformic influence’ of its enslavement to the siren Art. Britain and Norway had already struggled free. They were in the vanguard of what was ultimately an irreversible movement forward, towards the utopia of a whole world informed by liberal capitalist values and ideals. ‘Royalty, aristocracy, church-power, and feudalism in legislation, or in administrative function, have lost root and are withering away on the Continent’, observed Laing; ‘All Europe is advancing towards one goal, – a higher social and political condition’, more suited to the progressive Victorian age. Among the casualties, together with royalty and all the rest, were bound to be culture and learning, which were essentially the adjuncts of a more primitive stage of development, and incompatible with the advanced civilization of the future. Music would probably go first. ‘The age of Orpheus is past’, wrote Laing; to be replaced eventually by ‘higher and more intellectual influences than harmony of sound’. No doubt it would be missed for a while, until the Germans found how much healthier and happier they were free from the enervating influence of Beethoven’s aptly-named Appassionata and Pathétique. The other arts would follow. People would lose their taste for them. All countries would become like Britain, where ‘there is no feeling for the fine arts, no foundation for them, no esteem for them’, in any group or class. That was something to look forward to; together with the ‘mutton chops and mashed potatoes’ that, no doubt, everyone would develop a proper liberal capitalist stomach for in time. * Laing was not typical: as a travel writer, an early nineteenth-century capitalist, or even – probably – an Orcadian. He was even extreme as a philistine. Despite all this, however, he might have been representative in many ways. His books had mixed reviews. Many were favourable. If they were critical, then it was generally of Laing’s political radicalism. Only one reviewer picked him up on his ideas about art and education: to ask, for example, whether the steam engine would ever have been invented without just a little of the kind of idle speculation Laing so much deplored. Others let them pass. Laing’s expressions of philistinism do

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not seem to have startled contemporaries as much as they startle us. So they are probably a fair reflection, although a rare one, of the views of many of his middleclass compatriots. As such, they indicate that there was another side to the capitalism/culture conflict in the early nineteenth century. It was not simply a matter of reactionary aesthetes looking down their noses at men with northern accents who created the wealth that supported the rest. The northerners could be pretty withering too. Of course it may have been something like that which provoked Laing’s philistinism in the first place. There is an angrily defensive tone about much of it, especially after he strikes the main British upper-class tourist routes in southern Germany and Italy for his third book in the early 1840s, which suggests that he may have been snubbed there by some ‘lisping amateur’, or one of Thackeray’s ‘Continental snobs’. Some of his views may be overreactions. To read them in isolation, you would think that he must have been entirely uninterested in literature and art. That is certainly wrong. In between writing travel books, he wore another hat. In 1844 he published the first English translation of a series of Icelandic sagas known as the Heimskringla, part of which happened to surface much later – via Carlyle and Longfellow – as Elgar’s Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf, Opus 30 (first performed in 1896). The Heimskringla reads rather like Tolkien, and is difficult to see as qualifying as one of the ‘useful arts’. Laing himself, in fact, commended it to his readers simply as literature, and ‘for amusement’. So he was not quite the unregenerate philistine he presented himself as in his Observations and Notes of a Traveller. There are other problems with Laing. In view of his strong prejudices against leisure and unproductive activities, what on earth was he doing gallivanting around Europe, engaged in no gainful pursuit that we know of except writing, at what must have been the height of his productive powers? Could his writing have been profitable, enough to justify it in market terms? How many workmen did it employ? How did he square all this with his stated views? Then again: how objective a witness was he of what he saw? Was Norway really as idyllic, or Sweden, Germany and Italy as depraved, as he painted them? When it came to accuracy of fact, was he true to his own principles? Or did he sometimes let his prejudices run away with him? He believed his theory – Art (or ‘High’ art) flourishes in inverse proportion to Capitalism – was borne out by his observations. It may not have been. Nor do events since his time seem at first glance to help. Capitalism has come on a long way in Europe and the US since his time, but Art does not seem to have died just yet. Is that because of capitalism, or despite it? All of which rests, of

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course, on subjective judgments: of how invasive the capitalist ‘spirit’ has really been, and of what constitutes ‘good’ art. On the other hand, if there is something in ‘Laing’s Theorem’, it might help explain Britain’s and Norway’s relatively low positions on the European cultural scale for much of the nineteenth century, when utilitarianism was beginning to be one of the qualities that was thought to define ‘Britishness’. And that in turn tells us a lot about Britain’s relations with its more cultured, yet at the same time more backward – in liberal-capitalist British terms – neighbours.

Notes 1 The first version of this chapter appeared as ‘ “Monstrous Vandalism”: Capitalism and Philistinism in the works of Samuel Laing’, in Albion, vol. 23 (1991). Most of my sources are cited there.

Part Four

War in Europe

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World War I: Gallipoli

The single way in which Britain might be said to have ‘avoided’ the Continent of Europe in the nineteenth century was militarily. Apart from the Crimean War (1854–6) – which in any case had an extra-European dimension, with Russian aggression there being thought to indirectly threaten one of its routes to India – Britain was not materially involved in any of Europe’s many internal wars between the Battle of Waterloo (1815) and the outbreak of the First World War (1914). This was deliberate, and for good reasons. The first was that Britain had no territorial ambitions on the Continent, and no significant border disputes with its nearest neighbours. These could only come about if any of those neighbours, or a combination of them, threatened its territorial integrity directly, through invasion, which the British Foreign Office did bother itself with – indeed, it was its major preoccupation throughout most of the century – and sought to avoid, but by skilful diplomacy, rather than through force or the threat of it. Its main diplomatic trick was to dissuade potential enemies from attacking by encouraging alliances with other countries which would automatically be triggered against any such aggression. It was called the ‘Balance of Power’, and could shift and re-form according to circumstances, and so is not to be confused with the rather stiffer Soviet-era ‘Balance’ between two permanent blocs. The second reason was an ideological one. Because Britain’s main national priorities were commercial, and free trade required peace, everything should be done to avoid the disruption to trade that war was bound to bring. (There are flaws in this argument, but it was what contemporary liberals thought.) The third reason for avoiding war was that Britain was generally unprepared for it – land wars with powerful opponents, that is – both because its people were not keen on them, and because its Army was relatively small and, to be frank, pretty pathetic right through the period. Soldiering was generally thought to be the lowest of trades for working men, despised by most of their mates, as well as by the Duke of Wellington, who called them (notoriously) ‘the scum of the earth’; and, for the officer class, a profession 97

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for ‘younger sons’ once the elder ones had inherited the estates or taken the most prestigious jobs. (Winston Churchill was sent to Sandhurst because he wasn’t thought bright enough for university. Perhaps we should be grateful for that.) Despite its proud displays of battle honours in regimental mess halls and churches all over the country, the British Army’s record during the nineteenth century is a patchy one, at best; with the French having had all the major successes during the Crimean War (Queen Victoria was reported to be upset when it came to an end before her brave boys had scored any runs), a long succession of defeats overseas, often against poorly armed ‘natives’, and all its most glorious moments taking the form of what the historian Stephanie Barczewski has termed ‘heroic failures’: the Charge of the Light Brigade, Isandlwana, Gordon at Khartoum, Scott of the Antarctic (though he was Navy), Dunkirk, and several more. Barczewski hints that these failures might have been deliberate, in a way, with the British back home always feeling uncomfortable about winning forcibly and atrociously: vide their reactions to the victorious but one-sided Chinese, Sudan and South African campaigns. (One is reminded of Jonathan Miller’s ‘we need a futile gesture at this stage of the War’ in Beyond the Fringe.) That seems unlikely; but ‘heroic failures’ like these did go some way to put a brighter gloss on the general ineptitude of Britain’s military.1 (The Royal Navy, incidentally, didn’t share in this.) Which made the prospect of a major war with a militaristic Germany and its ferocious army a frightening prospect in the years leading up to 1914; which is why the British tried so hard to avoid it by diplomatic means, until Germany (it was felt) forced it on them by invading Belgium, one essential piece in the ‘Balance’, in August 1914. Although Britain won the ‘Great War’ in the end, it was not by its own efforts alone, which often – and now notoriously – proved less than adequate for the task, and could well have spelled failure for it overall. One particular battle, or series of battles, has come to exemplify this: the Gallipoli Campaign early in the war, undertaken on Churchill’s advice, would have stained his reputation probably permanently, had it not been for his making spectacular amends in 1940–5. This chapter will concentrate on that sorry affair: arguably a minor engagement in the First World War, but a characteristic one in some ways. * Churchill should have known. From the time of the Crusades onwards, Western military interventions in the Near and Middle East have nearly all been disastrous, in the long run obviously (look at today), but usually short-term too. The Gallipoli adventure (1915) was no exception. The reason for it was Turkey’s siding with Germany in the Great War – Turkey, of course, is a European as well

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as an Asian power geographically – and Churchill’s cunning plan to cut through the ghastly stalemate of the Western front with a morale-boosting attack where Germany expected it least. Force the Straits between the Aegean and the Sea of Marmara, get to Constantinople, detach the Turks from the Germans, bolster the Russians, and it could shorten the war by two years. In retrospect, it has been suggested that it might even have forestalled the Bolshevik Revolution. Ottoman oil may also have played a small part. Wasn’t all that worth a gamble? In the end it failed miserably, with appalling losses on both sides, and the Allied forces evacuating the peninsular in December, leaving much of their materiel behind. Churchill attracted most of the obloquy for this – ‘what about the Dardanelles?’ they used to shout at him whenever he got up in Parliament – though that may have been unfair to him: most of the rest of the government and the high command, including Kitchener, were behind him at the start. Kitchener’s reputation ended up pretty battered too, though he was drowned before it came to matter so much. In historical retrospect it has become established as one of those heroic cock-ups that the British seemed almost to revel in, and even to gain strength from. But obviously it would have been better if it had worked. The historical verdict today seems to be that it could never have done. Whether or not forcing the Straits might have had all those other, broader repercussions – and no one can know that for sure; things rarely turn out long-term as they are supposed to in war (again, look at today) – the strategy itself was a foolish and hopeless one. One Gurkha major thought that, ironically, this might be the ‘one hope’ of its success: it was so crazy that the Turks would never believe the Allies would contemplate it, so they would be taken by surprise. (One is inescapably reminded of General Melchett in Blackadder Goes Forth; another satire that repeatedly strikes one, reading these accounts, as closer to some of the essential truths of the war than people may credit.) On the other hand many of the Turks did think it was possible, and indeed inevitable: after all the Royal Navy, which would be doing most of the forcing, was the greatest in the world; and there were several occasions when on the Allied side they thought they could have burst through with just a few more reinforcements, for example, or better leadership, or a little luck. Talk of ‘missed opportunities’ was rife. Which was one of the reasons for the intense dislike among both troops and junior officers for the politicians and behind-the-lines senior officers who had got them into this mess in the first place, and now seemed quite incompetent to carry the campaign through. This of course is a common view of the Great War, the ‘lions led by donkeys’ trope (Blackadder, again); which has become so clichéd, in fact, as to rightly raise

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suspicions in the minds of many historians, but which, it has to be said, seems to be borne out by some recently published accounts.2 The first, Gallipoli: A Soldier’s Story, was originally penned in the 1930s by Arthur Beecroft of the Royal Engineers for his son Bobby, to counteract the new pacifist revisionism that he thought was painting him then (with all his comrades-in-arms) as ‘a poor bemused fool who was led blindfold to the slaughter, and had not the gumption to see that his ideals were sham’. Beecroft didn’t intend or expect it to be published; ‘the public’, he wrote, ‘are getting sick of the subject – and a good job too’. But here it is. Another recent account, Richard Van Emden’s and Stephen Chambers’s Gallipoli: The Dardanelles Disaster in Soldiers’ Words and Photographs, consists mainly of other soldiers’ and sailors’ letters and diaries, British, Anzac (Australian and New Zealander) and Turkish – but not French or Indian, apart from a couple of the latter’s British officers – arranged chronologically, with an editorial commentary, and some evocative if grainy battlefield photographs taken by the soldiers, even though cameras were officially banned. One can see why; few of these pictures were likely to do much for morale. Most are of awfully worn and miserable-looking men doing their daily chores in between battles. One of them is having a dump; which illustrates, as it happens, a recurring theme of both these books. Those were the appalling conditions that both the Allied and the Turkish armies were faced with on Gallipoli; far worse, it was thought, than on any other Great War front, but hidden from the folks back home. Diarrhoea was a major part of that, usually connected with dysentery, and suffered by nearly all the men for most of the time. As one wag put it: ‘the XIth Division went into action grasping the rifle in one hand, and keeping up his trousers with the other.’ ‘Sanitary arrangements were non-existent’, wrote a Welsh Fusilier captain, ‘and in the dark it was impossible to get men to use one spot with so many bullets flying all around. The result in a hot climate can be imagined.’ Another source of torment – probably connected – was the ‘pestering curse of those damnable Suvla Bay flies, and the lice with which every officer and man swarmed’. ‘To die for one’s country is all very well, and simple enough if it comes along in your day’s work’, wrote one junior officer. ‘But to itch for your country, day in and night out . . . ’ Then there was the searing heat in the summer, followed by winter temperatures that literally froze some men to death; the ‘torments of thirst’ suffered – they were repeatedly told that they would find water on the land, but they rarely did; the awful food – biscuits too hard to bite and bully beef that melted in the heat; and the utter exhaustion suffered by men who often had to go several days without sleeping, stomachs churning and skins crawling with little

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beasties, and without any proper rest or leave. This last was one of the particular disadvantages of Gallipoli over the Western Front; at least in France there were friendly villages to retire to behind the lines. And that was without taking account of the killing and mutilation – about 200,000 casualties on the Allied side, and roughly the same on the Turkish – described here without mercy to these diarists’ and correspondents’ readers, who one hopes were not close and caring relatives. A British petty officer ‘watched in wordless horror’ as a boat floated by his ship; ‘a mass of corpses huddled together . . . everywhere crimson mingling with the brown, and here and there a waxenwhite face with draggled hair staring up into the silent heavens . . . Such was our introduction to the glories of war.’ Several men were burned alive. ‘The carnage is awful’, wrote a Turkish lieutenant after one engagement. ‘Dismembered parts of bodies are intermingled. Blood has drained out of bodies, and chests and arms look like wax. Shins and legs, seared by the explosion, are purple. Some bones have been stripped of flesh.’ ‘Have you ever walked over dead men, still warm and quivering?’ asked Captain Albert Mure of the Royal Scots. Some descriptions are almost comically grotesque. ‘A bullet took the upper lip of a soldier lying beside me, shooting and talking. I did not realise it until his voice changed.’ Seas turned red. Dead mules floating out on their backs with their legs sticking up were mistaken for submarine periscopes. Rough beach cemeteries seemed to creep up the hills of their own volition, to meet the bodies being shot on the way down. Others went mad. There’s a painful self-description in Van Emden’s book of Captain Albert Mure’s descent into madness, as he thought. Many more of those who lived, and with their limbs and minds intact, remained traumatized for years. Arthur Beecroft never talked about his experiences with his family afterwards, which was common; it had something to do with the fact that those experiences were just too alien to be comprehended by civilians. There was no point of contact. In moments of (comparative) rest, they marvelled that they were still able to carry on in such conditions, pushing forward heroically or enduring stoically when they got stuck: one of the points of the whole enterprise had been to get away from the stasis of trench warfare, but it soon degenerated into that; and in pretty good spirits, despite the looks on their faces in the photographs. ‘Nothing in all my brief but vigorous soldiering’, wrote a captain of the Royal Scots, ‘has impressed me more than the miraculous way in which men who look completely finished can and do go on, not only doggedly (that one expects, of course, until they drop), but vigorously and alertly’. There are very few examples recorded here of ‘funking, bunking, hiding, thieving, abandoning arms, and miserable cowardice’, but then of course there was nowhere any deserters

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could bunk off to. In fact, ‘cowardice’ was not a straightforward thing: ‘the civilian soldier was sometimes brave and sometimes a coward and, still more often, exceedingly brave to hide his fear.’ As Arthur Beecroft put it, ‘I suppose one can get used to any sort of beastliness’. They had their diversions. Swimming was one, if they could avoid the dead mules. Footballs appeared from nowhere. (In one case it may have saved its owner’s life, when he used it in lieu of a life jacket.) Very occasionally the men were cheered up by the smell of frying bacon, or the taste of a tot of rum. In their trenches and ‘holes’ they amused themselves by betting on fights to the death between scorpions and spiders – the spiders usually won. (The equivalent for the French troops, apparently, was collecting and studying the archaeology that lay shallowly buried all around them. Different cultures.) ‘We aired our views on women and sang our bawdy songs.’ (The last that most of them had seen of real women was in the brothels of Alexandria on their way to Turkey.) Many of them enjoyed their brave padres’ hastily improvised religious services, for the (less bawdy) singing; or perhaps, as one suggested, because they felt themselves to be so ‘close to the next world’. But what mainly kept them sane and spirited was the comradeship forged among them, the sense of a shared burden, and of the responsibility each of them bore to his fighting ‘pals’. Ordinary troops and junior officers shared together in that. (Casualties among the latter group were far higher than in the former.) If one was ever invalided out, his sense of relief was nearly always qualified by his guilt at being separated from his mates. And this, as is very well known by now, was also the main motivation behind what was often taken at the time to be their ‘patriotism’, but which in fact went no wider than this. In particular, it didn’t bond them with their national leaders: the politicians in Whitehall and the senior officers on the ‘perfumed island’ of Imbros in the Aegean, where the ‘brass hats’ hung out. * These were the real enemy. The Turks weren’t; after the initial illusion that ‘ Abdul’ would immediately turn and run at the sight of the Tommies and Jack Tars coming towards him was pricked, which happened very quickly, the British soldiers grew to respect him enormously. Of course they heard scary rumours about the Turks – that they castrated their prisoners, for example – but soon saw through these. During temporary cease-fires (to bury the dead) the two sides fraternized and even exchanged gifts. (The Turks appreciated the cigarettes, but not the bully beef.) The high-ups disapproved of that, as they had of the famous football match on the Western Front at Christmas 1914; the men needed ‘a bit of hate’, they thought, to drive them on. But the troops saw things as they were.

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Offered gas masks, the Anzac units refused them on the grounds that ‘the Turks won’t use gas. They’re clean fighters’. The Allies’ main hatred was reserved for their own high command. They were indecisive. The preparations for the invasion – which were their responsibility – were totally inadequate. The men weren’t given proper maps. (Officers used to scour the shops for tourist guidebooks to discover where they were.) As a result they often found themselves in the wrong places, even the wrong bays. Tactics were confused, or non-existent. More often than not the only plan seemed to be to ‘put the troops ashore and let them get on with it’. ‘He [an officer] refused to give any orders, or information, and reiterated ad nauseam “This is your show”. I nearly brained him.’ Lines of communication from shore to land (let alone from Imbros to Gallipoli) broke down. ‘We were hampered, hindered and buggered about by old men.’ That – the ‘old men’ factor – was thought to be the crux of it. Most of the commanders were retirees, or ‘dugouts’, brought back from tending their roses for this one last show, mainly because the best officers (or reputedly the best) could not be spared from the Western Front, which after all was the major priority; and were inexperienced in the type of warfare that Gallipoli represented. (But then who wasn’t?) Some were unreliable in other ways. General Sir Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton (b. 1853) was widely rumoured to write poetry in his spare time, by God! Major-General Sir Frederick Hammersley (b. 1858) had already suffered one nervous breakdown, in 1911 at Aldershot of all places, after which he had had a spell in a private psychiatric hospital, which should have forewarned his seniors of his second mental collapse at the height of battle at Suvla Bay. General the Hon. Sir Frederick Stopford’s (b. 1854) incompetence in that same battle provoked Kitchener to sack him summarily, with the observation that Gallipoli ought to be ‘a young man’s war’. All of them had ‘old Regular Army ideas’. The slightly younger Brigadier-General William Sitwell (b. 1860) couldn’t even use a telephone, repeatedly speaking into the wrong end. All of them – it’s almost superfluous to remark – were educated at public (private) schools, more often than not Eton. It was their public school backgrounds that not only determined their ‘spirit’ as they went on this adventure – Lieutenant-Commander Adrian Keyes shaving each morning ‘with a copy of Kipling’s “If ” propped up before him’, for example – but also much of their enthusiasm for this particular theatre of war. They knew about it from their peculiar education. Almost every step of their way recalled their Homers to them, and the legendary goings-on of Xerxes, Hector, Achilles and all that lot. These were certainly in the front of Sub-Lieutenant Rupert Brooke’s mind as he set off to join the fun in the Dardanelles in the Spring of

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1915, before he died of a mosquito bite on the island of Skyros, on the way. ‘Oh God! I’ve never been quite so happy in my life.’ His naive eagerness was not unique among the classically educated. Ancient Greek allusions abound in the letters and diaries of the officers anthologized here, though less so in the other ranks’. To make up for this, one kind padre took it upon himself to teach them. ‘He began by saying that the ground on which we stood was famous in ancient history. He went on talking about Helen of Troy, the Wooden Horse, Ulysses and his battles and travels. I was fascinated. Like most boys of my social class I had left school early to earn a living and that lecture opened a new world to me. When I got home’ – he was one of the lucky ones – ‘I purchased Homer’s works.’ That must be counted a plus for the war. Whether it reconciled Sapper Gale to it, or any of his upper-middle class betters once the true and very un-Greek-like nature of the campaign became apparent, is doubtful. It is noticeable how the classical allusions thin out as the war goes on. But there were other pluses. * The two main positive repercussions of the Dardanelles campaign were unlooked for, at least by the British. The first was a boost in national self-confidence for the Turks, who took great pride in being the first, as they thought, to beat the invincible Royal Navy. They were also surprised and encouraged that the Europeans could make mistakes. ‘These British are either really stupid or unprepared’, wrote a Turkish lieutenant, on finding a unit laying out breakfast in open view of his troops. Mustafa Kemal (later Kemal Atatürk), founder of the first Turkish Republic, distinguished himself in the campaign. His famous command ‘I don’t order you to attack. I order you to die’ is supposed to have been inspiring. This wasn’t a final victory for the Turks: Colonel T.E. Laurence in their southern possessions had something to say about that; but it was a huge fillip, after successive military defeats in the Balkans in the years leading up to the Great War, and in the face of decades – probably a century – of European racist disparagement of the ‘unspeakable Turk’. Even when defeated, nations don’t like to be humiliated. We’re learning this with Russia today. The sinking of three British battleships in the Bosphorus on 18 March, and the repulsion of a significant Allied military force on the mainland, helped here. The second major positive result of the war was the creation of the myth in Australia, which still persists, of the effeteness and stupidity of the British officer classes, and inferiority of the ordinary soldiers, when set against the healthy democratic masculinity of the Anzac troops who came over to help them out. British officers were impressed with the latter, too, especially when they spied them stripped for bathing on the beaches, reminding them homoerotically of

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Flaxman’s illustrations in their Homers of their Greek heroes: ‘something as near to absolute beauty as I shall ever hope to see in this world.’ That’s what a public school education does for you. This is supposed to have planted the seed of Australia’s present-day self-identity as a nation – hence its annual celebration still of Anzac Day, April 25. Another long-term result, arising out of this, may have been the Murdoch newspaper family’s deep and lasting Anglophobia, based on a flying visit Rupert’s father Keith paid to the Dardanelles in early September, the nadir of the war. It was he who popularized the lions/donkeys myth back in Australia. Even friendly British visitors there still suffer from this, until we have learned to rubbish the Aussies back. (They quite like that.) Arthur Beecroft will have agreed with Murdoch about the British officers. One of his reasons for writing his memoir, however, was to put the record straight about the other ranks. ‘Physically’, he wrote, ‘the men were simply magnificent’; ‘a finer selection of good British manhood will never be seen than those early Kitchener Armies’. But they were the early ones, before they had been tested in battle, then supplemented by conscripted men, who were less fit (one Lancastrian blamed this on ‘a neat diet of fish and chips, and long close-confined work in the mills’), and finally tortured by the heat, thirst, exhaustion, flies and diarrhoea. Then they became ‘grim and haggard, as if the blood had been drained from their faces, and expression from their eyes’. Those were probably the ones Murdoch Senior saw. So far as the ordinary British soldier was concerned, he seems to have liked and admired the Anzacs (better than the French, anyway), though he envied their pay packets (six times his), and also their natural democracy, even in such a rigid hierarchy as the Army’s. ‘Saluting’s a thing for Pommie bastards – not for Austry-lian boys like us.’ This of course caused problems for more snooty British officers: ‘they really were rather difficult’, as one lieutenant colonel archly remembered them. But as the campaign wore on, the Australian way seems to have caught on a little among the Brits too; one junior lieutenant remarked how ‘no one stands on his dignity any more’ – this was after he had forgotten to salute a passing general and not been pulled up for it – so that ‘every day one is more convinced that people are at their best’. One officer noted – it seems to have come as a surprise to him – that ‘Tommy has his feelings’. This, and the understandable prejudice that developed in these months against the uppermost classes, may well have had an indirect influence on the progress of social democracy back in Britain, such as it was; another unsought effect, if so. * From a modern-day perspective, one would expect religion to have played a part in this. It doesn’t seem to have done, to any great extent. On the British side,

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there is no explicit sign that this was ever presented or seen as a fight for Christianity. Soldiers saw little difference between their own odd religious observances and the Turks’. In their accounts there are a few references to Islam – soldiers yelling ‘Allah! Allah!’ as they went ‘over the top’, and being gee-ed on by what the Brits called their ‘priests’ – but they are marginal. ‘War’, mused one Ottoman lieutenant, ‘is neither a game, nor a sacred thing’. For them, their main motive was not religious, but purely military: ‘to regain the prestige that they had lost in the Balkans.’ Some of them sincerely regretted that it was the British they had to fight, for ‘we know that you are just and that Moslems thrive under you’. It really is difficult to read present-day religious wars (if they are genuinely religious) back into this. There is certainly none of the deliberate horror – on both sides: beheadings, torture, bombings – that has accompanied conflict in and from the Middle East in recent years. Horror, yes; but usually what is called ‘collateral’. It’s also not easy to present this as an ‘imperialist’ venture on the Allies’ part. The Great War in general may have been – debate still rages over that; and there are plenty of the tell-tale signs that we usually associate with ‘imperialism’ on the Allies’ other front against the Ottomans, which was in what was loosely called ‘Arabia’ – modern Syria, Iraq, Palestine, as well as Saudi Arabia – at this time: the lust for control, greed for oil, colonial (Jewish) settlement, racial superiority, and so on. Gallipoli, however, was mainly a diversionary tactic in the main European war. The Allies had no intention of annexing it. (One Australian did write that it would ‘be a wonderful place for tourists after the war is over’, but he can’t have been entirely serious.) It was also, it needs to be remembered, in these days when the word ‘imperialism’ is usually identified exclusively with the West, directed against an empire which until comparatively recently had been the major one in this area, more extensive than the British or French, the successor to a number of Islamic empires or caliphates (Umayyad, Abbasid, etc.) with a mixed record of treating their non-Muslim subjects, and engaged at that very moment in resisting a series of anti-colonial movements of its own, often brutally. (The controversy over whether the Armenian massacre of 1915 constituted ‘genocide’, or perhaps ‘religiocide’ – the Armenians were Christians – is largely a semantic one.) So it doesn’t fit easily into one of the dominant narratives of today, of east–west and imperial–colonial conflict over the years. Whether Beecroft’s revisionary account of the affair really did, as he intended, puncture the fashionable view of his time of its participants as ‘poor bemused fools who were led blindfold to the slaughter, and had not the gumption to see that their ideals were sham’, must be doubted. We can accept that their ideals

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were not sham, in the sense of hypocritical: there’s enough evidence of that here, especially from those young men – he was one of them – who had imbibed all that ancient-romantic-heroic stuff at their public schools. But ‘blindfold to the slaughter’ sounds about right. So does ‘bemused’. Not having ‘the gumption to see’ that they were being fooled, however, depends on whether the project was a foolish one all along or not. Maybe if the conditions that these books focus on – weather, water, tiny fauna, disease – had been better, it could have worked. Van Emden and Chambers suggest that these were the real causes of the disaster. The main failure of the much-despised politicians and upper echelons of the Army, then, must be that they did not foresee this. What on earth were their intelligence services doing in Turkey before 1915? * The evacuation of Gallipoli was the most efficient part of the whole campaign. Officers who were against it had confidently predicted 25,000–40,000 new casualties in the course of it; in the event, there were almost none. That was a kind of success (anticipating Dunkirk), but it hardly made up for the apparent pointlessness of the Allies’ sacrifices overall. ‘We had come’, wrote Private Gill of the RAMC afterwards, ‘as invaders, fouled this legendary shore with blood and excrement, and filled it with graves. Our object unattained, we were now slipping away.’ They were all happy to leave; but ‘what of the men we were to leave behind there? The good comrades, who had come so gaily with us to the wars, who had fought so gallantly by our side, and would now lie for ever among the barren rocks where they had died . . . No man was sorry to leave Gallipoli, but few were really glad.’ As for Beecroft, he admitted it was ‘a story of failure’; and yet, he insisted, a ‘failure with a glory of its own’. There was something inspiring, he thought, in ‘the picture of the grim British Tommy just sticking it out until death found him’. This sounds grim; but in an Afterword he expressed the opinion (c. 1930) that the qualities that this had brought out in the men – ‘virility’,‘comradeship’,‘brotherliness between all classes’ – also stood as examples for peacetime. ‘I sometimes think that if we had stood together in the last ten years as we did during the war there would have been a happier country than there is today.’ That was a common way of looking at things then, throughout the political spectrum (‘we’re all in this together’), though opinions could differ, as today, on what ‘standing together’ involved. What is more unusual is Beecroft’s rider to this: that while men seemed to have lost that ‘virility’, women had taken it up. ‘At the moment, in every walk of life, woman is showing the way for man.’ One wonders what his pals in the trenches, ‘airing their views on women’, would have thought of that.

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Gallipoli could have been a crucial event in Britain’s first major European war for a century, but wasn’t. It was supposed to divert the British Army from the European theatre, where it didn’t really belong, but of course it did not. The hope was that it would end the war quickly, but it failed in that too. The war lumbered on, horrendously, for another three years. Churchill left the government temporarily, and had no further decisive influence on it, beyond visiting the troops on the Western Front to see with his own eyes how they were suffering; but not without taking his own creature comforts along with him. (Everywhere he went, ‘a long bath and a boiler for heating the bath water’ were dragged after him, presumably by horses which could otherwise have been pulling field-guns.) He was also generous to the ordinary squaddies at the Front, providing entertainments for them – mule races, pillow fights and a concert – and to the officers, whom he treated with oysters and champagne. (That’s the British class system for you.) Apart from that, however, he made no further significant contribution to this first major European intervention of Britain’s for a century; saving himself – though he wasn’t to know this – for the next major intervention, when it came.

Notes 1 Stephanie Barczewski, Heroic Failure and the British (Woodstock: Yale University Press, 2016). 2 My review of these books for the LRB, 20 May 2015, forms the basis for this chapter; from which all the quotations are taken.

8

World War II: Churchill

Britain’s next major intervention in Europe was, of course, its entry into the Second World War: or, to look at it another way – for there were connexions between them – the Great Twentieth-Century World War Part II.1 Churchill’s role in this was, of course, more central, and on the whole more beneficial – if, that is, you believe it was a good thing that his side won; but so was that of the British ‘people’. This chapter and the next will discuss these in turn: the first based on a number of recent biographies of Churchill (no, not Boris Johnson’s); the second on two newish books about attitudes and activities on the ‘home front’. * Churchill is an alluring subject for biographers, especially wannabe Churchills like Johnson, and it must be nearly impossible to write an uninteresting book about him. His own dicta, if liberally quoted, would keep the dullest narrative dancing along. Take this, from a speech in the House of Commons in 1922, which particularly struck me as I read Geoffrey Best’s Churchill: A Study in Greatness (2001); the debate is on Ulster, and Churchill has just finished describing the upheaval and transformation created everywhere in the world by the recent war. [B]ut as the deluge subsides and the waters fall we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that have been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world. That says a lot for the persistence with which Irishmen on the one side or the other are able to pursue their controversies. It says a good deal for the power which Ireland has, both Nationalist and Orange, to lay her hands upon the vital strings of British life and politics and to hold, dominate and convulse, year after year, generation after generation, the politics of this powerful country.

A very English view, of course, and recognizable today, with the Irish border still making difficulties for Britain’s Brexit settlement; but expressed vividly and sonorously. It is this sort of thing that makes his Nobel Prize in Literature, 109

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incongruous as it seemed at the time, not entirely unmerited. (Apparently he did not rate it very highly: he thought he should have got the Peace one instead. He could not attend the presentation, but wrote a gracious letter to the Nobel Prize committee saying how much he admired Sweden, especially its ‘warriors’. Was that meant ironically, in view of Sweden’s neutrality in the 1939–45 war?) He was always charismatic and dashing, albeit with certain notorious flaws. Stanley Baldwin put it well – almost, one might say, Churchillianly – in Parliament before the Second War. When Winston was born lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle [with] gifts – imagination, eloquence, industry, ability, and then came a fairy who said ‘No one person has a right to so many gifts,’ picked him up and gave him such a shake and twist that with all these gifts he was denied judgement and wisdom. And that is why while we delight to listen to him in this House we do not take his advice.

That was in 1936. They were perfectly reasonable to distrust him then. On two particular topics of the day – communism and imperialism – he was quite unbalanced. Whatever the moral rights and wrongs of the two issues – conventional wisdom today would hold him right about the Soviet Union, and wrong about Indian nationalism, but that might change – they involved gigantic miscalculations of the contemporary strengths of each. Hence the disaster of Allied ‘intervention’ against the Reds after the Great War, and the troubles caused by the ‘die-hards’ over India. They were also responsible for Churchill’s two most notorious insults, calling Gandhi a ‘half-naked fakir’ and linking Labour to the Gestapo, which are absolutely unforgivable, or would be if he had not done enough during the Second World war to deserve forgiveness for almost anything. He was also unwise to back Edward VIII during the abdication crisis (just as well he lost, jokes Roy Jenkins, whose Churchill (Macmillan, 2002), is another of the books under consideration here: or he might have had to intern him in 1940 as a Nazi sympathizer), and in some of his friendships, such as that with Beaverbrook. Some of his misjudgements in office may have been disastrous, like the Dardanelles, though both Jenkins and Best are charitable to him over that: ‘it could have worked.’ Many of his parliamentary interventions were terribly botched. Harold Nicolson thought he could tell when they were coming: I knew that Winston was going to do something dreadful. I had been staying the weekend with him. He was silent and restless and glancing into corners. Now when the dog does that, you know he is going to be sick on the carpet. It is the

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same with Winston. He managed to hold it for three days, and then comes up to the House and is sick right across the floor.

This happened often. He misjudged the situation, or his audience, or the pitch of his rhetoric, which had a tendency, as Jenkins puts it, ‘to go over several tops’. His betrayals of party, jumping from the Conservatives to the Liberals in 1904, then back again in 1924–5, could be seen as opportunistic – in both cases he was abandoning a sinking vessel for what appeared to be a more buoyant one – which compounded even his new comrades’ distrust of him. He seemed to have a selfdestructive streak. From early on, we are told, he was convinced that he was a man of destiny, invulnerable to bullets both literally (in his early military adventures) and metaphorically; but that was no reason, surely, to put himself deliberately in the path of so many shells that might come his way? Most opportunists also lack consistency of principle. Churchill seems not to have done. It is a mistake to judge these things by mere party affiliations, especially at times when politics are so fluid, and with people – Jenkins himself may be another example – who are not easily squeezed into normal party moulds in any case. Churchill changed his mind, certainly: it was part of his bigness (and one reason why both these authors are so rightly irritated by the more narrow-minded Margaret Thatcher’s brazen attempts in the 1980s to identify with him); but usually it was in response to circumstances that had changed. That covers the ‘paradox’ (Jenkins) of his campaign against naval rearmament in Asquith’s cabinet in 1908, and his ever-willingness to consider the ‘apaisement’, as he called it then, of various hostile interests (the House of Lords, trade unions), so long as they were not the Nazis, both before and after the Second World War. (One unfortunate side-effect of Munich has been to brand ‘appeasement’ as intrinsically wicked, which of course does not follow, and was not Churchill’s way.) Outside European affairs it is possible to see a woolly consistency in all his major lines of political thought. Its roots lie in the ‘feudal, patriarchal paternalism’ (Best’s phrase) he was soaked in from birth, and which again marks him out strongly from both Thatcher and the proto-Thatcherites of his own time, of whom there were many. Contemporaries wondered how the man who sent in the Army to shoot at striking miners in Tonypandy in 1910, and resisted the General Strike so adamantly, could also claim to be the friend of the workers, and indeed push through so many collectivist reforms for them in the 1910s and 1950s; the simple answer (apart from scotching the Tonypandy ‘myth’) is that he genuinely believed in bettering the lot of the people, but – as Jenkins puts it – ‘in a peculiarly de haut en bas way’.

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Exactly the same philosophy informed his imperialism. (Was this one of the few things he learned from his stretch at Harrow, I wonder, headmastered at that time by the grotesquely imperialist and rather stupid J.E.C. Welldon, whom Churchill met again in India when Welldon had become bishop of Calcutta, and who later apologized to him for his unhappiness at school?) Churchill always put ‘good’ (by which he meant just and kind) government before self-government – an unfashionable view today. In this particular case, of course, it partly depends on how good one believes British colonial government to have been. Churchill had no way of knowing this. This is despite two rather undistinguished spells at the Colonial Office. Both these books point out how fundamentally ignorant he was both of the Empire, apart from what an early spell of polo-playing in Bangalore and some bullet-dodging in the Sudan and South Africa could teach him; and of the working classes, in what he persisted in calling their ‘cottages’. The roseate image that conjures up is typical. His whole political philosophy – if it can be called that – derived from a romantic ideal of noblesse oblige, workingclass gratitude, British goodness, and English-speaking loyalty. Hence what Jenkins calls his ‘fantasies’ early on in the second war over the inevitability that England’s American cousins would help him out. He was just as ignorant of the US. It was all based on feeling, not on facts. Wrong, then – or wrong-footed – on so many of the great issues of the day, why was he so right about Hitler? That was not out of knowledge either: he knew little of Germany or its history, except in battles. His stand against the Nazis certainly could not have been predicted from his known views before the middle 1930s (Jenkins quotes him in February 1933 expressing admiration for Germany’s ‘splendid clear-eyed youth marching forward on the road of the Reich singing their ancient songs, demanding to be conscripted into an army; eagerly seeking the most terrible weapons of war; burning to suffer and die for their fatherland’), or from the political alliances he was forging during that decade. Other virulent anti-Soviets and Indian ‘die-hards’ positively welcomed Hitler, or at least were inclined to tolerate him, to act as a bulwark against the greater danger of communism, and to ensure that the British Empire stayed up. (Hitler had promised them that.) There has always been an argument – developed most notoriously by John Charmley in Churchill: The End of Glory (1993) – that it was the damage the war did to Britain’s material capacity that lost it the Empire: destroyed, that is, what was dearest to Churchill’s heart. If this was true, Churchill obviously did not suspect it, misled probably by his romantic belief in the loyalty and gratitude of those whom Britain so nobly obliged. Rightly or wrongly he did not trust the Germans to keep their hands off the Empire, and in any case balked

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at its being ‘dependent on their good will or pleasure’. But that may not have been uppermost. Both Best and Jenkins portray him as at least as much repelled by Hitler’s domestic policies, especially the anti-Semitism, as by the threat he posed to Britain’s interests. Best thinks that his early realization of the scale of the Nazi horror was ‘probably just brilliant intuition’. As a basically intuitive politician, he was bound to guess right sometimes. It was his rightness over this that hiked him into the premiership in May 1940, together with the fact that people were desperate. Neither of these circumstances, of course, guaranteed that he would be consistently right after this. His track record was against it. Those who worked for him during the Second war testified that he buzzed with ideas on most days, nine out of ten of which however were impractical or mad. Whether those that were actually realized were always the least mad ones must be left to military experts to discuss, if not to decide. We can agree, however, on the much greater importance of his rhetoric as a morale-boosting factor in the early darkest days of the war, at least. In a 1940 broadcast he spoke of the importance, in winning wars, of ‘a cause which rouses the spontaneous surgings of the human spirit in millions of hearts’. He created that; or, in his own more modest appraisal, gave voice to it. ‘Churchill’, writes Best, made the people feel proud and strong. His speeches set them on a world stage, somewhere few had dreamed of ever finding themselves, defending values important for the world at large. Their survival was to mean more than the survival of their insular selves, it meant the survival of civilisation and freedom.

For this purpose, and in these circumstances, no rhetoric could be too extravagant. Jenkins quotes some instructions Churchill gave to his copy-editor in 1933, asking him to look out for words he knew he was fond of over-using: ‘e.g. vast, bleak, immense, formidable, etc.’; but these were just the sorts of words the situation of 1940 required. This was where Churchill came into his own: Churchill the literary man, that is, the reluctant 1953 Nobel Prize winner. Asked to assess his greatest qualities for a collection of tributes shortly after his death, Clement Attlee first considered ‘wisdom, practical judgement [and] vision’, before rejecting all these in favour of ‘energy and poetry’. These, he wrote, were what ‘really summed him up’. Some might want to come back at Attlee on the ‘vision’ thing; but the poetry was arguably central even to that. He was Britain’s literateur-king (not philosopher-king, which implies more analytical introspection) of the twentieth century. That is Jenkins’s perspective, his special contribution to Churchill studies (or hagiographies); and a valid one.

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* For Churchill’s virtues or otherwise as a warrior, one can turn to Carlo D’Este’s Warlord: A Life of Churchill at War, 1874–1945 (2004). D’Este is a retired US Army lieutenant colonel who is much admired in military history circles for his books on the Second World War, which would seem to make him just the man to shed light on Winston Churchill as soldier and war leader. After all, he has had experience of bullets whizzing around his head (presumably), which very few of the other hundred or so Churchill biographers, or their reviewers, have. By a nice coincidence, lieutenant colonel was also Churchill’s final rank as a serving soldier. So there is that bond between them. Sadly for Churchill’s reputation, this does not always work in his favour. D’Este knows a real soldier when he sees one, and on most counts Churchill doesn’t measure up. He was certainly fascinated by soldiering from an early age – it was his toy soldiers, he claimed, that did it – but he seems to have mainly relished the adventurous, Boy’s Own Paper side of war. Ordinary soldiering in India he found boring, apart from the polo, which he was good at. So he wangled his way instead to Cuba, the Sudan, South Africa and the Northwest Frontier for some real action, as a soldier-cum-journalist; a combination of roles which wasn’t greatly approved of, and was later banned. He liked it best when it involved charging around on horses, under fire, especially when others could see him being brave. ‘Given an audience there is no act too daring or too noble. Without the gallery things are different.’ This was because his main concern was to win fame: sufficient of it to propel him into public life early enough in what he presumed would be a relatively short career. (He was obsessed with his father’s early death.) Though he liked soldiering, he said early on, he thought politics were more his métier. D’Este writes of his treating ‘war as if it were an activity being conducted solely for his personal advancement’. Sometimes that may have been at the expense of his fellow officers; as is supposed to have occurred with his famous – and much self-publicized – ‘great escape’ from the Boers in Pretoria in December 1899, leaving two comrades fuming behind. He was quite brazen about this, which earned him little love among his fellow-soldiers; or among his (very) senior officers, especially when he – a stripling in his twenties (he wasn’t always fat) – presumed to tell them how to do their jobs. But it worked. He got into Parliament, and then (via the first of his two party-changes) into the Liberal government of 1906. His last spell of military duty, five months on the Western Front in 1915–16, could also be seen as basically unsoldierly, involving as it did his resignation from the Cabinet – surely a dereliction of his real war duty. His excuse was that he wanted some fun.

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This, however, made him unusual. As D’Este points out, ‘most politicians who start wars rarely experience the results of their actions’. Churchill did. D’Este praises him for getting down in the trenches to see what life was like for the ordinary squaddies in the First World War. There is no doubt that Churchill learned a lot from these experiences, though whether they were the best lessons he could have learned must be questionable. One thing they drummed into him was ‘the pity of war’; or, rather, of the kind of war he saw on the Western Front: static, attritional, with industrial-scale casualties – not really ‘fun’ at all. It was his desire to break out of this bloody stalemate that lay behind his obsession right through both world wars with finding brilliant diversions, sudden attacks at vulnerable points that would topple the enemy at a stroke. The Dardanelles expedition was the most notorious of these, and dreamt up entirely with this in view; ‘are there not alternatives’, he wrote to Asquith, ‘than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?’ The lesson he learned from that was not that it was a mistake, but that it could have worked but for poor commanders in the field, cowardly troops, and some ill luck. D’Este thinks that several of his later hare-brained strategies were partly designed to exonerate him over this fiasco retrospectively. He could be an obstinate bugger at times. Whatever the truth of this, the list of Churchill’s other failures of military judgment, according to D’Este, is a long one. They include (as well as the Dardanelles) Antwerp (1914), Archangel (1917), Norway (1940), Dunkirk (1940, though that had its positive side), Greece and Crete (1941), Singapore (1942), Tobruk (1942), Dieppe (1942), Rhodes (1943), Anzio and Arnhem (both 1944); and that is without counting several foolish schemes he was mercifully restrained from. He opposed the US plan for the invasion of France for months in 1944, and so cannot be credited with the success of that. Generally he was ‘never quite the expert authority he thought himself ’ on military matters. He was hopeless with logistics; a bad picker of generals (he hit on Monty only ‘by chance’); apt to be seduced by his own ‘glittering phrases’; too interfering in details that should have been left to his commanders; ready to blame others;‘prone to jump to conclusions’; liable to ‘hubris’; obsessive; and foolhardy. (All this from D’Este.) He clearly found personal relationships difficult – always had, in fact. (‘Must everybody hate my Winnie?’ his mother once pathetically exclaimed.) In the later stages of the Second World War, he constantly crossed the Americans, who were invariably (claims the American D’Este) proved right in the end. Reading this book – whose military verdicts the present author is not qualified to assess – it is sometimes difficult to see how Britain managed to win the war at all: or, rather, to keep it going until the Americans and Russians came in to win it for us. One reason may

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simply be that Hitler made even more strategic mistakes than Churchill. But strategy isn’t everything. It’s the conventional view nowadays, in fact, that Churchill’s crucial contribution to Britain’s war effort lay elsewhere entirely. D’Este goes along with this. * Two qualities in particular are supposed to have marked him out. One is his far-sightedness. That of course is mainly based on his early perception of the Nazi menace, before most people took it seriously (and when some in his own party didn’t find it menacing at all). But there are other examples. This, for example, from a speech he gave in 1901, seems to me to be enormously prescient of the European war that was to come; which could not, he predicted, be anything but a cruel, heart-rending struggle, which, if we are ever to enjoy the bitter fruits of victory, must demand, perhaps for several years, the entire suspension of peaceful industries, and the concentration to one end of every vital energy in the community . . . a European war can only end in the ruination of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors.

Many others feared war before 1914 (the idea of the Edwardian era as an era of blissful innocence is of course a myth), but few realized its likely nature as Churchill did. In 1925 he was warning of mankind’s potential for self-destruction, with all the new weaponry available to it, as a race. This was twenty years before the atom bomb. When that arrived, therefore, he was unusually well placed to alert the world to the dangers of a nuclear stand-off with the USSR. Rightest of all was Churchill’s prediction that the courses of wars were usually unpredictable. Never, never, never believe that any war will be smooth or easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

That sounds like Donald Rumsfeld’s rather pithier ‘stuff happens’, though in the latter’s case, of course, the realization came too late. Churchill in 1930 was wiser from the start. He was good at the ‘longue durée’. Sometimes. That was his problem. He made a whole lot of predictions; but more of them were wrong than right. These included – errors of prediction, not necessarily judgment –over India; Soviet Russia; a Labour government – that ‘Gestapo’ gibe; and over the long-term prospects for the Empire, which he thought would always

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remain bound to Britain by love. Despite that 1901 vision of the European war of the future, he was still in 1912 reassuring audiences that it probably wouldn’t happen – indeed, that war itself might have ‘passed from the world’. That was because it would obviously be so dreadful. On this he trailed behind many of his contemporaries, who were far less sanguine. Around the same time he seems to have believed that no civilized nation would indulge in submarine warfare because it was so underhand. He was against rearmament – the ‘Dreadnought’ programme, for example – until very late in the Edwardian day; and was a disarmer as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the later 1920s (though that may have been sensible then). Early in the Second War he grossly underestimated the German U-Boat threat. He was of course right about Hitler, but he wasn’t quite alone in this (D’Este doesn’t give the British Left the credit it deserves in this area – or indeed in any area); and it is possible that he just happened to be right here, for the wrong or at least questionable reasons, like a belief in Germany’s ingrained ‘Prussianism’. He may not have seen as far as he certainly thought he did, and as his sonorous phrases implied. ‘He deceives himself into the belief that he takes broad views’, wrote Lord Esher, ‘when his mind is fixed upon one comparatively small aspect of the question’. Those who worked with him in the 1939–45 war remarked on this again and again. A common observation was that he brimmed with ideas, a few of which were good, but the others utter rubbish. Often they were contradictory. The trick, of course, was to spot the winners – tanks and Mulberry artificial harbours were two of the good ’uns – and squash the rest. This became a vital necessity, and often quite a struggle, when he was in power. Before then, it was too much of a bother. To have one’s foresight and wisdom recognized, it helps to be foresighted and wise most of the time. Churchill certainly wasn’t. * But of course he made up for all this, during the Second World War, by his impact on British morale. That is what all these biographers say. He inspired the British people generally to persevere, against what seemed to be all the odds, by stirring speeches, promising only blood and tears but in the noblest of causes – good against evil, no less; and by his image: the posters, the ‘V for Victory’ sign, even the cigars and the slurred ‘s’s’, and his old baby face miraculously metamorphosed into the ‘British bulldog’s’. People loved him, and had faith in him. He often worried about this – ‘poor people, poor people. They trust me, and I can give them nothing but disaster for quite a long time’ – but managed to keep up the front all the same. One of the reasons for his success here, apart from his oratorical genius, was a certain softness in his character, which came through to

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the public; his empathy for the suffering of the victims of the London blitz he met, for example: ‘you see, he really cares; he’s crying’ – this from one of them, in 1940. In fact, he cried frequently. (I counted a dozen examples in D’Este’s book.) ‘Brave as a lion, tender as a woman, simple as a child’, was Lord Ismay’s summingup of his character. (Not exactly a ‘masculinist’ one.) That seems to have got through. Was he a ‘warmonger’? D’Este spends some space debating this, before answering in the negative. If a warmonger is one who deliberately sets out to foment conflicts, he was not. (His intervention in the Russian civil war is the only episode that one might pause over.) But there are problems here: frequent references in Churchill’s writings – even his later ones – to war as a ‘splendid game’, for example, with ‘death’ merely a ‘sporting element’ in it. He almost certainly had in mind here a different kind of war from the sort he described in that 1901 prediction. ‘War, which used to be cruel and magnificent’, he wrote in 1930, ‘has now become cruel and squalid’. (Note that he did not seem to object to the ‘cruelty’.) But that did not prevent his feeling a thrill – albeit guiltily – when even a squalid war loomed. ‘I am interested, geared up and happy’, he wrote to his wife at the start of the First World War. ‘Is it not horrible to be built like that?’ And a little later: ‘I think a curse should rest on me – because I love this war. I know it’s smashing & shattering the lives of thousands every moment – & yet – I can’t help it – I enjoy every second of it.’ The recognition of how awful this sounded may be his saving grace. It is difficult to control one’s visceral feelings. There are plenty of other expressions in Churchill’s writings of a loathing for the more terrible effects of war. Kitchener’s massacre of brave Islamicists at Omdurman (1898) sickened him. ‘War, disguise it as you may, is but a dirty, shoddy business, which only a fool would play at’, he commented then. On the other hand he supported the saturation bombing of German cities, notoriously (though he had qualms latterly), and the use, in theory, of poison gas. His rationale for this is well known: ‘I do not see why we should always have all the disadvantages of being the gentlemen while they have all the advantages of being the cad.’ He also however genuinely agonized over the poor British boys he sent out to their possible deaths. This may – as D’Este holds – mark the crucial difference between him and Hitler, ‘who cared nothing for human life’, and for whom ‘such losses were almost abstract and carried no burden of conscience’. Otherwise their ‘leadership’ profiles might seem uncomfortably close: flawed as strategists, great inspirers, both. But of course Churchill’s humanity, in most circumstances, was a difference: morally, at least. *

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Whether his inspirational qualities were as crucial as D’Este believes they were in stiffening Britain’s resolve in the war years is at least debatable. D’Este disagrees. Though we might differ over other aspects of Churchill’s career, he writes, ‘one conclusion is beyond dispute’ (my emphasis). That is that Churchill was ‘the only man in Britain’ who could have saved it then. Of course that was how it looked at the time. This was one of the most personalized wars in history. Apart from the much lesser Falklands conflict of 1982, where Thatcher self-consciously modelled herself on Churchill, and Eden’s disastrous Suez invasion of 1956, no modern British war has ever been quite so identified with a single ‘leader’ as the Second World War was. Churchill was dominant in the propaganda of the time; his great speeches heard by everyone; his presence seen and felt everywhere. He kept a close control over all aspects of decision-making. He himself saw history in terms of the deeds of ‘heroes’, the pantheon of whom he always believed he was destined to join. Though not religious, he sometimes spoke as though he thought he was being divinely protected for this. When the Second World War came to its end, nearly all of his contemporaries credited him with the winning of it. Historians and biographers have mostly set their seal on that. ‘The saviour of his country’, was A.J.P. Taylor’s uncharacteristically uncritical verdict on him, in a famous footnote to his Oxford English History 1914–45 (1965). After the war, Churchill liked to downplay all this: it was ‘the nation’ that ‘had the lion’s heart’, he once said, ‘I had the luck to give the roar’; but this may have been false modesty; and he must have been chuffed when, on VE Day, the great crowd that gathered to celebrate it in Whitehall replied to his ‘This is your victory’ with a shout of ‘No – it is yours!’ But not even Churchill would have gone so far as to say, surely, that he was the ‘only’ man who could have done it. That is to pivot an awful lot of history on the head of one person, and on the mere chance that he happened to be around at the time. This kind of analysis probably goes with the genre. This is very top-down history, as one might expect from one lieutenant colonel writing about another. There’s an awful lot in D’Este’s book about ‘leadership’, which appears to be the key to everything military, and from which all else – victory in battle, political success, civilian morale – is assumed to follow. Churchill had this in spades, as others around him didn’t, so this had to be the crucial factor in Britain’s holding out against Hitler in 1940–1. (At one point D’Este hints that his American side – his mother - might have had something to do with this. He was what General George Patton described as a ‘son of a bitch’. D’Este finds that quite ‘un-English’.) Behind this there lies the clear assumption that the Brits needed this kind of leadership to keep them on course; to prevent their sliding back into appeasement-type

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defeatism when the going got rough. Several times D’Este mentions their ‘demoralization’, or the danger of it, which only Churchill, of course, managed to gee them out of. Never does he furnish evidence for this – or, it has to be said, for a host of other assumptions outside his main, military, field. His is a sorry picture of just about every Briton apart from his hero, including – to give just one example – his deputy Clement Attlee, who is repeatedly diminished here, partly, I think, because his ‘leadership’ qualities were of a quieter kind than Churchill’s, though no less effective in other circumstances, as was to be seen later; and partly because he didn’t boast so much about his own military career, though it could be regarded as equally impressive in some ways. (He ended up a rank behind Churchill, but only because he had worked his way up from Private, and saw out the whole of the First World War – without the comfort of a perambulating bath tub – in France, Mesopotamia, and – yes – Gallipoli.) This is of course a danger implicit in biography: focussing too much on the human subject of it at the expense of his or her context. Most biographers are careful to avoid this. For D’Este it may have been more difficult, because of his assumption that history – at least in this instance – is mainly determined from above. Everywhere that a broader context than the merely military is required, in fact, D’Este falls short. In my own special field, which was also the theatre of Churchill’s earliest military adventures – the British Empire – his political judgments are superficial, mainly consisting of the customary prejudices of most modern Americans, backed up by one popular but not altogether reliable general British history (Niall Ferguson’s Empire). D’Este’s section on the lead-up to the Boer War wouldn’t even rate a ‘C’ grade at A level. Elsewhere the British colonies are notable for their invisibility, despite the wars that were continually going on there while Churchill was at the Colonial Office (1906–08, 1921–2), as well as during his peacetime premiership; and the struggles of Britain’s ‘forgotten armies’ in Burma and further down the South-East Asian Peninsular before, during and after the Second World War: now no longer forgotten, after the publication in 2004 of Christopher Bayly’s and Tim Harper’s book on them, which D’Este seems not to have read. Another area of rank ignorance is the question of ‘appeasement’, on which he simply swallows, uncritically, Churchill’s line. As for British domestic society and politics – well, the less said about D’Este’s understanding of these the better. He seems to have the idea that the king’s sayso was important, for a start. If he really thinks that ‘to the present day the Dardanelles and Gallipoli remain raw wounds in the British psyche’, he can’t have talked to many present-day Brits. And to read this account you would scarcely know that political parties, social classes and ideologies existed. It’s this

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in particular that enables him to generalize so crudely about the ‘British people’. From this book they appear – whether this was his intention or not – as one, undifferentiated, sheep-like mass. Of course one would not go to a book like this to learn about domestic British history; but it must bear on the central question, for D’Este, of Churchill’s role in ‘leading’ the domestic masses in wartime, and whether they required to be led by him. They may not have done. Anti-fascism was a powerful force in British politics long before Churchill came to power. The battlers of Cable Street (1936), and the volunteers for the International Brigade in Spain (1936–9), didn’t need him to egg them on. These of course were minorities; but as for the rest – there is simply no way of telling what they might have achieved off their own bats, if he hadn’t been there to provide the ‘roar’. They could be stubborn buggers, too. If they needed a leader, another might well have been found; of course with Churchill around there was no need for one, which is why we cannot spot him or her in his great shadow. And it is worth at least considering this possibility: that a leader without quite Churchill’s charisma, but with a better grasp of military strategy than this book shows him to have had, might have done the job better and quicker than he. Just a thought. And a reason for not relying too greatly on the accounts of ex-soldiers in this field. Yes, they should have their say – this book furnishes perspectives on Churchill that are bound to escape us civilians – but not the last word. History, like war, is too important to be left to lieutenant colonels.

Notes 1 This chapter draws on material first published in the London Review of Books, 24 January 2002, and 27 August 2009.

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The Home Front

It wasn’t only Churchill.1 When Neville Chamberlain took the British to war against Germany in September 1939, he had little idea how they would respond. Very few of those in authority did. In their introduction to their collection of wartime reports, Listening to Britain, published in 2011, Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang point out the ‘gulf of mutual incomprehension’ that separated ministers and civil servants from ‘the broad mass of the British public’ at this time. Ordinary MPs and the press thought they had a better grasp of popular opinion, but they may not have done. This was a serious matter, because if the government were to take the people along with it, it had to know how they felt and what kinds of appeals they would respond to. It was with this in mind that in December it set up a brandnew ‘Home Intelligence Department’, within the fairly new ‘Ministry of Information’ (or propaganda), to find out. It was headed by Mary Adams, one of British television’s earliest producers before TV was shut down for the duration of the war, at which point she moved to Whitehall and was given the task of monitoring domestic morale. She may be thought to have been a surprising choice. For a start, she was a woman – ‘a tiny, vivacious, brainy blonde with bright blue eyes who always dressed very elegantly’ – in what was a predominantly man’s world; though it could also be argued that looking after the ‘home’ front was very much in line with traditional perceptions of gender roles at that time. (‘Keep an eye on the children while daddy goes out to fight.’) She was married to a Tory MP, which will have reassured the Establishment; but he was an anti-appeasement Tory, and she herself is described as ‘a socialist, a romantic communist . . . a fervent atheist and advocate of humanism’, which didn’t fit the conventional bill nearly so well. But we – those of us who are glad Germany didn’t win the war, that is – should probably thank our lucky stars for that. The Conservative men often got things terribly wrong; including her own boss (as Minister of Information), Duff Cooper. It hardly bears thinking how things might have turned out if MI5 – an 123

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obvious alternative candidate – had been given the job; one cannot imagine those stupid old reactionaries being anything like so relaxed as she was about the Communists in Britain, romantic or not, for example; or recommending, as she did, that people ought to be pleased rather than angry that ‘Conshies’ were refusing to ‘join up’ because pacifists did not generally make good soldiers anyway. Nor, it has to be said, could one absolutely rely on MI5’s anti-Fascism. Adams was sound on that, and receptive to and open-minded about most other things. If the information she elicited succeeded in preventing or correcting some of the ministers’ clumsiest false steps, she may have been one of the most important, if unsung, heroes of the Second World War. Her task was a delicate one. It involved – to put it bluntly – spying on ordinary folk, which was thought to be anathema at the time. Even open enquiries – doorto door surveys – were highly suspect; Duff Cooper tried it in the summer of 1940, only to have his canvassers vilified as ‘Cooper’s Snoopers’ in the press, and compared to the Gestapo. ‘The idea of sounding opinion by doorstep inquiries can hardly have been produced by a British mind’, opined the Observer. Adams’s own investigators later claimed this was one typical instance of the press’s being out of touch with ‘real’ people; most of the latter, they reported, ‘had little idea of what the fuss has all been about’, and if they had, were broadly in favour of the ‘snoopers’; but it showed how careful they had to be. If the press had known how Adams got her information, it might have been even more savage. It came via ‘Regional Information Officers’ mainly from what they and some trusted voluntary contacts overheard in factories, offices, buses, pubs, various clubs and societies, and in air-raid shelters where ‘observers’ insinuated themselves as genuine refugees from the bombing; all this information supplemented by intercepted post from Irish sources (justified because of the very real fear that the Germans might use the Republic of Ireland, with Fifth Column help there, as a base from which to launch an invasion of Britain), and information volunteered by Special Branch units, Chief Constables and the ‘snoopers’, as long as they operated. Between May and September 1940, it was phoned in from the various regions each day – thereafter weekly – in time to be collated and typed up for the minister around tea-time. (It is the daily reports that are reproduced here, complete.) All this was far more covert than Cooper’s ill-fated little enterprise, and consequently even more ‘un-British’. * Is the end product reliable? The reports are highly impressionistic; far less ‘scientific’ than proper social sampling would have been. That, however, was inevitable, in view of the instant assessments that were required; and there are of

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course things that ordinary conversations – what the reports call ‘verbatims’ – can convey that quantitative analysis cannot. (Adams learned this from the example of Tom Harrison’s pioneering ‘Mass Observation’ surveys before the war.) Another problem may have been the inhibitions felt by the people who were being eavesdropped on, with posters all around them warning against ‘gossip’ and ‘careless talk’, and even the possibility, for a short while in 1940, that they could be thrown into prison for expressing ‘defeatist’ opinions. That was another clumsy official wheeze whose widespread unpopularity the Home Intelligence Department revealed in no uncertain terms, in the middle of July: ‘it is suggested there is no outlet for healthy grumbling . . . working-class people feel suspicious and afraid. “Oh I don’t know. Best to pass no opinion these days. You might get hung” ’; and was eventually countermanded by Churchill. In the meantime, however, it must have put people on their guard. Lastly, Mary Adams’s own subjective values may have coloured both the work of her department, and the tone of her reports; just as MI5’s would have done, in different ways. That cannot be discounted. For whatever reason – and the likeliest one, I think, is that they were broadly accurate – the general impression given by these daily reports is overwhelmingly positive. Most of them begin with the words ‘morale is high’, or ‘remains high’, or some such; usually they make great play of the ‘cheerfulness’ of people, even under the most extreme circumstances: ‘conditions of living now almost impossible’, reported one observer after a night in a West Ham air-raid shelter during the London Blitz; and they are full of little vignettes of tough little cockneys (especially) which are so familiar to us from wartime propaganda and post-war Ealing comedies as to inevitably arouse suspicion that they must be mythical. But not at all. Cowley Estate, Stockwell, reports tenants busy making shelters comfortable with carpets to sleep on, furniture, beds for children, pictures of King and Queen, artificial flowers, Union Jacks, etc. Women scrubbing floors and laughing: ‘wish Hitler could see us now!’

Air raids were accepted ‘philosophically’, and even (by those who weren’t hit) enjoyed. ‘Reaction to bombs and anti-aircraft guns in East Sussex is pleasurable excitement rather than alarm.’ ‘Many civilians refused to take cover wishing to see the sights.’ (That was a common observation.) Sightseers were bussed in from outside to gawp at the damage: twenty-nine coach-loads on one occasion, after a solitary German plane had bombed Brighton. In nearly every case, aerial bombing was claimed to strengthen morale rather than undermine it: ‘intensified

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raids have not affected morale; rather the reverse: confidence is increased, opinion is stiffer and there is a feeling of growing exhilaration’; ‘generally speaking, morale appears to be best in those places which have been heavily bombed’; ‘the general reaction’ – this after mid-Wales’s first taste of bombing – ‘is one of pride that these areas are now “in the show” ’. Oddly, a similar reaction followed the other major setback of these months, which was the fall of France. Many people, no doubt perversely, thought they were ‘better off without the French’. ‘Now we are alone there is no one to let us down.’ It may have been just bravado; but it does sound quite brave. All this must have been reassuring to ministers; but there was a worrying side. First of all, the resilience was not quite complete; and second, it owed little to the Government. Gaps in the picture of total war support included a few ‘pockets’ of pacifism, defeatism and even native Fascism, though these were not thought to be significant: even the ‘religio-pacifist Welsh press’, reported one observer, was ‘now calling Germans “barbarians” ’. Women apparently tended to be ‘more anxious and nervy than men’, but only because they were left on their own at home too much to brood; and to balance these out there were plenty of stories of, for example, Nottingham women demanding ‘to be armed with rifles and hand grenades’, and ‘working-class Edinburgh women’ vowing to ‘fight Germans in the streets if men can’t stop them’. (That is quite apart from the very feisty ‘Evangelical ladies in Tunbridge Wells’ who, when Mussolini entered the war, were reported to be ‘satisfied at bombing of Italian Catholics’.) The more serious obstacles to wartime morale were perceived to come from the middle and upper classes. ‘The whiter the collar, the less the assurance’, the Department’s Reading contact reported in June (and Adams repeated later); a judgment confirmed by ‘three reliable contacts in Devon’, who had found that ‘people with the least satisfactory attitude towards the war are mostly found in the income group from £250–£750.’ That more or less covered the lower- and middle-middle classes. They were the ones who spread the alarmist rumours; of which ‘hairy-handed nuns’ – that is, German paratroopers disguised as nuns – is the best known and most ridiculed. But it was a genuine rumour. Others brought to Home Intelligence’s notice were the tunnel that Germany had apparently dug under Switzerland to get to Toulouse; the ‘gas which paralyses the will power’ that Hitler had developed (perhaps he tried it on the lower-middle classes first); and the idea that either Germany or Britain – it is not clear which – was about to recruit ‘mentally defective patients . . . for a suicide corps’. It was also, rather more seriously, the middle classes (or some of them) who were reputed to be the hoarders; the black marketers; the profiteers – it was reported from Islington at

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the height of the Blitz that even undertakers were ‘making excessive charges for funerals’; to have the best air-raid shelters; and to be the least ‘neighbourly’ when neighbourliness was most needed. Then there were the ‘joy-riders’ in their cars (a middle-class luxury then, of course), wasting petrol that could be going into tanks, and driving imperiously past queues of workers trying to hitch lifts home after their long working days (or nights) in the national interest, with public transport disrupted by the air raids; who in one report objected to working-class passengers intruding into their first-class railway carriages when the third-class overflowed; and those who kicked up fusses in posh restaurants when told they had to keep to the ‘ration’ like everyone else; who were obnoxious to poor children from target areas billeted with them; and who sent their own children away to safety in America while the working classes had no such option. ‘Film of children arriving in USA hissed in Winchester’, Reading reported in July. Duff Cooper was one of these middle-class parents. He will have read of the widespread criticism directed at him personally over this, in these reports. There were, of course, dangers in this. As the Blitz intensified, Adams warned increasingly of the ‘class feeling’ and ‘bitterness’ that such stories were stirring up at the sharp end of the German onslaught; and of ‘talk’ on the Isle of Dogs, for example, of ‘marching to West End to commandeer hotels and clubs’. That would have set the working-class cat among the pigeons. In the meantime it certainly undermined confidence among those same working classes, and others, in the resolution of their political leaders to see the war through. To read some accounts of the British effort in the Second World War – Carlo D’Este’s Warlord is an example – you might get the impression that it required Churchill’s stirring oratory in 1940 to rally a wavering people to the cause; but that is a travesty. The people were solid, in the main. It was the authorities that were perceived to be the waverers. This comes out again and again in these reports. One sign is the repeated criticism expressed of Neville Chamberlain’s continued presence in the Cabinet after Churchill had taken over as Prime Minister, with talk of ‘lynching’ him and the rest of the ‘old gang if things get very bad’. That was said at the time of France’s capitulation, which was widely attributed to the ‘treachery’ of her own political classes, and taken to be a warning of what might well occur in Britain too. ‘Black-coated workers in Glasgow regard French Government’s betrayal of French people as a possible indication of what may happen here, and are naming the would-be traitor.’ That must be Chamberlain; but others in authority were mistrusted also. Rumours abounded of certain ministers (unnamed) already suing for peace. A report from the West Country spoke of ‘prominent men having been arrested’ for disloyalty, and from Newcastle of a Chief Constable

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and a Professor of French under suspicion there. At the apex of the social hierarchy (almost) the Duke of Windsor’s Fascist proclivities were widely suspected, and people wondered what he was doing in Spain: waiting to take over, perhaps? These were the unreliable elements. ‘Fifth Columnists were at the top, and not at the bottom’, was the widespread opinion reported from Leeds. That was how it appeared from the ground looking up. Hence the degree of criticism expressed in these reports towards the authorities; far greater early on, as Adams commented several times – this surprised her too – than against the Germans. This emphatically was not because the government was asking people to fight – public opinion was if anything ahead of the government in wanting aggressive action against Germany and Italy, for example – but because it wasn’t giving them the means to fight as hard as they wanted. There were no complaints about military conscription, but only at the slowness of it – ‘men lose their enthusiasm waiting’; no objection to women working, but a great deal of anger when women went along to labour exchanges to get war work, only to be turned away. It was this that was supposed to account in large part for their relative demoralization, by comparison with working men. Even among the men, continuing unemployment, at a time when surely every available human resource should be being mobilized for the war effort, was seen as a sign of ‘half-heartedness’ on the part of the political and administrative class. (What must defeated French soldiers think, one commentator speculated, when they escape to England and see idle men strolling around?) ‘Everyone wants fulltime war work’; ‘we are all anxious to be up and doing’; all they needed was ‘to be told precisely what to do’; ‘they would, in fact, like to be disciplined’. ‘Morale is healthy and the confidence and determination of the people is ready for mobilisation and for translation into vigorous action.’ But the authorities had better be quick about it. ‘The willing horse is getting fed up.’ Seen from this point of view – the people the resolute ones, the governing classes the waverers, or worse – much of the propaganda put out by government departments in 1940 in order to ‘rally’ people appeared simply galling. The BBC was of course the main propaganda vehicle at this time. That came in for huge criticism. News broadcasts were condemned for being too repetitive, too flippant, and – most seriously – for not telling the truth. A particular grudge was that they were slow in reporting details of air raids on Britain, so forcing people to tune into ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ (the traitor William Joyce, broadcasting from Germany), who was found to be more reliable. News-readers were criticized for being too polite to Hitler and Mussolini – always referring to them as ‘Herr’ and ‘Signor’. (‘Is this cissy attitude’, asked ‘Tunbridge Wells’, ‘due to the existence of an

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appeasement policy?) They were also widely condemned for their concentration on ‘aerial exploits’ at a time when the RAF stood in very low estimation – blamed for not giving enough cover at Dunkirk – before the Battle of Britain, when of course people could not get enough of them. Still, one particular live broadcast of an air battle over the Straits of Dover on 14 July attracted much criticism, mainly from women, for seeming to treat it like a sporting event. (‘O boy – I’ve never seen anything as good as this.’) ‘His callous Oxford accent’, commented one listener, ‘made it worse’. Accents in fact were a general cause of irritation; far more, almost certainly, than the authorities could have realized if Adams had not pointed it out. There were many criticisms of ‘Eton and Sandhurst’, ‘plum-pudding’, ‘Foreign-Office’, ‘pompous and heavy’ (‘almost as if the Nazis had taken over already’) and ‘lugubrious’ radio accents (the last attributed to a Scottish pastor); and also of literary, poetical, classical, religious and historical allusions in Ministers’ peptalks that went over ordinary people’s heads. ‘Plain North Country voices go down better on wireless than University voices’, was one bit of advice (from London). J.B. Priestley’s Yorkshire and Lord Beaverbrook’s Canadian were well received. This may seem petty; but in view of the widespread suspicion of the loyalties of the upper classes anyway, it is easy to understand. What really got people’s backs up about much government propaganda, however, was the exhortatory tone of it; especially when delivered in these plummy accents. ‘People don’t want exhortation to be cheerful: they are cheerful,’ reported one of Adams’s observers after an extensive tour of England. ‘They don’t want to be told to be good: they are as cooperative as they can be.’ They just needed to be mobilized. ‘Strong opinions heard on all sides that propaganda exhorting us to be courageous is not only unnecessary but impertinent.’ That was London, in the middle of the Blitz. ‘Much feeling against advertisement headed “Let us brace ourselves to our duty”. Public say “we are braced already, why doesn’t the Government tell us what to do. Fault lies in high places, not with us working people.” ’ And then this telling comment: ‘We’re not jittery; I suppose they are.’ Initially even Churchill’s oratory, which D’Este believes was crucial, seems to have made very little difference to this. Reactions to his earlier speeches are not prominent in these reports, and are divided in their assessments even when they do appear. ‘Blood, sweat and tears’ in particular appears not to have gone down particularly well, at a time when people were ‘seeking and needing a positive purpose, something aggressive, dynamic, beyond themselves, worth dying for’. There are also indications here that Churchill’s war aims appeared somewhat

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narrow to many Britons, even when he brought his beloved ‘Empire’ on board. ‘Opinions expressed that Britain should demonstrate she is fighting not only to preserve the Empire, but for a community of interest for the peoples of Europe, to counteract creation of Hitler’s “New Europe” ’. (‘Even unimaginative Slough’, reported Reading, ‘has voiced this’.) So the people were ahead of the government here too. It took a little time for Churchill to find his feet with them; one can see the rapport developing, slowly, in these reports. When it happened, however, it was not because he gee-ed them up, which wasn’t needed, but because he was seen to represent the kind of leadership they were looking for: in particular, the resolution they already had, to fight to the very end. ‘Reports from all regions agree that the Premier’s speech last night won universal approval, and the assurance that there will be no peace discussion was welcome and heartening. A typical comment from Bristol is “that’s the sort of thing we want and he’s the fellow we can follow.” ’ This was in mid-July. But isn’t that exactly how he described his own contribution? ‘I have never accepted,’ he said in 1954, ‘what many people have kindly said – namely, that I inspired the nation. It was the nation’ – and also, he added, imperially, ‘the race dwelling all around the globe’ – ‘that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.’ His government’s own secret snoopers would seem to back that up. * There was, however, another side. Britons seem to have behaved pretty well on the whole, bearing the material sacrifices the war imposed on them without too much complaint. In particular they accepted the need for market controls and rationing, which were intended to limit their demand for precious consumables, but at the same time to ensure their quality, and share them out equally. This was in a society which before then had been notably inegalitarian, and whose dominant economic ideology had taught that anyone was entitled to what he or she could afford. For some, this self-restraint was difficult to understand. Chicago economists apparently got themselves into quite a lather trying to explain why their model of ‘rational economic man’ didn’t seem to fit this case. To many people today, after having gone through the purgative fires of Thatcherism, all that community spirit may seem too good – or too illogical – to be true. I imagine that younger viewers of Ken Loach’s The Spirit of ’45 simply won’t be able to credit it. It must be one of those left-wing ‘myths’. Historians have been quick to point out exceptions: instances of defeatism, disloyalty, and people taking advantage of wartime conditions to loot, steal, cheat and kill undetected. The excellent TV drama Foyle’s War is built on this. And then there was the ‘black market’ in illicit goods, and in food ‘coupons’ which

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were not supposed to be traded, but were. Don’t these dent the myth to some extent? To a Chicago economist, a black market is just a market. It shows man’s (and woman’s) ‘natural’ propensities triumphing over state tyranny. Compliance with wartime controls was an aberration. (Wartime America was much less obedient.) Mark Roodhouse’s answer to the crude question of just how much black market activity there was in Britain, both during the war and in the period of post-war ‘austerity’, outlined in his Black Market Britain 1939–1955 (2013), is that it was pretty widespread, but far less so than might have been expected, considering all those ‘rational economic’ temptations open to people, and the ease with which they could get away with it if they wanted. (The government didn’t have the resources to police it properly. There was a war on, after all.) It varied geographically: Roodhouse singles out Northern Ireland – both communities – as particularly evasive in this respect; and Romford in Essex as a notorious centre of unlawful activity. (Coming from there, I’m not surprised.) Elsewhere, however, serious black marketing was thin on the ground. It was also less harmful to Britain’s wartime economy than it could have been. Willing compliance with the regulations was widespread. This was because other popular values trumped ‘pure’ economic ones for most of the period. Those usually credited at the time were patriotism, and Britons’ inbred respect for the law. Roodhouse, however, by analyzing both the black market and the resistance to it more systematically and in more empirical detail than has been done before – other studies tend to be either over-theoretical or merely anecdotal – shows that this was a simplistic way of looking at it, at best. The key is to discriminate between ‘black markets’. The term was understood rather loosely then. The government used it to discredit all illegal economic activities, from wholesale smuggling and coupon forgery, often attributed to great (and even foreign) ‘organized crime’ syndicates: a bit of a myth, but it helped to vilify them, to Corporal Jones – the elderly butcher in TV’s Dad’s Army – slipping the buxom Mrs Fox a couple of spare sausages on the side. (A while ago, Alan Bennett cited a letter from a Grantham evacuee reporting the rumour that Alderman Roberts – Margaret Thatcher’s father – was ‘thought to be into the black market.’ It is tempting to imagine that this was where the future prime minister learned her neo-liberal ethics, but ‘a bit under the counter’ may have been all it amounted to.) Private Walker, the ‘wide boy’ of the same programme, with his own mysterious sources of nylons, cigarettes and the like, and his dubious excuse for avoiding the call-up (a corned beef allergy), came somewhere in between. Ordinary people, however, distinguished degrees of

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black markets, through various shades of ‘grey’ to ‘dirty white’. They were happy to obey some laws, but not others. The choice was up to them. Generally the crucial question was: was it ‘fair’? If they felt a regulation wasn’t, they flouted it. With people having different needs, equality of sacrifice could itself be said to be unjust. Some regulations seemed to make no sense: the one about ‘swapping’ coupons, for example, instead of returning spare ones to the government. That was a ‘grey’ area. Overall, it could make no difference to the wider economy. The same applied to petty pilfering, so long as it wasn’t of materials needed for the war, or from the pilferers’ neighbours. For many of the poorer working classes, this had been an accepted way of life for years. Another question was, was anyone profiting from the trade? If they were, this was going too far. (Private Walker is made a loveable rogue in Dad’s Army, but he probably wouldn’t have seemed so loveable at the time.) That went back to the experience of blatant capitalist profiteering in the First World War. People were expressing their sense of moral economy here, rather than a strictly market one. Ministers turned blind eyes to much of it, if it rubbed down any sense of unfairness that might detract from people’s ‘patriotism’. So did the courts. Having juries helped; sometimes judges had to be restrained, with ex-colonial civil servants apparently being the most vindictive. Sir Waldron Smithers, described by one of his colleagues as ‘an extreme Tory out of a vanished age’ who was ‘not insensitive to the consoling effect of alcohol’, but also served as chairman of his local bench, believed that everyone convicted of black market offences should be (a) hanged, (b) flogged, (c) imprisoned for at least fourteen years, (d) have all his property confiscated, and (e) deprived of his citizenship: yes, all of these. (‘Surely in reverse order!’ minuted the Home Secretary.) Over-zealous inspectors also had to be held in check, if they employed ‘un-British’ methods, like posing as customers (agents provocateurs), or ‘snooping’. It wouldn’t do, said another Conservative JP, ‘to have to imitate totalitarian methods in order to vindicate democracy’. The police didn’t much like getting involved, for fear it would undermine public trust in them. Some of us might regard this – a discriminating support for ‘fair’ laws, decently enforced – as a healthier national characteristic than ‘respect for the law’ tout court: especially a law imposed on ‘the people’, as they saw it, by the upper classes. (Roodhouse is right here to draw attention to the overwhelmingly Tory make-up of the bench; quite apart from the ex-colonials and drunks.) Aware of the damage that even a hint of class favouritism might do to morale, the government went out of its way to make examples of rich and famous transgressors where it could. Roodhouse begins his account with a report of the

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arrest, trial and imprisonment of Ivor Novello for fiddling his petrol ration, covered widely in the press, as one would expect, and generally approved of (the prosecution, that is) even by his fellow thespians. Novello claimed that driving from Maidenhead to London to direct his musical shows was vital war work; and that a man of his standing couldn’t be expected to travel by train. At the time, Noël Coward found this excuse ‘selfish and pathetic’. Later he fell foul of the regulations himself. So did Lady Astor, Lord Donegall, and the Army’s Provost Marshal, no less. It was a smart move by the authorities to target these. (Boris Johnson could have learned from this in relation to Dominic Cummings’s escapade during the 2020 coronavirus emergency.) Another was the play they made of the king’s and Churchill’s strict adherence to everyone else’s food rations; though in Churchill’s case this was somewhat mitigated by a cook (married to a French chef) who could apparently do wonders with spam, and regular gifts of caviar from Uncle Joe (Stalin). (You were allowed food parcels from abroad.) This was contrasted with the situation in Germany, where rations were determined by one’s value to the Reich: so that the intellectually disabled and Jews were effectively starved, soldiers and factory workers did better, and Goering was allowed to stuff himself with whatever he fancied. Ordinary Germans resented that. The only hints of this kind of thing in Britain were working-class mutterings over posh restaurants where the rich were able to scoff coupon-free: ‘Cassandra’ of the Daily Mirror declared a ‘Gutskrieg’ on this in 1941; but ordinary people also had their works canteens and state-run ‘British Restaurants’, which didn’t take coupons either. The food was probably healthier there, if not so gastronomique. All this made for a sense of equality of sacrifice which did much to cement the Briton’s sense of ‘patriotism’, without its restrictions chafing too much. Roodhouse calls it ‘conditional co-operation’. The lighter shades of ‘grey’ market, coupled with sensitive policing, food parcels and exemptions (like the restaurants), saw to that. * One can understand this acquiescence in total-war time, and in Britain rather than America, where the war impinged far less. (Chicago was never blitzed.) What may seem more remarkable is that Attlee’s Labour government was able to continue with rationing well into the post-war years, even tightening it at one point (in 1947, to include bread for the first time), despite no longer having this obvious excuse for it. The new rationale, of course, was the nation’s desperate need to repair the huge economic and fiscal damage the war had done to it, by boosting exports at the expense of the domestic market to repair the deficit. So Brits still went without. At first, most of them accepted this as a temporary

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measure – the signs of ruin were all around them, in the cities at least – but as time went on patience began to wear thin. The Conservatives, freed from the constraints of their wartime coalition with Labour, which many had felt uncomfortable with in any case – one junior minister thought he detected a ‘tinge of socialism’ about the ‘fair shares’ slogan they had all agreed to use – led the reaction, aided by big business interests and the mean-minded middle-class British Housewives’ League. They were intellectually stiffened by Friedrich von Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, first published by Chicago University Press (who else?) in 1944, which the Conservatives printed tens of thousands more of, at party expense, for distribution during the general election of the following year. The main lesson they drew from Hayek was that rationing was the cause of the black market and so of criminality; which is plausible. (It was clearly true in prohibition America; and is used as an argument for the liberalization of drugs today.) It was at this point, with the blame lifted from his shoulders at least partially, that the wartime ‘Spiv’ figure began to metamorphose into Private Walker: less an unmitigated blackguard than a figure of fun. He even had his own comic walk, according to the writer Bill Naughton: ‘You stiffen the shoulders, and lift them a drop. And walk knowing you are walking. Fancy little style it is, and there’s no other walk just like it. It’s a mixture of ‘pug and pansy’ (sic). George Cole as ‘Flash Harry’ in the St Trinian’s films got this off to a T. In 1947 Mass Observation, that priceless source of opinions and attitudes at the time (though it has to be used carefully), noted that in the minds of many of its interviewees ‘peace meant the end of communal effort, neighbourliness, and belief in a common cause’. Others talked of ‘patriotic fatigue’. Individualism reared its head again. ‘Fairness’ dropped out of the common political vocabulary. Was this as a result of all that Tory propaganda; or a mere reversion to man’s (and housewives’) ‘natural’ state – homo economicus? Or did the Mass Observers get it wrong? They did tend to be biased towards the middle classes. The working classes seem to have taken longer to turn against rationing. Communitarianism must have persisted in one form or another, in order for Labour to be able to launch its great new welfare state over the next few years, without any need for the ‘Gestapo’ that Churchill notoriously predicted in the 1945 election would be needed to bed it down (he may have got this idea from Hayek, too), and indeed with the broad acquiescence of the Conservatives for some time after that. The scale of that achievement can never be understated. The time seemed wrong for it economically, with Britain horrendously in debt – far more so than now. (Today, of course, debt is presented as a reason to cut welfare services.) But it may have been timed just right morally, in the still warm afterglow of wartime

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‘patriotism’ – the word defined then in communal terms. Maybe Labour got its welfare state up and running just in time. What significance you place on the black market in wartime and post-war Britain depends on how broadly you define it. Almost everyone broke the rules to some extent. (That’s what I remember as a child; but that may just have been Romford.) On the other hand, the system needed some wriggle room to keep it flexible, and so prevent its shattering. Minor ‘fiddles’ also helped you feel you were still a free agent, by presenting opportunities for individualism and ingenuity. They could even be ‘fun’ (viz Compton Mackenzie’s Whisky Galore). In a way, they may have helped prevent a really serious and damaging black market taking hold in Britain; this plus the ‘we’re all in it together’ spirit that the authorities managed to keep up pretty successfully, by making sure – or claiming to – that the rich behaved as well as the poor: ‘equality of sacrifice.’ The equivalent to this in the present crisis (2021) might be to come down properly on bonuses and big-money tax avoidance, and turn a blind eye towards minor ‘benefit cheats’. But that seems unlikely. The circumstances are a little different, after all: no bombs or craters (literal ones, at least); no Nazis – only bankers; no socialism. ‘We’re all Thatcherites now,’ according to former Prime Minister David Cameron. So ‘patriotism’ doesn’t include community any more. Roodhouse doesn’t quite say that. But it’s one sobering inference to be drawn from this account of the place of crooks and fiddlers, in this earlier and rather more heroic period of national ‘austerity’. Which is not to say, however, that the wartime lion didn’t need Churchill’s ‘roar’.

Notes 1 This chapter makes use of material first published in the London Review of Books, 8 July 2010, and 23 May 2012.

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On the Margins

Not every Briton in the Second World War was out fighting the enemy, or back home having bombs dropped on them by the Luftwaffe. Some lived in the Channel Islands, an odd little outpost of England going back to Norman times, and actually far closer to the Continent than to Britain, which made them impossible to defend from the Germans once they had rolled over France. Others lived in exile in neutral countries, of which Portugal was one.1 * For Channel Islanders, the Second World War has always been a sensitive topic. The only part of the British Isles occupied by the Germans – invaded in July 1940, and run by two Kommandanten, military and civil, with most of the usual Nazi paraphernalia, like draconian laws, forced immigrant labour, expulsion of Jews and internment camps – they rarely encountered any serious native ‘Resistance’ at all, as that word is generally understood. To M.R.D. Foot, the historian of European Resistance movements during World War II, they appeared ‘an embarrassment’, by comparison with, for example, occupied France, Norway and Denmark, whose inhabitants showed some spunk. Several Channel Islanders collaborated with the enemy, as indeed was the case in those other countries, and even in Britain itself; the difference being, however, that virtually none of the other Channel Islanders took up arms or plotted in any significant way against their occupiers, which might have compensated for this, and given them and their descendants some retrospective dignity and pride. Gilly Carr, who is of Guernsey stock, set out on her research into the occupation, as she confided to a local newspaper, ‘furious’ at this reputation, and determined to set the record straight. The result is Protest, Defiance and Resistance in the Channel Islands:German Occupation, 1940–45 (2015), by her and two co-authors, Paul Sanders and Louise Wilmot. ‘Fury’ is perhaps not the best mood in which to start a piece of objective research. In November 2010, the Guernsey Press anticipated her findings with the unambiguous headline: ‘Cleared at Last.’ In the event the book doesn’t quite justify that verdict, or, I would say, anything close 137

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to it; but it does furnish a revealing picture of how a not very heroic people – probably like most of us – managed to cope with the difficult circumstances of a basically irresistible enemy occupation, well short of active collaboration on the part of most of them. To expect much more of the islanders was probably unreasonable. Abandoned by the British government as not worth holding on to even before their capture, demilitarized apart from a few shotguns, skimmed of most of their fighting-age men, their proximity to the French coast making escape difficult, with few natural hiding or plotting places, and with a German garrison far bigger, proportionately, than in any other western European occupied country – Paul Sanders claims that Germans were actually thicker on the ground there than in Germany itself; against all this, ‘proper’ – that is organized military – resistance was almost out of the question. There were other factors militating against it. Jersey and Guernsey’s political organizations were almost feudal – Alderney’s and Sark’s more so. The islands were ruled by traditional elites with scarcely any democratic input, and no proper political parties before the war. A ‘Jersey Democratic Movement’ sprang up in 1942, but that confined its attention to reforming the island government after the war. Trade union organization was rudimentary. Women knew their place – there were fewer in paid jobs than on the mainland. So there was no strong tradition of collective popular protest. This meant that if the Germans got the elites onside, which they managed to do, they had little to fear from the wider population. They were also fairly clever in not alienating that population unnecessarily. British-born Channel Islanders were deported, as of course were Jews, but not gentiles who had been born there. They were allowed to live pretty normal lives in the main: adequately nourished (there are lots of farms in the Channel Islands); their Christian worship respected, except the Salvation Army for some reason (the uniform?); and not forced to labour for the occupying forces, with eastern Europeans (called ‘OTs’, for Organisation Todt) being shipped in for that. There was some oppression – the most resented form was the confiscation of wireless sets from June 1942, and pretty draconian punishments for anyone caught listening to the BBC or spreading its news – but no islander, so far as can be ascertained, was put to death for that, though it was theoretically possible. Although not formally organized, the Channel Islanders were fairly close-knit, and news of that sort of atrocity was bound to spread. Hence what appears to be their relative quiescence during the war. Serious resistance was limited to the tiny Jersey Communist Party; a Salvationist Major, Marie Ozanne, who refused to change into civvies and constantly railed against the occupiers’ ‘reign of terror’: she was imprisoned and

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died shortly afterwards, but probably not due to bad treatment, thinks Willmot; a couple of lesbian surrealist artists, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, brought up in a different political tradition in France; and a few maverick individuals. The Communists made sketches of German fortifications with the hope of getting them to the Allies, and circulated propaganda. ARP wardens – many of them First World War veterans – used their relative liberty of movement to spy. A couple of individuals made and distributed illegal crystal sets. Gangs of naturally ‘rebellious adolescents’ tried sabotaging German vehicles (smearing wet tar on the seats was a favourite trick), cutting cables, turning signposts, and stealing the Germans’ Christmas mail. Schwob and Malherbe sought to sow dissension among the occupying troops by circulating a collage of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas – in flagrante? it’s not made clear – superimposed on a photograph of German soldiers. They were nothing if not enterprising. None of this came to anything; but at least they tried. To fill in the gaps, and make sense of their claim that the islanders were pretty resistant really, the authors of this book have broadened their definition to include symbolic protests, like chalking ‘V’s (for Allied Victory) on walls, wearing patriotic badges in their buttonholes (but behind their lapels), and sporting national colours. A football match on Jersey in May 1944 was attended by 4,000– 5,000 spectators, who apparently treated it as a patriotic demonstration because of the colours of the teams’ shirts: red and white for the Corinthians, blue and white for St Clements. (Afterwards the Germans forbad the Jersey Evening Post from advertising any more sporting fixtures.) There were also acts of simple disobedience, some of which were trivial – like refusing to shake hands with Germans – but others of which were significant, and could bring serious retribution, like listening to the radio and offering help to escaped prisoners and OTs. Young women caterers used to secretly spit in the Germans’ soup. Clergymen included encoded scriptural references to the war in their sermons. Escaped prisoners and forced labourers were sheltered for months in attics, cellars and barns. Anti-German jokes were circulated. (‘Why are the Germans going to close St Joseph’s church? Because there’s a canon in the pulpit.’ That must have slayed them). Eighteen civilian Guernsey policemen were tried in 1942 for pilfering from German depots, which could be claimed to be patriotic and redistributive, except that some of the goods stolen were from islander-owned stores (‘ah, but they were going to be sold to the Germans’), and consisted of hard liquor, which may not all have reached the poor. Adolescents (again) enjoyed interrupting newsreels with catcalls whenever Hitler appeared, and the ‘exaggerated saluting of everyone in uniform (including the postman)’; but this, as Willmot admits,

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was ‘cheek, not resistance’. I remember getting up to the same sorts of tricks in school. Still, it helped sustain morale. What was notably lacking was any kind of significant protest on behalf of the Jews who were forced to register in 1940, and then deported to the Continent, some to their deaths, in 1942–3; acknowledged here, with regret, by all three authors. Only a handful of members of the islands’ Councils objected; which contrasts with the protests they did put up when members of their own staffs, or families, or – perhaps more tellingly – Freemasons, were selected. Some degree of anti-Semitism is likely to have lain behind this (though Paul Sanders points out that prominent and rich Jews were protected); together with what David Fraser elsewhere has described as the ‘gross and immoral utilitarian calculation’ that it was worth sacrificing a few Jews for the good of the wider community. There were also not believed to be many Jews remaining on the islands, most of them having left for Britain on the outbreak of war; and it may be that the islanders were ignorant of their likely fates. Individually, several Jews avoided registration and extradition with the help of brave neighbours, one of whom, Albert Bedane, was posthumously awarded Israel’s ‘highest Holocaust honour’ in 2000 in recognition. Much the same could be said of the ‘OT’ system, against which there was almost no public protest, and quite a lot of animus manifested against the forced labourers themselves – resentful of their begging and even stealing to keep alive on their meagre rations of thin potato soup and hard bread; but still several examples of individual humanity – food, clothes, shelter, concealment –towards those who tried to abscond. Much of this kind of charity was meted out by the islands’ doctors, who were also by and large the bravest in their open defiance of the authorities, probably because they knew they couldn’t easily be dispensed with; and clergymen, who kept their heads down more, but acted the good Samaritan when they could. Whether this made up for the islanders’ lack of collective effort in defence of these unfortunates must be a matter of individual judgment; so long as the context is taken into account. * One piece of that context is of course the position taken up and the guidance given to their compatriots by the formal rulers of the islands, who continued in place throughout the war, and then, as Paul Sanders points out, became ‘the only collaborating administration in the whole of occupied Europe that remained in office in the post-war era’. Whether or not that is to their credit is another matter of judgment, and one of the two major moral questions raised by this book. (The other is whether ordinary people were justified in following their guidance.) The general tenor of the governments’ approach is indicated by this statement by

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Ambrose Sherwill, president of Guernsey’s ‘Controlling Committee’ at the start of the occupation, expressing his hope that this occupation [may] be a model to the world. On the one hand, tolerance on the part of the military authority, and courtesy and correctness on the part of the occupying forces, and on the other, dignity and courtesy and exemplary behaviour on the part of the civilian population.

That implies collaboration, but in the vaguest terms. In October 1940, however, Sherwill was succeeded by the Reverend John Leale, who even before the invasion had been a good deal blunter. There must be no thought of any kind of resistance, we can only expect that the more dire punishment will be meted. I say this, the man who even contemplates resistance should the Germans come is the most dangerous man in the Island, and its most bitter enemy.

Sanders thinks that went unnecessarily far. The excuse for this kind of approach, of course, was that it sheltered the islanders from more direct German rule, which was bound to be more onerous. The advantage to the occupiers was that they didn’t have to rule directly, which might have provoked more active and dangerous resistance from the people, and warned the British in Britain – who were of course the next stop on Hitler’s schedule – of what they might expect. Leale and Sherwill both claimed that they had saved countless lives in this way, which they may have done. Whether this had any adverse impact on the Allied cause in the war is doubtful. All these authors think that nothing the islanders could have done in the islands could have contributed to the broader strategies of either side. So why risk innocent lives for no gain? Answers to that question at the time may have depended on who you were in Jersey and Guernsey; less on your class or occupation – all three authors agree that ‘resisters came from all social groups’ – than on which island you lived on, and how old you were. Jersey saw the largest incidence of resistance, for many reasons, most of them circumstantial. On both islands the seventeen to twentyfive age group was far and away the most active when it came to minor sabotage, ‘symbolic resistance’ and ‘cheek’; with older people being the most generous in sheltering escapees – obviously, because they owned the houses to hide them in – and the veterans of the ARP the most able to indulge in espionage activities. The youth of the saboteurs and tricksters went against them among the general population, however, by associating their ‘resistance’ with youthful high spirits at best, hooliganism at worst – at any rate, not with ‘patriotism’ – and so seeming to

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play to the normal anti-‘youth’ prejudices of their more respectable elders. Some of the youths actually admitted to getting a buzz out of their adventures, which was supposed to cheapen them. The Guernsey police’s thefts of liquor raised similar suspicions. In societies as basically conservative and middle-aged as these – literally, because most young men had been evacuated to the mainland in the summer of 1940 – law-breaking appeared more reprehensible morally, as well as strictly legally, than it clearly did to the young. Sanders calls it ‘rule worship’. This was heightened by the awareness, or perception, that rule-breaking by a small minority could endanger the lives of the rest of them. ‘Most people were furious’, recalled one Guernesiaise at the end of the war, referring to an illegal escape. ‘Aren’t they selfish? Now we shall be punished.’‘Selfishness’ was a common accusation. Most of the roughly 1,300 islanders who were tried for all offences by German courts in the 1940s – around two per cent of the total – were regarded as simple ‘troublemakers’ by apparently the bulk of the population, who had little sympathy even for the most clearly ‘political’ of them while they were serving their sentences, often in dreadful German gaols or concentration camps. One after-effect of this was that when they were liberated and returned home, they weren’t widely welcomed as the heroes they perceived themselves to be, and as their fellow resisters from the other occupied countries generally were. One who proudly sported a badge made by her sister with the words ‘Political Prisoner 12516’ and ‘victory 1945’ embroidered on it quickly removed it when she found it was attracting more hostility than admiration. Gilly Carr speculates that this might have been because such shows of defiance could be implied to cast the more compliant majority in a poor light. More salt was rubbed into the wound when the 1946 British New Year’s honours list was published, featuring knighthoods for three of the collaborating governors, including Leale, and CBEs, MBEs and OBEs scattered among their underlings; and none at all for any of the resisters. It was as if, post-war, both the official and the popular judgment was against the very idea of resistance to the islanders’ former Nazi overlords, which as a result was seen as a mark of poor judgment, at the very least, if not actual shame. Some islanders will have actually collaborated with the Germans - beyond, that is, the actions of their formal rulers. There’s not much about this here – it’s not, after all, the subject of the book – but there are hints scattered through. Louise Willmot, for example, doesn’t shrink from the topic of ‘horizontal collaboration’ – Jersey and Guernsey women (or ‘Jerrybags’) who had sexual relations with German soldiers – though she excuses much of it as the results of

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opportunistic bargaining (for extra food), the shortage of young vigorous British men, and in some cases genuine romantic attachment. Estimates of the number of babies born as a result of these liaisons vary from 60 to 900. Interestingly, these women were not victimized as badly after the war as in France, despite threats from a group of ‘Underground Barbers’ to mete out the same punishments to them. Another example of direct collaboration, the invisible elephant in the room, is the betrayal of resisters by anonymous informers among the general population, without whom the Germans could not have caught as many saboteurs, radio-listeners, escapees and V-signers as they did. Some of them may also have been ideological collaborators: that is, secret Nazi sympathizers, though they don’t appear in this book. (The only small hint is a claim by one 1930s Victoria College schoolboy – later a communist – that most of his wealthy fellow-pupils had been ‘Franco men to a lad’, which may be felt to be close enough.) That was surely to be expected; Britain had plenty of her own native Fascists, after all. Maybe – just maybe – the Foreign Office files of the Occupation that we are told here are still ‘closed’ to researchers will tell us more about this. That’s the other side of the picture. If we wanted to draw up a moral balancesheet of the Occupation – which, as all these authors point out, is far from a simple matter, and probably best not attempted – these traitors, or pragmatists, would need to be included. But every country had them, often with less excuse than the Channel Islands. In this sense what provoked Gilly Carr’s ‘fury’ in setting out on her part of the research here – the devaluation of the Channel Islands’ resistance to the Occupation – can be at least partly attributed to the islanders themselves. Puffing up the resistance would have implicitly damned the reputations of the ‘timorous majority’ who (as elsewhere) did not resist in any significant way. It certainly would have undermined the authority of the Channel Islands governments, whom the British needed to carry on their rule after the victory. The resisters had been resisting them, too. For years afterwards there was widespread opposition on the islands to granting amnesties, even, to prisoners of the Occupation, let alone compensating them, or erecting any kind of memorial to them of the kind that can be found all over continental Europe today. (There are one or two on Jersey now.) This book, with others, may be said to restore some of these awkward people’s reputations, at long last, but in a way that merely emphasizes their weaknesses in the context of their time and place. The Guernsey Press may be disappointed. But as Willmot puts it, the islanders ‘deserve to be judged according to the conditions they faced and the limited choices available to them’. That must be right.

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* Then there were those Brits who saw out the war in exile; usually in America, but a few in the neutral city of Lisbon, which was a staging post for a significant number of refugees from Germany itself on their way to America, and who constituted a vibrant and attractive society, albeit marginal and transitory, while they were there; fun enough to inspire several contemporary feature films, and two more recent books: Ronald Weber’s The Lisbon Route: Entry and Escape in Nazi Europe, and Neill Lochery’s Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939–45, both published in 2011. These are the sources for what follows. * It could be said that the only real winners of wars are those on the edges of them. This was where Portugal was fortunate in World War II. Too weak militarily to help either side significantly, with assets that both belligerents wanted but weren’t worth their while invading the country for, mainly because it let them have them anyway, Portugal was enabled to sit out the war peacefully, and indeed highly profitably. Neill Lochery credits this to the clever diplomacy of Prime Minister António Salazar, ‘the wily doctor’, but much of it was down to sheer good luck. It suited both the Allied and the Axis powers to have neutral countries in Europe, as venues for secret negotiations, or headquarters for humanitarian groups, or places to offload the unwanted detritus of their war. Portugal could also ship the latter directly across the Atlantic to America, which was an advantage enjoyed by none of the other neutral powers – Spain, Sweden, Ireland, Switzerland. That was just an accident of geography. But it turned Portugal from being one of the most marginal, backward and insignificant of European countries into what the Irish Times called ‘the hub of the western universe’, for the duration of the War, at least. This gave its capital, Lisbon, a special attraction and allure. ‘The sight of a million lights blazing in the sky’, wrote the journalist Polly Peabody soon after she arrived in 1941, ‘went to my head: it was champagne: it made me dizzy. Lisbon was like a beacon emerging out of the European black-out. It looked like a dream city.’ Another newspaperman, Harvey Klemmer, likened it to ‘some halfforgotten splendour out of another life’. For Cecil Beaton, there to butter up Salazar by taking photos of him, it gave him ‘the feeling of being back on pre-war holidays’. For some, it was simply a matter of available consumables: ‘camera shops filled with cameras . . . Typewriters – new typewriters . . . The latest books from England and the United States. Yesterday’s Times, Daily Mail, and Daily Telegraph . . . A grocer’s window boasting boxes and boxes of McVitie’s and Price’s Petits Buerres [sic], Clotted creams – and Scotch Shortbread. Haig and Haig. Johnny Walker, and Dewar’s White Label . . .’ ‘Where else in Europe’, drooled

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T.J. Hamilton, ‘can you get a Martini made with English gin?’ But it was also the political contrast that struck Hamilton, in this ‘last refuge of sanity in Europe’. The word ‘sanity’ was used a lot. It seemed the more poignant in view of the new Lisboetas’ proximity to the madness; ‘sitting on the edge of the war’, as one Briton put it, ‘with our feet dangling over the side’. The war was impossible to put out of one’s mind anyway, if only because of the swarms of refugees from war-torn Europe that made up the bulk of the new population of Lisbon. They poured in, hoping to escape torture and death in their own countries, and to pass on from there to America or Britain, by ship, or by the great Boeing B-314 flying-boats that flew out of Lisbon harbour, refuelling in the Azores and Bermuda on their way to New York. Most were Jews, or active anti-Nazis. The novelist Arthur Koestler, who was both, and whose ‘Neutralia’ in Arrival and Departure (1943) is a thinly disguised version of Portugal, described them ‘streaming through this last open port, Europe’s gaping mouth, vomiting the contents of her poisoned stomach’. How many were ‘vomited’ in this way is difficult to tell; the lowest estimate is 100,000, but that rises to nearly a million in other accounts. In any case there were too many for the boat or plane berths available, or for the visas that were rather stingily distributed by the American authorities, in particular. (To be fair, there was the problem of Gestapo agents coming in disguised as refugees, which needed to be addressed.) That led to desperate scrambles for both. Some of this is conveyed in the 1942 film Casablanca, which both Weber and Lochery use to kick off their accounts of wartime Lisbon; which is fair enough, because Casablanca served a similar function, and Lisbon was the place that Victor and Ilsa fly off to, mistily, in the film’s famous final scene. (None of the contemporary films featuring Lisbon itself has worn so well as Casablanca, or – by most accounts – deserves to.) Refugees also had to cope with the apparent fragility of Portugal’s neutral status. How long would Germany permit it? The rumour was going round that Hitler could end it with a phone call, activating all the Nazi fifth-columnists that were supposed to be already living in Lisbon. As The Lisbon Route puts it: ‘Civilization, such as it was, had not yet been stamped out here by a Nazi boot. But next week? Next month? The month after? Would not Hitler’s hordes take this too and extinguish the last lights?’ Or even Franco’s littler hordes. Hence the refugees’ desperation to get out, as quickly as they could. In fact Portugal’s neutrality was probably never in serious danger, so long as Salazar didn’t do anything wildly silly. Both Germany and Spain had contingency plans for invading Portugal; but then most states have contingency plans for everything. The present situation suited the Nazis well, enabling them ‘to get rid

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of those they do not wish to feed, squeeze as much as possible from them in the process, and dump them where they will do the most harm’. If they wanted any of them back – dangerous anti-Nazis like Casablanca’s Victor Laszlo, for example – they could kidnap them in the streets, and spirit them away. That happened. The only other reason for the Germans to invade would have been to get their hands on Portugal’s wolfram (or tungsten) deposits, used to strengthen steel armour and shells; but they could buy that freely from Portugal in any case. The tit for tat for Britain and the United States was their use of the Portuguese Azores as a naval base. Likewise Salazar had nothing to complain about, with the refugees boosting Portugal’s economy so hugely – hotels, shops, cafes, the casino at Estoril, bribes – so long as any possible political infection, for example from anti-Nazis finding common cause with his own opposition parties, was minimized by a quick turn-around. That could be a motive for stoking the uncertainty that people naturally felt. The result was a highly transient foreign population, with the exception of those who never managed to find tickets or visas, and a few who liked the life in Lisbon so much that (like Rick in Casablanca) they decided to settle there. Among the latter were some Brits who probably ought to have gone back to fight for their country, but then discovered they were entitled to a monthly hand-out (on loan) from the British consulate if they stayed; ex-King Carol II of Romania and his ‘flame-haired Jewish mistress’ Elena, who gave a touch of class (or farce) to the place; and the oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian, who bequeathed it a whole cultural Foundation. The others remained in ‘a fretful limbo’, with no reason to engage seriously with the native population, which features merely as ‘silent members of the chorus in an operetta’ in most contemporary accounts. They generally huddled together in their own national communities, in venues that would remind them of home. So, Small replicas of a dead Europe were erected all over the city, tenderly, rather shabbily. French and Belgians flocked to the boulevard cafés; Germans to the shady beauty spots; English to the tennis-courts; Jews and South Americans to fashionable tea-shops; Dutch and Norwegians and Jugoslavs to the cliff-lined beaches.

(All this from The Lisbon Route.) That is typical of this genus of exile, anywhere. The natives didn’t seem to mind, continuing, as Lochery puts it, ‘to offer the refugees a strange mixture of Christian hospitality tinged with a degree of financial exploitation wherever possible’. There was also a gulf between the richer refugees and the poorer ones. The Old Etonian Ronald Bodley, for example, regarded many of the latter as ‘ungrateful hobos’, trying to wheedle tickets by

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‘brandishing bribes or telling sob stories’. But he had a sob story of his own. Finally en route to New York in a Portuguese liner, he was shocked to find that ‘there was hardly a bottle of champagne to be had and not one lump of ice!’ Different classes of people can suffer in different ways. The more wretched temporary denizens of wartime Lisbon also lacked their individual chroniclers. Intellectuals always have an advantage here, simply because they can write themselves up. (In wartime Lisbon they also had a huge advantage when it came to securing passages out of the city, with one American relief agency, the Emergency Rescue Committee, specializing in getting famous writers, painters and musicians away. Some humans are worth more than others.) The result of course is that historical accounts of the city at war, like these two, are almost bound to focus on the rich, the famous, the creative and the notorious, whose stories are known. Weber mentions around a hundred exiles by name in his book, nearly all of whom come into one or other of these categories. They include – these are people who passed through Lisbon in these years, not necessarily as refugees – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Arthur Koestler, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, George Kennan, Wendell Willkie, Clement Attlee, H.G. Wells, Leslie Howard, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Noël Coward, Gracie Fields, exkings Carol II and Edward VIII, Wilfrid Israel, Darius Milhaud, Virgil Thomson, Man Ray, Salvador Dali, René Clair, Jean Renoir, Peggy Guggenheim, Ed Murrow, Rose Macaulay, the British double-agents ‘Tricycle’ (Duško Popov) and ‘Garbo’ (Juan Pujol), Ian Fleming and Klop Ustinov – Peter’s father, under the cover name of Middleton-Pendleton. That’s quite a galaxy of 1940s’ fame and talent. They also furnish the best stories. Some of them involve sex. (Look up ‘Max Ernst’ and ‘Peggy Guggenheim’ in either of these books.) Others featured Machiavellian plots by the secret services of both the main combatants: ranging from British ‘black propaganda’ among the Portuguese to the effect that Germanmanufactured aspirins caused impotence, which was thought likely to worry ‘Latin’ men in particular; to the much more ambitious ‘Operation Willi’: a German plan to kidnap the Duke of Windsor while he was in Lisbon and ‘turn’ him into a Nazi propaganda asset – possibly even a puppet king. That seems to have been based on some loose table-talk on the Duke’s part – criticism of the British government, dislike of the War, and so on – though there has always been speculation about his suspected fascist tendencies. In any event the plot came to nothing, with the former king enjoying a life of parties and golf in the summer villa of the banker Ricardo Espírito Santo, undisturbed, until Churchill could get him, his duchess and their luxurious entourage shunted off to the Bahamas, where Edward had been appointed governor, out of harm’s way. Then there was

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the ‘mystery’ of the film actor Leslie Howard’s disappearance, shot down over the Bay of Biscay on his return from Lisbon to England, unusually for civilian aircraft on that route, and possibly because his plump cigar-smoking agent Alfred Chenhalls was mistaken for Churchill. One story is that the British knew the attack was on, but didn’t divert the flight, so as not to compromise the source of their information, which was the highly-secret ‘Ultra’ decoding device. Even in the absence of genuine plots, rumours of false ones abounded, in this ‘busy ant-heap’, as J.C. Masterman called it, ‘of spies and agents’. Everyone seemed involved: hoteliers, waiters, chamber-maids, croupiers, policemen, bureaucrats, prostitutes; spying for one side or the other, and sometimes for both. It was another rich source of income for the locals. ‘Espionage has become a national Portuguese racket’, concluded an American military intelligence report in 1943. Most of the stories they came up with were ‘laughable’, even ‘fantastic’, wrote George Kennan; but they were something to talk about over the English gin and tonics, and provided some wonderful material for the visiting novelists. Ian Fleming is supposed to have got his inspiration for Casino Royale, the first Bond book, from watching Duško Popov in action at the Estoril casino. * However much we might want to criticize neutral nations – Sweden, for example, for keeping out of all modern wars, a stance that many present-day Swedes regard as a virtue; and Ireland – there is always a need for them. Diplomats can meet in them; the persecuted seek shelter there; and a model set out there of ‘normal life’ to remind the belligerents of what they are missing, and are fighting for. For the neutrals themselves there is a lot to be said for avoiding the destruction of war, enabling economies to be rebuilt more easily and strongly afterwards, as happened with Sweden, although less so (in the long term) for Portugal. Britain certainly appreciated Portugal’s independence, quite apart from the Azores: the University of Oxford, for example, granted Salazar an honorary degree in 1941, and sent a group of dons over there to confer it on him, which must have been flattering and unexpected for a supposed Fascist. The British nationals who sought shelter there were not very much approved of back home; but they probably wouldn’t have been able to aid the war effort all that much if they had stayed there. (Arty people generally don’t.) Besides, there were still ways in which they could make their patriotic feeling felt. Forbidden from openly expressing their political sympathies in Lisbon cinemas, for example, when the newsreels on came audiences ‘circumvented the prohibition by stamping their boots on the floor when Hitler appeared, having coughing fits when it was Mussolini, and shouting “Viva Benfica!” . . . for Churchill’. They will have included native

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Lisboetas, 80 per cent of whom are supposed to have sympathized with the Allied side. (Britain, after all, was Portugal’s ‘oldest ally’.) Salazar wasn’t one of them. Though the degree of his allegiance to Fascist ideology can be debated – ‘conservative’ and ‘Catholic’ seem to fit him better – he carried a portrait of Mussolini on his desk; dismissed the Nazi Holocaust as ‘an internal issue of the Third Reich’; insisted on holding on to plundered Jewish gold smuggled out of Germany, with ingots marked with swastikas apparently being used to rebuild the Catholic shrine at Fatima; and when news of Hitler’s death came through, ordered three days of national mourning for him – longer even than de Valera ordered in Ireland. And he retained his grip on Portugal, and his beloved colonies, for another twenty-nine years. For conservatives at the time, that must have gone a long way to make up for his ambivalent stand during the war, after which ‘no glory clung to Portugal as a victorious nation, nor had it experienced a joyous release from occupation’. On the other hand, for Salazar ‘victory’ simply left the way open for other threats, from the (supposedly) anticolonialist superpowers: Russia, whose communism he had always of course dreaded, and the United States: ‘a barbaric people illuminated not by god, but rather by electric light.’ So the ultimate benefits of neutrality were not unalloyed. To the many British it helped to escape wartime austerity, however, and to reprise their ‘pre-war holidays’, in what was (and is) a delightful and friendly city, they were pretty much so.

Notes 1 Based on two review articles commissioned by, but I believe never published in, the London Review of Books.

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Hope and Decline

For Britain, the post-war years were a period of really quite remarkable recovery after the material and psychological damage inflicted by her recent immersion in the continent of Europe in just about the deepest way conceivable. The pain of the recovery lasted for at least a decade – if it was ever completed at all. Then in the 1950s, things began to look up. Unfortunately for the reputation of that decade it was succeeded by an even brighter one, when regarded in retrospect, through which the immediately post-war years appear either dull and socially stifling, or else the last years of social decency before the dam burst, depending on your outlook; but conservative, in any case. Recently a couple of books have appeared focusing on those pre-1960s years. The first part of this chapter is based on a review article that I published about them in 2016, which takes account of my own subjective experiences, as a child of the Fifties.1 * ‘There’s a dreadfully misplaced nostalgia for the ’50s’, write Francis Beckett and Tony Russell at the start of their book 1956: The Year That Changed Britain (2016); mostly to be found among expensively educated children of Thatcherism. They see the ’50s as a glorious Indian summer, before free love and protest and egalitarianism, and 1956 and then 1968, came along to ruin it. Sometimes Thatcher’s children sound as though they want to take us back to it – but they have never been there. If they had, they’d know better.

Well, I was there, and I have to say that I found the 1950s rather exciting. Reading this book, with its accounts of the horrors of the age – snobbery, smog, bigotry, National Service, beatings in schools, awful food, gloomy Sundays, stifling sexual attitudes: all quite true – I started to wonder why. Of course I’m only one person, and a pretty lucky one at that. I’m not a woman, for a start (see below). People of my generation were also unaware then of the joys to come – Chinese takeaways, reality TV, seven-day shopping, the internet – which make the 1950s seem duller 153

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in retrospect. But this isn’t the only reason. That is hinted at both in this book, and also in Simon Hall’s 1956: The World in Revolt (Faber and Faber, 2016. Beckett and Russell cover just Britain; Hall ranges more widely). There’s a good case to be made that it was then – far more than in the more celebrated 1968, for example – that many things began to change quite fundamentally. And the start of a period of change is always more exhilarating than its – usually disappointing – end. On the international front, 1956 really was momentous. In Britain it is mainly remembered for the Suez Crisis, often taken as the defining moment in the fall of her Empire; but overall the most significant event was probably Khrushchev’s supposedly ‘secret’ speech to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow in the early hours of 25 February, criticizing in retrospect the ‘cult of personality’ that had grown up in the party recently, and in particular over the personality of the late Josef Stalin. That, when it got out, released an ‘orgy of public criticism’ of the Soviet Union in her oppressed eastern European satellites, beginning in Poland, and of genuine hope that things might change for them: not, it should be noted, away from communism, but towards a more liberal and – the optimists claimed – ‘genuine’ kind. There were huge demonstrations in Poland and Hungary, prompting Tony Benn to write in his diary: ‘Everyone in the world is breathless with hope that this may lead to a rebirth of freedom throughout the whole of Eastern Europe.’ But not their Soviet masters, who regarded them as having got out of hand: ‘it begins with a demand for freedom of the press’, claimed the Czech deputy premier, ‘and ends with freedom for capitalism’. This turned out to be prescient, of course, to the regret no doubt of those of the original brave dissidents who survived until 1989. The Soviets were also nervous of their satellites’ leaving the Warsaw pact; and suspicious of ‘foreign imperialist agents’ and indigenous Fascists: neither of which fear was entirely paranoid, Hall maintains, in the light of ‘Radio Free Europe’, and the strong showing of Hungary’s explicitly fascist Arrow Cross Party in the 1940s. Anyway, the Soviets weren’t having any of it, and brutally crushed both uprisings in the course of the year. ‘All youth is rising and being mowed down’, wrote Violet Bonham Carter. She blamed Eden’s ‘folly’ – the Suez aggression – for having ‘distracted the attention of the world from this tragedy. I cannot forgive it’. One happy result, for Britain, was the asylum it gave to 21,000 Hungarian refugees in the aftermath, greeted with enormous goodwill by their hosts, and repaying the country handsomely. Apparently it wasn’t quite so happy for the refugees, who were ‘dreadfully disappointed to find a poorer and dingier nation than the one they had left’. And that, write Beckett and Russell, ‘was before they had tasted the food’.

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One way or another, these events affected all the other ‘big’ happenings of that year. The Soviet Union, and by association communism itself, of whatever type, were largely discredited almost everywhere as automatic foci for left-wingers, leaving young British idealists, Beckett and Russell suggest, without a natural ‘home’ ever after: only a sterile choice between the squabbling splinters that remained, of which the CPGB was now only one. ‘The Hungarians’, proclaimed the New York Times in November, ‘have put a brand upon communism as a philosophy of life and government from which it can never recover’. From now on, the main vigour of dissident youth was channelled instead into single-issue politics, like CND (founded the following year) and later the movement against the war in Vietnam, with the less vigorous opting for John Osborne-like cynicism – ‘there are no good causes left to die for’ – or for the new musical culture – ‘rock’n’roll’ – as a diversion. In America it obviously stiffened the resolve of Red-baiters – Senator McCarthy had only very recently been dethroned – some of whom saw a communist conspiracy lurking behind the Civil Rights movement of the period, which was peaking just then with the Montgomery bus boycott; but also of liberals aware that racial segregation in the South was making it difficult for the United States to occupy the moral high ground in response to events in eastern Europe. Martin Luther King was canny here, with impeccable anti-Communist credentials and his insistence that desegregation was the patriotic American thing to do. The Cold War, and this recent alarming ratcheting-up of it, hung over almost everything. To a great extent, the crisis was inter-generational. Both these books emphasize this. It was the young (preponderantly) reacting against the conventions of the past: bureaucratic communist in the east, capitalist and racist in America, aristocratic in Britain, imperialist in northern Africa, killjoy everywhere; all of which were supposed by the mid-fifties to have outlived their relevance, especially so long after the end of the war which had seemed to – as is the usual pattern with great wars in history – shake things up. In Eastern Europe, the specific targets were shortages and Russian tyranny; in the US, Jim Crow; in Britain, the hold that the Old Etonians still exerted over their supposedly democratic country; and in Egypt and other colonies or partial colonies a system of rule – formal imperialism – which most enlightened people could plainly see was already on its last legs. Beckett and Russell have coined a choice expression for those who could not read the signs: ‘the harrumph tendency’, they call them; which, ridiculous as these people seem in retrospect – and were made to appear even at the time, for example in the character of ‘Major Bloodnok’ on radio’s The Goon Show – could be frustratingly effective in blocking, even if it was only for a

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while, the abolition of hanging and legal reforms regarding homosexuality. Both of these reforms were mooted seriously in Britain in 1956, with abolition of the death penalty passed in the House of Commons but then rejected in the Lords, at that time ‘composed of hitherto unknown rustics, who thought, perhaps, that abolition was in some way a threat to blood sports’. (This is one of Beckett and Russell’s best jokes.) Eden’s quite mad Suez adventure was also kept going by these men and women. Without them, and their fellow old reactionaries and procrastinators in Washington and Moscow, the modern age might have come sooner than it did. On the other hand, that still left – pace Osborne – plenty of ‘good causes’ to fight for, or at the very least bad causes to fight against, which is what made it such a stimulating time for many young men (or, in my case, boys) of that generation. Less so, I have to admit, for young women, who scarcely feature in these books, apart from Hall’s short chapter on the women’s march on Pretoria in August 1956 to protest against the extension to them of the hated pass laws. Feminism seems to have been slumbering then, though I may be wrong. For us young and progressive males, however, the Day appeared to have arrived. (Actually I wasn’t at all progressive at that time, supporting Eden over Suez, I remember; but I was only fifteen. And we had just switched from the good old News Chronicle to the Daily Telegraph at home.) We had our welfare state well set up; the new National Health Service was ‘in its best shape in its history’, according to Beckett and Russell; there was full employment (an astonishing 98.8 per cent in 1955, though one imagines the relative lack of women in the labour market partly accounted for that); decolonization nicely on track, with two more colonies (Sudan and Ghana) liberated that year, though there was still much to be done on that front (Cyprus, for a start); and a pretty healthy Labour Party, with some heroic recent achievements behind it, for non-doctrinal socialists to become enthusiastic about and active in. The abolition of the death penalty, easier divorce and the legalization of homosexuality were there for the grabbing. Resistance to ‘progress’ was crumbling, but still vociferous enough to be worth taking on. Simon Hall makes much of the savage backlash against school integration in the American South, by whites worried that ‘the social fabric of our community’ was about to ‘be destroyed by a group of Negro radicals who have split asunder the fine relationships which have existed between the Negro and white people for generations’ (sic). Even President Eisenhower could understand white parents’ concern ‘to see that their sweet little white girls are not required to sit... alongside some big overgrown Negroes’. In Britain there was the noisy but ridiculous League of Empire Loyalists, who enjoyed a brief notoriety at

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this time. There was resistance too in North Africa (the violently intransigent pieds noirs), Cyprus (EOKA), South Africa, and of course by the Soviet puppet rulers and their secret police forces in eastern Europe. But all these causes seemed to be good and winnable, which made the struggle worthwhile; while simultaneously providing the protesters with a rich seam of satirical comedy (like Major Bloodnock, and five years later Private Eye) to cheer them on. The marching and demonstrating were fun as well: out of doors, social, serious. (I got into that a couple of years later, with CND.) ‘Progress’ seemed to be the dominant and irreversible trend of the time. Martin Luther King spoke encouragingly of ‘the rushing waters of historical necessity’. Hence all the harrumphing; a desperate, defensive cry if ever there was one, like a dying elephant. The music was fun, too. 1956 was the year when Bill Haley and his Comets and Elvis Presley first made it into the British charts with Rock around the Clock and Hound Dog respectively, competing rather powerfully with How Much Is That Doggie in the Window, sung by Patti Page; and Liberace, or ‘the biggest sentimental vomit of all time’, as ‘Cassandra’ of the Daily Mirror described him, for which Liberace sued the Mirror – and won. It’s a sign of the times – the present time, that is, rather than the 1950s – that so much is made of this in these books, especially Beckett’s and Russell’s. By contrast, there’s not a word in either of them about the ‘classical’ music being composed then – Britten, Shostakovich, Martinů, Messiaen, Vaughan Williams, Bernstein, Poulenc, Kabalevsky’s Song of the Party Membership Card. . . . – which surely merits a footnote at least. What popular culture’s relationship to the other developments taking place in 1956 was, however, is not explored here, apart from the obvious: that it expressed a vague spirit of revolt. The Montgomery bus boycott that started in December 1955 and the Budapest Rising of October 1956 were also expressions of revolt, but the connexions between the music and the political activism here are not clear. These were very rarely ‘protest songs’. Likewise there were few (if any) explicitly ‘political’ novels or plays in 1956, at any rate in Britain; the critic D.J. Taylor surmised that this was because ‘young writers seemed too committed to a sceptical and empirical attitude to be roused by political causes’. (Again, I stand to be corrected on this.) But of course politics doesn’t need to be explicit. Just as contemporary American rednecks liked to claim that rock’n’roll was a cunning communist plot to demoralize American youth, ready for the Soviet tanks to move in, so Peter Fleming, elder brother of Ian, and a terrific harrumpher, thought he espied a Soviet ‘sixth column’ behind the trivialization of popular culture generally in his day. (This was in a novel published in 1952. The plot’s main agent was a figure spookily reminiscent of Terry Wogan, although the latter wasn’t to

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come on to our TV screens until the 1970s.) The Soviet gerontocracy harboured similar suspicions – this time with the capitalists as the plotters – about jazz and rock’n’roll. Fears like this may have lain behind the more strictly musical criticisms of this genre that were voiced in the 1950s: Frank Sinatra’s characterization of it, for example, as ‘phony’ music, ‘sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons’. (There was a lot of this.) But it required a very conspiratorial frame of mind to believe that subverting the moral fabric of the nation was the deliberate motive behind rock’n’roll. Still, that could have been a side effect. More likely, however, is that it was a means of escape for the young from the world the oldies had imposed on them. There’s probably little more serious to say about it than that. (PS. I’ve nothing against it. I was hooked on it, too.) Beckett and Russell, in a nice conceit, begin their book by imagining ‘a tourist from the twenty-first century’ visiting 1950s Britain, and the shocks that he or she would encounter there. I guess that the greatest shocks would be for the women: essentially unliberated in 1956, second-class citizens, objectified, bound to the home, the only carers of small children, excluded from most responsible public jobs, demeaned in so many ways (if not idealized soppily), liable to be beaten and raped within marriage with little recourse except to hit back, as Ruth Ellis did – and she had just (in July 1955) been hanged for it: all in all, not something I imagine most modern women would want to go back to. On the other hand, for Beryl Hinde of Enfield – born in 1933, so hardly one of ‘Thatcher’s children’ – ‘the ’50s were wonderful years. There was plenty of work and plenty of employment. People were happy.’ I couldn’t imagine being unemployed after school, either. And there were other compensations. One that Beckett and Russell lay great emphasis on is ‘the erosion of automatic respect for politicians, for ministers of religion or teachers, [and] for those who are richer or older than we are’ that was a feature of the mid-fifties. Yes, that was probably an important legacy, certainly in the field of popular culture, although it is worth mentioning that this was a charge that had been levelled against ‘the young’ periodically for centuries past. Another legacy, of Suez in particular, was the confirmation that Britain’s imperial time was up, though few outside the League of Empire Loyalists and the Daily Mail (just as choleric then as it is today: our twenty-first century tourist would not notice much difference there) bothered much about that; and the realization that we could no longer do anything as a nation if America didn’t want us to, which of course was the reason Eden had to pull out of Suez. That has bugged us ever since. For me, however, the big thing about 1956 is the survival – from wartime – of a sense of hope, at least for men; of the idea that things could and probably would

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get better, for us individually, as a society, and as a world, if we went on as we were doing then: knitting the country together, becoming more socially liberal, and conceding to our colonies the freedoms we claimed for ourselves. Harold Macmillan, who succeeded Eden after the latter’s well-deserved fall after Suez (despite his own pro-Suez stance), proved expert in directing this, managing, as Beckett and Russell put it, ‘to make great change at headlong pace feel like a gentle amble over a grouse moor’. That was the main thing distinguishing their world from ours, and feeding my emphatically non-Thatcherite nostalgia. There hasn’t been much hope around since her. * So, what brought an end to it? You might think that the fall of the Empire would have been a factor; but that seems unlikely for all but the most dyed-inthe-wool harrumphers, who continued harrumphing well into the 1960s and ’70s, mainly over Rhodesia, until that was given its independence (from Britain, at any rate) as the new nation of Zimbabwe in 1980. Most Britons were unaffected by that, as they had been unaffected – consciously and emotionally, at any rate; not necessarily materially – by their Empire all along. (Of course readers can disagree with this, but only, hopefully, after having taken on board my Absent-Minded Imperialists, which sought to undermine the then conventional view that Britons generally had been imbued with jingoism all along.) The end of the Empire didn’t entirely destroy Britain’s wider-world orientation for a few years yet: most of that had always been ‘informal’, not bounded by colonial frontiers; but after the withdrawal of her military from ‘East of Suez’, announced in 1967, and her adhesion to the European Common Market six years later, that became less and less convincing, unless it was done on the US’s coat-tails. There were signs of it poking its little harrumphing head above the battlements during the great ‘Brexit’ debate of 2016–20 – for example, in Boris Johnson’s sub-Churchillan vision of an ‘independent’ Britain breaking out of Europe and reuniting at least commercially with her widespread but longabandoned racial family; but even then it seems not to have moved even the Brexiters viscerally. The loss of the Empire probably – we’ll never know about its subconscious impact – had little to do with Britain’s pervasive sense of decline from at least the late 1960s onwards. That arose from more domestic circumstances, acted upon by a much more powerful international force than the Empire had ever been. The hope that had sustained the young in the 1950s had been not for national power or prestige, but for social progress, measured mainly in terms of human welfare and equality, great strides in which were made in the following decade.

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The Labour Party of course took the lead in this, but the Conservatives under Macmillan were not far behind, having come to accept the general mid-century consensus that this was the way history was driving them. The 1960s were a decade of enormous societal change, together with some conflict, especially in 1968, that totemic year; but the latter, though it had its moments, was not nearly so serious in Britain as on the European continent or in Vietnam-riven America. This was taken to bear out Britons’ centuries-old conviction that ‘moderation’ – in this case, taking a middle way between the extremes of communism and capitalism – was the smoothest and least dangerous path of ‘progress’. The state’s ability and willingness to smooth down the sharpest edges of the capitalist system with steady income growth and social welfare were seen, also, to give the lie to the common Marxist claim that capitalism had to grow redder in tooth and claw as a precondition for the socialist revolution that Marx had been banking on eventually. The old man had been simply wrong. Capitalism could adapt. Another – better – example of this was the nation of Sweden, with the ‘Swedish model’ – of democratically regulated, but not state-owned, industry and generous welfare – serving as British Labour’s own ‘shining city on the hill’: the phrase ironically taken, of course, from the old American Puritans’ and then Ronald Reagan’s way of characterizing the capitalist USA. Which explains why there were not all that many communists around in Britain in the 1960s and ’70s. In 1944, the CPGB (‘Marxist-Leninist’) had boasted a membership of well over 50,000. By 1970, largely due to Russian suppression in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, but also possibly because the party no longer seemed so necessary in ‘never had it so good’ Britain (Macmillan’s famous phrase), this had shrunk to around 30,000, and still on the slide. Marx – as a seer, at any rate – appeared to be consigned to history. All of which sustained the ‘hopeful’ times for a couple of decades thereafter. For my generation, things were pretty good in the 1960s. The ‘top’ 10 per cent of us had free university education, plus maintenance grants; the university sector was expanding to improve on that 10 per cent; industry was doing OK – that is, Britain still made things; we and nearly everyone else were guaranteed jobs after finishing our education; and the healthy excitement of young protest continued, focused now mainly on opposition to nuclear weapons, South African apartheid and the Vietnam War. Every ‘progressive’ cause, both abroad (those three) and at home seemed winnable, with homosexuality at last legalized, divorce made easier and the death penalty abandoned in a sudden and quite spectacular clutch of reforms carried out by the Wilson government in the 1960s and early ’70s. Womens’ prospects still lagged behind, but their new ‘liberation’ movement had

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at least got off the ground (viz Germaine Greer and Made in Dagenham). Anticolonialism was clearly winning as Britain’s colonies dropped off the tree at a bewildering rate in Africa and Asia, not always fully prepared for their new circumstances; and without too many indigenous dictators sprouting up just yet to spoil the happy story. Britain’s joining what was then called (only) the ‘European Common Market’ as an equal member was supposed to be a sign that she had once and for all, and quite contentedly, abandoned her imperial pretensions: though it could be claimed that she had merely replaced one kind of imperialism by a joint venture which could also be regarded as ‘imperialist’ – i.e. expansionist – in its fashion. (But that was a somewhat sophisticated view.) All of which seemed to prove that the much bruited Lab–Con ‘middle way’ was in fact the best means to achieve ‘progress’ in these new times. Social democracy was the answer. Britain (and Sweden) had it about right. Looking back from modern times, however, that could be seen as something of an illusion. The general opinion now is that this happy state of affairs could not continue: in Britain, at any rate. In Sweden it did, for reasons that only a Swede might be able to understand. It may be because of its more ‘consensual’ national character, contrasting with Britain’s stronger traditions of ‘individualism’ and hierarchy. At any rate, and for whatever reason, this – round about 1970 – was the time when the two societies began to diverge, Sweden continuing – albeit fitfully – along her much-cherished and admired social democratic route, while Britain took another path. That was the path of what is called ‘Thatcherism’, although it predated Margaret Thatcher in most ways, and – as I shall argue in the next chapter – was not really her doing. She was just lucky to be around when disillusion with the old consensus set in, and the political and economic tides began to turn. * The problem can be looked at in many ways. It could be that a generous welfare state together with economic growth could not – and cannot – be sustained essentially: that the costs of welfare will always cripple the enterprise upon which economic prosperity and growth must depend. Higher taxes lead to lower profits, and so slower growth. Whether or not the example of Sweden – highly taxed, and so with almost no poverty, but also impressively innovative and productive, and with a flourishing manufacturing sector still – gives the lie to that, is a moot point. Of course it’s more complicated than that. In any case, a number of quite specific things happened in the later 1960s to persuade people that the old consensus was breaking down. One was what was taken to be the relative decline of British industry – although looking back from today, after the ‘Thatcherite revolution’, the figures for production and so on then

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don’t look too bad. That was widely blamed on the activities of ‘over-powerful’ trade unions, especially some damaging strikes – culminating in what became known as the great ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978–9, when dead bodies were pictured lying in the streets. (That wasn’t of course true; it arose from a conflation of two separate and quite minor strikes, of refuse collectors, and a tiny number of gravediggers in Liverpool.) High-profile left-wing trade union leaders compounded the damage by rejecting a general national settlement of the ‘trade union problem’ offered by the Labour government in 1969 – Barbara Castle’s In Place of Strife – which might have brought British trade unions in line with the Swedish corporatist model, so benefitting both sides of industry, as it did in Sweden. That would probably have rendered Thatcher unnecessary. In the meantime, however, her alternative way of thinking – today called ‘neo-liberalism’ – was gaining credibility among certain sectors of the political intelligentsia, battening on to that significant minority in the Conservative Party which had never entirely shed its Victorian mindset. There may have been another more fundamental factor lying behind this too. Neo-liberalism, of course, wasn’t confined to Britain, but was – or soon became – a global trend. That may indicate a global dynamic behind it, which can only be expressed in Marxist terms. The welfare state, and corporatism, had been supposed to give the lie to Marx’s prediction of capitalism’s becoming more and more oppressive, through the inevitable force of its own internal contradictions, until it provoked the revolutionary reaction that would lead to the system’s collapse and supersession by (in the longer run) a ‘communist’ society. Welfare was supposed to prevent or at least delay this. But welfare itself seemed to be beset with contradictions, which now were leading to its collapse, releasing the hounds of red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism again. Didn’t that suggest that Marx had been right all along? Capitalism, worldwide, having devoured the pathetic sops that had been placed in its path, was now careering on under its own dynamic, via what was now called ‘austerity’, to a worse condition of society, leading to – in one form or another, one of which might be ecological – selfdestruction? This was bigger than Britain: bigger than Thatcher, even. She was simply riding the ‘inevitable’ trend predicted by Marx more than a century before. (We’ll return to this in the next chapter.) Of course, most of us trust that it isn’t really so ‘inevitable’. One by-product of this – to return to the quotation at the beginning of this chapter – was that the 1950s and 60s became widely denigrated as the worst of times, rather than, as has been suggested here, one of the most hopeful. That was easy to do in view of the technological developments that had taken place since

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then, taking us out of a monochrome time into a brightly coloured one, with far more consumer choice, more opportunities for many, especially for women, and spicier food. Life on Mars – the title of a popular TV police drama from 2006–07 which had its hero transported back from modern times to 1973 – would be difficult for most of us to stomach, as it was for the character of Sam Tyler in that series. But that’s with the benefit of a hindsight that wasn’t available to people then; and with an arguably superficial ‘consumerist’ set of priorities, that has no place in it for ‘hope’.

Notes 1 Originally published as ‘The Swinging Fifties’, in Times Literary Supplement, 23 December 2016.

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Thatcher’s Time

Shortly after she was bundled out of office, in one of the most dramatic episodes of the constant soap opera which seems to have been the history of the British Conservative Party over recent years, Margaret Thatcher gave a revealing interview to Newsweek magazine in America.1 Though it was obviously written for an American audience, its ostensible purpose was to try to persuade what she was beginning even by then to suspect were her inadequate and wavering successors back in Britain to stick to her path; not to – in the words of the headline given to the report of the interview – ‘Undo What I Have Done’, and so throw away the achievements of her eleven years in office. It also, however – and more interestingly to the historian – revealed what she believed those achievements to have been. They were pretty considerable. She had changed the course of history, no less. ‘I set out,’ she said, ‘to destroy socialism, because I felt it was at odds with the character of the people.’ She succeeded. ‘We were the first country in the world to roll back the frontiers of socialism, then roll forward the frontiers of freedom. We reclaimed our heritage.... I turned round the whole philosophy of government. We restored the strength and reputation of Britain.’ This was her legacy: her personal legacy, the triumph of her will, no one else’s; and a permanent legacy, so long as the weaker-willed men who followed her did not falter. ‘Thatcherism will live,’ she went on. ‘It will live long after Thatcher has died’ – one is almost surprised to find the admission of mortality there – ‘because we had the courage to restore the great principles and put them into practice, in keeping with the character of the people, and the place of this country in the world.’ This is highly revealing, partly because it is pure, direct Thatcher: the uncut diamond of her philosophy, so to speak, as opposed to some of her other obiter dicta, which were fed to her by the PR consultants she had to advise her when she was in office, or have been carefully cut and polished by the ‘memoirs team’, as she called it, which helped her with the two volumes of her autobiography, and which included – I am told – Norman Stone, the Oxford Professor of Modern 165

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History, which may explain why some of the history in the first volume (the one that deals with her premiership) is in fact quite respectable. This is a slight surprise, because left to herself Thatcher was not a good historian. During her period in office, we professional historians used to spend hours and days and months putting her right on some of the wilder historical assertions she used to come out with on all kinds of topics, without any apparent effect, however, because she never modified her views, or deigned to reply. Usually her fault was that she over-simplified things, horribly. But that, of course, was in character. One of Thatcher’s main attributes – and probably overall a source of strength to her – was that she did tend to see things in simple, blackand-white terms. This is something that does come out clearly in her memoirs, despite the diamond-cutting; in her defence, for example, of Sir Alec DouglasHome, who once aroused great derision among the intelligentsia by admitting that he used matchsticks to work out economic problems: ‘No one stopped to question,’ commented Thatcher, ‘whether the weaknesses of the British economy were fundamentally simple and only superficially complex.’ She obviously felt the same about the way we academics sought to over-elaborate and muddy the ‘fundamentally simple’ lessons of history. She also had another reason for disregarding us. Some readers might sympathize with this more. ‘History’s lessons’, she wrote in the second volume of her Memoirs, ‘usually teach us what we want to learn. It was possible to take a very different view of the causes of war and of the historical achievements of capitalism. Things looked different from the perspective of Grantham’ – Thatcher’s home town – ‘than from that of Stockton’ – her predecessor Harold Macmillan’s northern industrial constituency. (Macmillan had taken a very different line on economic policy from Thatcher; almost socialist. Later she coined a word for his kind: the ‘wets.’) That is disarming, in a way; but it disarms both sides: both Thatcher’s and the academics’. Neither camp’s history is better – or worse – than the other’s. So she is as entitled to her view as we are to ours. (She’s almost a postmodernist!) Even on the facts she appears to hold that we are on level ground. For example, she simply refuses to accept what all the evidence tells us quite unambiguously – that there were more Conservative ‘appeasers’ in 1938 than Labour ones – simply because her instincts, and her Grantham memories, seem to tell her otherwise. Thatcher’s historical ignorance, which she acknowledges – ‘I had a particularly inspiring History teacher, Miss Harding, who gave me a taste for the subject which, unfortunately, I never developed,’ she writes about her schooldays; it seems to me that that Miss Harding has a lot to answer for – is exactly equal in the balance to all our academic knowledge and cogitation. That is no less irritating a point

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of view for the grain of truth that – as is the case of most of her arguments – lies within it. It is, of course, a profoundly anti-intellectual point of view, which is one of the reasons why most of us intellectuals in Britain took against Margaret Thatcher so virulently. (Another reason is that she made the lives of us in universities much less pleasant than they had used to be.) This is another important, and indeed defining, characteristic of her political personality. She was impervious to ideas: impervious, that is, in the sense that she would not allow them to alter opinions she had already formed from other materials entirely. She took on ideas if they bolstered her opinions – or, of you like, her prejudices: this in fact is the literally correct word for them – but not otherwise. She was quite open about this. Indeed she believed – as the passage in the memoirs about history I’ve just quoted indicates – that it applied to everyone, but that she was just more honest about it. It is a theme that runs right through the second volume of the memoirs (covering her early years). Her whole political philosophy was based on what she called her ‘instincts’, which she acknowledged to have been largely formed by her upbringing over the corner grocery store in the small market town of Grantham in rural Lincolnshire, and at the hands of her strong-principled father, who was also a Conservative councillor. It was her father who protected her from what might otherwise have been another powerful early influence on her: the Methodist chapel she regularly attended. Methodism in Britain is usually associated with a more left-wing brand of political radicalism. The young Margaret Roberts (her maiden name) was aware of this, and a little disturbed, I think, both by it, and by the obvious Christian goodness of the left-wing Ministers she heard preach; until her father pointed out what later came to be an axiom with her: that ‘personal virtue is no substitute for political hard-headedness’, which puts Christianity firmly in its place. Few other early experiences seem seriously to have undermined her lower middle-class instincts and her father’s teachings. She pointed out herself, for example, that the Depression of the 1930s had little effect on her life. Although on the way to school she would pass ‘long queues of men’ at the nearby labour exchange, ‘none of our closest friends was unemployed’, and her father’s business did not suffer. The poor still turned their children out well, which showed how strong ‘the spirit of self-reliance and independence was’ among them. Grantham was ‘a decent place’ at that time: unlike Stockton, one presumes. That affected her; and indeed confirmed a set of basic political principles that was never to desert her: at university, for example, where most young men’s and women’s notions mature a little, but not hers. Individual self-reliance was all. The only impact that ideas and arguments were

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allowed to have on this was to firm it up, give intellectual substance to it later. Only sympathetic ideas were welcomed on board, including, as we have seen, interpretations of history. Nothing was taken on that might rock the boat. Instinct took priority; intellectuals were only valuable insofar as they were willing to service it. No wonder most self-respecting ones took umbrage. None of this, however, should be taken to imply that, according to Thatcher’s way of looking at things, ideas were of no importance at all. They were in fact of crucial importance, in two ways. The first was to give those whose instincts told them a particular course of action was necessary the confidence to push for that course of action, and a clearer idea of the way it could be done. These things are what Thatcher lacked in the early part of her political career, which explains – in her submission – some of what in retrospect appear to be inconsistencies in her statements and actions then. The most puzzling of these come from her time as Minister for Education in the Heath government of 1970–4, when she inaugurated a programme of public spending which would have been anathema to her after 1979; and when she signally failed to object in any way – by resigning, for example, or even, it seems, protesting – against what she continually excoriated thereafter as Heath’s ‘treachery’ (that was her word for it) in abandoning the proto-Thatcherite ‘Selsdon’ programme he had come to power on, and reverting to more ‘consensual’ and Keynesian policies when the going started getting rough in 1972. Where – later critics have asked – was Margaret Thatcher all this time? In her memoirs she admitted she went along with it – ‘I must take my full share of responsibility’ – but claimed that she, like other likeminded ministers (Sir Keith Joseph, for example), simply did not yet have the intellectual backing to stiffen her resolve. ‘Those of us who disliked what was happening had not yet either fully analysed the situation or worked out an alternative approach.’ That needed to be done, before instinct could be turned into action. That was where the intellectuals came in. That was their positive value. But in a way they were only required for this task because of the harm they had done in other ways. The reason why ideas were necessary to aid Thatcherism was the great mountain of contrary ideas that was blocking its way up to then: the Keynesian ‘consensus’ that generations of intellectuals had built up since 1945, which was genuinely intimidating to all but the most thick-skinned free marketeer before the mid-1970s; Enoch Powell, for example, who was laughed out of court when he dared embrace what seemed then to be dead and mouldering nineteenth-century liberal economic ideas in the 1960s. Thatcher at this time was as intimidated as the rest. Hence, again, her silence during the Heath years. And hence also her lack of respect later for

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intellectuals generally, whom she saw as partly responsible for the wrong turnings that British history had taken over the past several years. * This brings us to the nub of Thatcher’s view of modern British history; and, by extension, of the history of the rest of the world too. Needless to say it is only one of a number of possible interpretations of history, chosen by her to fit in with her prejudices; though it must be said also that it is far from being an impossible one, and indeed chimes in with much fashionable thinking in academic circles today. It begins effectively in Victorian times – Mrs Thatcher never looked very far beyond that, except once to rubbish the French Revolution in order to irritate the French who were celebrating its bicentenary – and takes us up to Thatcher’s own times. In Thatcher’s version, the first eighty or ninety years of this stretch of time were sketched in only very thinly; but the gap can be filled out by the words of some of her acolytes, in particular Lord (David) Young, a businessman she brought into her cabinet in 1984, who produced what is probably the best summary of the Thatcherite view the following year. Thatcher’s version saw Britain’s decline as stemming from the country’s abandonment of the individualistic, entrepreneurial and patriotic ‘values’ she associated with Victorian times – this, her notion of ‘Victorian values’, was a particular irritation to academic historians – under pressure from ‘socialism’ in the twentieth century. That was the simple (and therefore, to her mind, probably the correct) explanation for Britain’s fall from economic grace, and consequently from prestige and power as a nation, since World War II. It sufficed for Thatcher. Of course it will not quite do for those who see Britain’s decline as originating before 1945, simply because there was not enough socialism around then – only two short-lived and minority Labour governments, for example – to account for the decline on its own. It is at this point that the intellectuals – and various other groups of British society – have to be brought in to complete the picture. Other factors weakened the capitalist ethos in Britain long before effective socialism came along. One of the most damaging was the revival of paternalist values in the later nineteenth century, largely at the public (that is, private) schools, to which even successful entrepreneurs misguidedly sent their sons, to be seduced away from their entrepreneurial ways, and even taught to despise moneymaking, to the enormous detriment of the wealth-creating sector in Britain. Modern British historians will be familiar with this idea from the American Martin Wiener’s influential English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–1980, published in 1981. Thatcherites loved that book, partly because it pandered to the social prejudices of the lower-born ones among them, who

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resented the ‘toffs’ – whom Thatcher sneeringly called the ‘grandees’ – almost as much as they loathed the proletariat. ‘It was not just the schools’, wrote Lord Young (following Wiener). ‘Oxbridge reflected a similar set of values’, deliberately setting its face against utility, both in its curricula and in the broader social principles and attitudes it tried to nurture and promulgate. It was thence, of course, that most British intellectuals originally came. No wonder they were so enamoured of paternalistic or socialist ideas (there does, indeed, seem very little to choose between upper-class paternalism and the dominant form of socialism in Britain in the mid-twentieth century; the relationship between them being neatly exemplified, for example, in the person of Clement Attlee, Labour prime minister from 1945 to 1951, who had attended Haileybury public school in the 1900s – the one explicitly founded to train young men to govern India); and consequently resistant to purer (or cruder) strains of capitalism, almost right through the twentieth century. It affected their perception of history, for example, with the industrial revolution being increasingly depicted, as Lord Young put it, as ‘the period in which humanity was sacrificed for profit’, and ‘the very word “Victorian”’ coming to be used pejoratively. In the days before socialism, and then after 1945 in cahoots with the socialists, it was these groups – toffs and intellectuals – together with a whole hive of allied workers (clerics, social workers, teachers and so on) which erected this great barrier of ‘consensus’, quasi-socialist, collectivist orthodoxy that stood in the path that Thatcher would instinctively have liked to take in the 1960s and 70s, but felt she could not, because the obstacles in her way seemed so massive. Our friend Samuel Laing (ch. 5) would have sympathised. Hence the scale of her achievement, as she saw it, when she eventually found the courage and the confidence to grapple with the monster, and bring it to its knees. Others – who were not necessarily sympathetic to her – regarded it as an achievement too. This was because they shared – and in their case took comfort in – her view of the strength of the opposition. I remember vividly, for example, a TV programme broadcast just after her 1979 election victory in which Peter Jay, television’s leading economic guru (and incidentally a son-in-law of the outgoing Labour prime minister), proved to us conclusively that, whatever Margaret Thatcher wanted, in the way of controlling money, reducing the role of the state and so on, she could not possibly achieve it, because of the backlash in all quarters of society it would provoke. The argument was backed up with tables, graphs and pie charts, so it had to be right. The doubters in Thatcher’s own first cabinet shared this view. They thought they had seen it all before: politicians promising great changes before they came to power, then being forced by what one prominent contemporary civil servant called the ‘ongoing reality’ to return

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again to the centre ground. The last and best example of this, of course, had been Edward Heath’s U-turn (or ‘treachery’) in 1970–4. This was one of the reasons why the doubters – Thatcher’s ‘wets’ – did not fight back more at the beginning. They thought things would turn their way in any case. ‘Those of us in Cabinet who were out of sympathy with Margaret’s views grossly underestimated her absolute determination’, wrote one of them (Jim Prior) later, ‘to push through the new right-wing policies’. It is probable that the fact that she was a woman caused some of them to underestimate her too. By the time they realized, it was too late. ‘Determination’ was clearly a factor in Thatcher’s success over the next eleven years, though it could equally be argued that it was also her undoing in the end. (The ‘poll tax’, which was the real cause of her defeat in 1990, was only persisted in because she insisted on it.) Was this the only or even a main reason for the rise and triumph of ‘Thatcherism’ in the 1980s, however? How much was she personally responsible for it? Was it she who – as she claimed in that 1992 Newsweek interview – single-handedly ‘rolled back socialism’, ‘rolled forward the frontiers of freedom’, ‘turned round the whole philosophy of government’ in Britain, and ‘reclaimed our heritage’? (These are all direct quotations.) Is this really the measure of the woman who ruled over our lives in Britain in the 1980s? Hence runs the widespread myth in Britain, which was encouraged by the manner of her going in 1990 – of course it was due to the poll tax really, but it was done in such a way as to give credence to the idea that she was simply betrayed by the moral midgets surrounding her – and has been compounded since by the poor performance of the government she left behind. That is very generally ascribed to John Major’s lack of ‘leadership’ qualities. Thatcher had those in abundance. Hence – the argument goes – her contrasting success. * Of course, there are problems with this explanation of the history of Britain over the last years of the twentieth century. One obvious one has to do with the nature of the ‘success’ that Thatcher was credited with. In a way, it is curious that this period can be regarded as ‘successful’ at all. By most traditional criteria its record was mixed, to say the least. It saw two deep economic recessions; the decimation of Britain’s native manufacturing capacity; a huge hike in unemployment; growing inequalities; rising taxation; social unrest unprecedented since (probably) the 1920s; and higher levels of recorded crime than ever before in British history. Abroad, the government’s achievement was no less questionable. Its greatest diplomatic success went totally against the instincts and wishes of Thatcher: that is, the transfer of power to the majority in Zimbabwe in 1980. That was – on the British side – mainly Lord Carrington’s doing. (Thatcher never

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forgave him for it.) In South Africa she backed the wrong horse right to the end, putting all the weight she could muster against the ‘terrorists’ of the ANC, and against the imposition of sanctions against the Nationalist government. (Husband Denis Thatcher was a constant visitor to South Africa under apartheid, and her son later moved there.) Her undoubted – and very personal –military success in defence of the Falkland Islands in 1982 benefited her enormously, and presumably the islanders, but brought no tangible wider advantages: did not deter aggression by dictators elsewhere afterwards, for example, as she claimed it would; and had its downside, in particular the ruling out of a compromise settlement which would seem objectively to be a far more reasonable solution to a real and genuinely contested political anomaly than turning the Falklands into a British Army firing range. She made herself the darling of the Americans, and especially of their President Reagan, but mainly by flattering them, and in a blatantly partisan way that was bound to rebound on Britain when the Democrat Bill Clinton came to office, and it was discovered that her government had been digging up dirt for the Republicans to use against him in the presidential election. She antagonized Britain’s European partners no end. And they call this success? One wonders in that case what failure could possibly look like to a Thatcherite. Of course, we know really. ‘Failure’ would have consisted of her not being able to carry through her policies – irrespective, almost, of whether those policies brought the kinds of benefits most people wanted from government, or even the benefits that Thatcher herself claimed for them. The deed was all. Bash the trade unions – let business fend for itself – get some discipline into financial policy (Tories thrilled at the word ‘discipline’ – or the ‘smack of firm government’, as they liked to call it, no doubt recalling with masochistic pleasure their public school days) – pursue the ‘scroungers’ – let the rich enjoy their success – resist the ‘terrorists’ – insult the French – bash the Argies – put the toffs, intellectuals and Guardian-readers in their place: this was good enough for most of Thatcher’s kind of Tory, a mark of success on its own, if it could all be done, whatever its broader results. Of course, most Thatcherites believed its broader results would be beneficial, too: to ‘restore the strength and reputation of Britain’, as Thatcher put it in that Newsweek interview. In fact, most of them believed it so faithfully that they assumed these benefits had followed when the policies had been put in place, without looking (why bother?); or else – if they were a little less blinkered – that they would follow shortly, once the cure had really worked through, or if the tourniquet were tightened just a little more, or if John Major would only give way to a ‘purer’ Thatcherite, like Redwood or Portillo or Lilley. On the other

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hand, some scarcely seemed to care. Behind Thatcherism there was an enormous reservoir of simple instinctive middle-class resentment against trade unionists, intellectuals, foreigners, people of other ethnicities and others, which had built up during the dark, frustrating years of socialism, and was a sufficient fuel on its own to push Thatcher forward, and allow the holders of these feelings to enjoy the journey for its own sake, without much thought for their ultimate destination, which did not seem to matter. Thatcher’s own memoirs are full of this: of tremendous animosity against the organized working classes, for example (she could just about abide the quiet deferential ones who dressed their children nicely), and against intellectuals and ‘grandees’, some of which undoubtedly stemmed from the latter’s condescending and clearly appallingly sexist attitudes towards her. (She did have a struggle against this kind of thing in her early years.) This was why she hit such a resonance among ordinary Conservative Party members and supporters, who continued to worship her, despite her failures, after she left. She expressed their prejudices. That did. This also clearly helps explain her success in gaining and then holding onto and exercising power between 1979 and 1990, in addition to the other factor we have looked at so far: her determination, or resolve, or ‘will’. She had an enormous constituency out there, larger than almost anyone else realized at the time. James Prior, for example, who we have already seen being taken by surprise by Thatcher’s ‘determination’, also admitted in his memoirs that ‘we’ – that is, the ‘wets’ in the cabinet – ‘underestimated enormously... the changes in the Conservative party that were taking place’. He also failed to anticipate the appeal of her approach more widely, especially among the lumpenproletariat. Thatcher, however oppressed she may have felt initially by the ‘consensus’ forces arrayed against her, did spot these things; felt in her bones the frustrations of ‘ordinary conservative-minded people’ with whose ‘instincts and aspirations’ the main body of the Conservative Party had lost touch over the past twenty years or so; partly, of course, because she shared them, as the likes of Prior and Edward Heath could not. Here her narrow, provincial background and upbringing probably gave her an advantage: the blinkered can often see things clearly that broader-visioned people miss. She also saw the imminent ebbing of the socialist tide earlier than most of her colleagues, who even in the late 1970s were going along with the conventional wisdom of the time, that the inexorable ‘march of history’ was a social-democratic one that had to be appeased if it was not to overwhelm them entirely, while she – almost alone among prominent world politicians – was preaching that ‘The tide is beginning to turn against collectivism, socialism, statism, dirigisme, whatever you call it’, and that socialism would soon

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be seen to have ‘failed’. That was in 1977. Such beliefs gave her confidence, and consequently fed her ‘determination’. That there was a general trend of reaction against socialism in the 1970s, not just in Britain but elsewhere in the world, and quite irrespective of any input Thatcher might have contributed to it, seems pretty clear today. The alternative, of course, is that she was responsible for this reaction: took world history by the scruff of its neck, turned it around and set it marching in the opposite direction from the one she found it facing; which the tone of that interview in Newsweek suggests may have been her own view of her achievement in her more megalomaniac moments, and was certainly the view of some of her dottier followers (like the late eccentric tartan-betrousered MP Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, for example, who once credited her with single-handedly destroying the Soviet Union, no less), but which it rather goes against the grain for an academic historian – used to finding deeper and more complex explanations than the exploits of a single heroic woman for the great events of history – to accept. Besides, it also clashes with Margaret Thatcher’s own more considered view (or, if you like, the view of her speechwriters and ‘memoirs team’). She was aware, as we have just seen, that she was riding a tide. She also believed that that tide was the natural one, certainly for Britain, which socialism was not. 1945, she writes in her memoirs, ‘represented a wrong turning from the country’s destined path’. It ‘distorted’ British society. It was ‘at odds with the character of the people’. It was ‘imposed’ on them, by socialist politicians, the metropolitan media and (here we have it again) those clever-clever people at the universities. It was always, in other words, an incubus on Britain, ill-fitting, uncomfortable; and consequently – one could surely infer from this – not all that difficult to shed. By 1979, as Thatcher claims in her Memoirs, before she came into office, socialism had already ‘collapsed’ of its own accord, in the notorious ‘winter of discontent’ of the beginning of that year. Thereafter, whatever her difficulties, she was at least cutting with the grain. All this helps to place her in history, as the agent of a revolution which was going to happen in any case, which to a great extent accounts for her success, such as it was, because she went along with it, rather than trying to halt or modify it, as others would have preferred. Of course there were difficulties; though one suspects that a great deal of Thatcher’s constant talk of struggle, of walking up down escalators, as she once described it in a TV interview – ‘ihr Kampf ’, if you will – was self-serving myth-making, whose whole purpose, whether conscious or not, was to enhance her image as hero.

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On the other hand certain things were not easy for her. Like a dying man, a doomed ideology can exert a terrible grip. For Thatcher, that grip also had a sinister aspect. The Russians were behind it. She was sure of it. It was they who were pulling the strings behind the scenes, from Arthur Scargill, the leader of the coal miners’ union who waged a famous losing battle with her in 1984; through CND, the anti-nuclear weapons protest group, and (it went without saying) the anti-apartheid movement; to most university academics, whom they had subtly suborned. She was dealing, that is, not only with open opposition, but with a conspiracy; and one that was rendered all the more dangerous by the fact that so few people – even her allies – were willing to take it seriously. This belief in conspiracy was yet another thing that was characteristic of Thatcher. One source of it may have been some of the books she gleaned her knowledge of recent world history from in her early years, in lieu of the proper history books that Miss Harding, no doubt, would have been pleased to recommend to her if she had persisted with the subject at school. These are listed in her memoirs; they include, for example, Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night and Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy, both of which present communism as a form of evil plot. A little later on, she wrote, she had her views on the French Revolution ‘gloriously confirmed by Leslie Howard and lovely Merle Oberon in The Scarlet Pimpernel’. (Apparently Ronald Reagan’s political education was very similar.) Later still she will have seen practical corroboration of her belief in conspiracies in the way the political and intellectual establishment colluded to frustrate the popular will during the years of ‘collectivism’ in Britain; and possibly against her personally, as an aspiring politician who was also a woman. Her suspicion of the Russians in particular, and of their involvement in British left-wing politics, was bolstered by Brian Crozier, an indefatigable ‘free agent’ against the forces of evil, as he described himself in his autobiography, Free Agent (subtitle: The Unseen War 1941–1991), and who claimed he was very close to her in her early days at No.10. It would not be at all surprising if Thatcher swallowed whole all the nonsense that was going around at that time – confided by Soviet defectors overeager to please their new masters – about the Labour leader Michael Foot, for example, being a secret agent of the KGB. That was the way her mind worked. She was probably the most paranoid of all Britain’s prime ministers after Harold Wilson. Which has an obvious bearing on her own view of her place in history; and may also have implications for our view of it. In her mind, of course, it makes her more heroic still. Slaying dragons is one thing; slaying invisible dragons requires quite a different order of heroism. You also need special weapons. Overt dangers can be combated openly: in this

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context by persuading the democracy, for example; hidden enemies, however, may not be quite so vulnerable to that. Brian Crozier’s autobiography has a passage on this. The ‘consensual view’ of politics, he writes, ‘is that a pluralistic democracy is by its nature self-correcting, so that there is no need to take any special action’ against political threats from outside. That might have been true in normal times. But the situation in the 1970s and 80s was ‘abnormal’. The ‘selfcorrecting mechanisms of free elections could no longer be assumed to work. Therefore... more positive action was needed.’ For example: few voters realized – as he did – that a Labour election victory would merely be the prelude to a communist putsch (under the new Labour leader Michael Foot, presumably); so some means had to be found to frustrate the electorate’s will on this, in (of course) its better interests. That justified their ‘using the enemy’s own methods’ against Labour; in other words, counter-conspiracy, in order to ensure that the original conspiracy did not succeed. This, it should be stressed, is Margaret Thatcher’s adviser speaking, and not Thatcher herself. We have no means of knowing at present whether she went along with Crozier’s analysis to this extent. (She would scarcely want to admit in her memoirs to such a conventionally outrageous view if she did share it.) If so, however, it must affect not only her assessment of her own achievement, but also the neutral academic observer’s. It opens up the possibility that she was less of a passive, more of a secretly active, agent of change. She achieved what she did riding a trend, perhaps, but a trend which the democracy, subverted from without, might still have resisted, had she not resorted (on the advice of Crozier and others) to anti-democratic trickery. In that case, her ‘place in history’ needs to be substantially reconsidered yet again. There are circumstantial signs pointing in this direction. Margaret Thatcher was certainly no democrat, in the usual meaning of the word; she believed in individual economic freedom within the market place, but would not respect the right of majorities to resist that freedom in particular circumstances, perhaps in the interests of another kind of freedom, however democratic those majorities might be. Hence her contrasting stances towards apartheid South Africa and communist Russia, only in one of which were people deprived of choice as customers, and consequently were truly tyrannized. She was also a believer in a ‘strong state’ (unlike, incidentally, the nineteenth-century British liberals she claimed were her ideological ancestors), and consequently prepared to use state agencies in defence of her beliefs. Her Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, claims she was ‘positively besotted’ by her security services, which were the agencies she would look to first if she was planning clandestine measures against her enemies. We have horse’s-mouth evidence – not all of it reliable, because secret agents are

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intrinsically untrustworthy, even when they become whistleblowers, and some have had grievances – that she did use such measures against, for example, the National Union of Mineworkers and CND. Going back a little way, the last prime minister but one before Thatcher, a Labour one (Harold Wilson), was deliberately and effectively demoralized, and may have been forced to leave office in 1976, by plots involving right-wingers in MI5. Some versions of that conspiracy theory see Heath’s fall and Thatcher’s succession to the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1975 as part and parcel of the same process, by which shady figures in the background engineered the party’s lurch to the Right. (It is supposed to be significant, for example, that Thatcher’s main campaign manager on that occasion was Airey Neave, who was closely connected with British intelligence and a deep-dyed conspirator.) So far, however, none of this is enough to prove decisively what would seem to be the implication of it: that Thatcher’s contribution to British history was to shift the course of it through covert methods, rather than (say) sheer determination, or an eye for new trends. The other problem with this, of course, is that – just like the other ‘heroic’ version of historical causation she seemed to embrace in her Newsweek interview – this explanation puts rather more weight on the ability of small groups of individuals to influence great events than most academic historians feel comfortable with, including myself; though that, of course, is no reason to reject it utterly. Personally (for what it is worth), I prefer the version which sees Thatcher coming at just the right time in British politics – the very eve of the final ‘end of history’ (to use Francis Fukuyama’s famous phrase) – to exploit the reaction when it came. That accords with one of the scenarios we have seen she herself painted; although in accepting it – if we wish to – we do not need to go along with all the implications she read into it. For example, Thatcher saw individualism and the free market as the natural British way of life, which ‘collectivism’ had artificially smothered; hence her claim (in the Newsweek interview) to have ‘reclaimed our [British] heritage’. This, incidentally, is the notion that enables the present British political Right to link free marketism with nationalism, or chauvinism if you like, in a way that would have seemed perverse to Victorian champions of the free market, who claimed of course to be internationalists, but which now brings enormous electoral benefits among your average British xenophobe. It is a heady mixture: seen typically, for example, in British free marketist Europhobes’ attacks on ‘Brussels bureaucracy’. Most academic historians might not go along with that: with the idea, that is, that free marketism is a peculiarly British racial characteristic. It seems to me to be much more a class thing. The values Thatcher wanted Britain

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to return to were not British values particularly, but capitalist middle class values; which she took to be British because – in Grantham during her childhood – they were the only ones she knew. This was one of the problems historians pointed out with her list of ‘Victorian’ values: that it was selective, and omitted, for example, the more social ones that were just as much a part of the British scene at that time. (And Thatcher doesn’t seem to have noticed the early Victorian liberals’ belief – Samuel Laing’s, for example: supra – that the free market would inevitably lead to greater equality; or the great John Stuart Mill’s rather startling declaration that if it turned out not to, he would become a ‘socialist’.) There are signs that Thatcher was perfectly aware of this weakness. Her ‘Victorian values’, for example, started off as what she called ‘middle-class values’ (in 1975), and were only translated into ‘Victorian’ ones when a television interviewer – Brian Walden – suggested this might be a better name for them. Throughout her memoirs she makes no attempt to disguise her partiality towards the middle classes, in preference to the dirty workers and depraved grandees. Almost before anything else Margaret Thatcher was a class warrior; and her true role was to be there when her class needed her, to march at the head of it, to liberate the city from its divided and demoralized captors of thirty-five years. She also, I believe – perhaps more controversially – had another role. This is one she certainly would not want to acknowledge, even in her sanest and most reasonable moments. She helped save Britain for capitalism; but for what kind of capitalism, and from exactly what? To take the second question first: it was surely not from full-blown socialism, which Britain never espoused in the years after 1945, being perfectly content all that time – and for the foreseeable future – with a very half-baked version of it: a mixed economy, with a welfare state to ensure some kind of social justice under it, and hence – this was its express purpose, in the minds of its architects – to preserve Britain from the dangerous excesses of both uncontrolled capitalism, and socialism of a more totalitarian (communist) kind. Thatcher believed this would inevitably lead to communism; but that was the view neither of its aficionados, nor of the communists themselves, most of whom opposed it, as a sop that would merely delay the revolution to genuine socialism by smoothing out the irritations which a fuller-blooded capitalist system inevitably caused. It was also, in the view of the communists, quite incongruous. To repeat a point made in the last chapter: according to Marx, capitalism was not supposed to be able to develop in this way. As it went on – became more competitive, red in tooth and claw – conditions must get progressively worse for the mass of people under it, not better; with depressions becoming more frequent, ownership narrowing into monopolies, wages cut to

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save labour costs, unemployment rising, social tensions increasing, and governments turning to repression to contain the effects of all this. I remember how smug we non-communist Labour supporters used to be in the 1960s, believing we had disproved the Marxian analysis with our much more socially responsible form of capitalism in Britain, which really had brought ‘history’ to an ‘end’. Now, of course, it appears that we were wrong. The mixed economy too has its internal contradictions. In the years since 1979 it has been swept away, and replaced by exactly what Marx predicted for the later stages of capitalist civilization: frequent depressions, monopoly, wage cuts, rising unemployment, social tensions, the ‘strong state’ to cope with all this... And who spearheaded this transformation? Margaret Thatcher: the self-proclaimed foe of Marxism, but, in truth, its vindication in so many ways. Which makes one wonder... If the KGB were really clever, and wished to return Britain to the true path of communism, who would be its likeliest candidate among rising British politicians to suborn as an agent for this purpose? Michael Foot, or Margaret Thatcher? Do we know everything that happened to her when she paid her first visit to Moscow in 1969? Can every hour of her time there be accounted for? I think we should be told. But I do not want to make too much of this. Indeed, I don’t want to make anything of it at all. I feel I need to make this clear; when I first floated the suggestion, in a book I published in 1989, not every reviewer noticed – what I thought was obvious – the tongue firmly placed in my cheek at the time. Of course Thatcher was not a KGB mole. (The KGB probably weren’t clever enough.) She was a genuinely dedicated agent of the English middle classes and the reviving free market system. She was also, however, as we have seen, a very narrow-minded, unthinking, anti-intellectual, instinctive champion of them. Which means that it will not have occurred to her – as it does to us cleverer (!) people – that following her instincts might have a very different outcome from the one she desired and assumed. We are still, however, left with the problem of deciding how much Thatcher personally was responsible for any of this, and how much of it was simply her riding the wave. Thatcher offers her own solution to this, in some lines of what she said was her favourite poem (this was to demonstrate that she wasn’t the philistine she was often accused of being), reproduced near the beginning of the second volume of her memoirs. It is by Ella Wheeler Wilcox; and while it may not get us much nearer a satisfactory resolution of our problem, or particularly impress us with Thatcher’s literary taste, it is worth quoting as an illustration of the rather banal quality of her thinking on these issues. It runs like this:

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One ship drives East and another drives West, By the self-same gale that blows; ’Tis the set of the sail, and not the gale, That determines the way she goes.

In her case, some of us might be inclined to give more credit to the gale.

Notes 1 The original version of this chapter was my Inaugural Lecture (as a professor) at Newcastle University. A version that includes references is published in Twentieth Century British History, vol.5 no.2, 1994.

Part Six

What Now?

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Secrets and Lies

How much of this is true?1 This is a question that should always be in the back of the mind of any reader of any history book. Written texts are not gospel. (Even the Gospels, in my view, are not gospel.) All kinds of factors can distort them. The author might be telling lies. (I’m not; but you only have my word for it.) More likely, he or she might be prejudiced, leading her or him to favour certain kinds of evidence and explanations above others. (That’s more likely in my case.) Or s/he might be being misled, on purpose or otherwise, by his or her evidence. Lastly, there’s the philosophical problem, of what really is ‘truth’? It is certainly highly complex. We shan’t be discussing that here – too deep. But readers should always be aware of the other possibilities, and be constantly sceptical of everything they read, including in this book; without, I hope, becoming totally cynical. Some of the political discourse of very recent years appears to be deliberately guiding people in this latter direction – ‘you can’t believe anything you read these days’, ‘they’re all liars’, it’s all ‘fake news’ – possibly with a view to making voters so uncertain of any ‘facts’ and the authorities who pronounce them – ‘we’ve had enough of experts’ (Michael Gove, MP, dismissing the prognostications of professional economists about the effects of Brexit) – as to justify their falling back on their own prejudices, which can then be easily manipulated for political ends. This chapter will not be about that, but about evidence of Britain’s history that we now know to have been consciously hidden or distorted at source. There has been a lot of that, leaving important lacunae in our knowledge of our (British) past, and encouraging a number of historical myths that may well have a greater hold on people than the truth. Myths have their uses. One of the latent functions of the American Republic’s founding myth, for example, is to comfort and reassure. Wouldn’t Americans be just slightly discombobulated if they believed that, rather than their Revolution’s having been a war of independence from colonial tyranny, it was essentially a rebellion to enable white Americans to tyrannize others – Native Americans, black slaves, the industrial proletariat? (A 183

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good case can be made out for the first of these.) Most national ‘histories’ are like that. Britain’s is no exception. * In its case, one of its ‘national myths’ is the one that Prime Minister David Cameron expressed in September 2014, on his way to planning renewed military action against ISIS in Syria: that ‘we’ (that is, the British) ‘are a peaceful people’. That was while he was planning renewed military action against ISIS in Syria. Anyone subscribing to this belief should read Ian Cobain’s The History Thieves: . Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation (2016), which forensically lists the wars that ‘we’ have been involved in since 1945: one a year at least, most of them through choice. (His first book, Cruel Britannia (2013), was about Britain’s secret involvement in torture, similarly officially denied.) ‘The British’, Cobain writes, ‘are unique in this respect. . . Only the British are perpetually at war.’ That should shake up most people’s views of their recent history, including, probably, Cameron’s. (That’s assuming he believed what he said.) If any more evidence is needed it can be found in T.J. Coles’s Britain’s Secret Wars: How and Why the United Kingdom Sponsors Conflict around the World (2016), which goes further than Cobain in attributing these wars and their accompanying atrocities to capitalist-imperialist greed. That’s the ‘Why’ part of the subtitle, and may seem too conspiratorial for some. But the facts alone are telling. They are not however Cobain’s main point. His emphasis is on the way in which most of this, and a lot else that is rather nasty, has been deliberately hidden from the British people, in order to buttress their ‘peace-loving’ and other comfortable liberal myths. Hence his title, The History Thieves; who are, of course, governments and government agencies, and to a lesser extent the British press and Parliament, who have connived in it. One example is the way the messy business of dismantling Britain’s Empire was deliberately sanitized for posterity by destroying and hiding the historical record. Historians of decolonization were often frustrated by gaps in the written evidence; now we know what happened to a lot of it. Stuff that wasn’t burned, but was thought to be too sensitive to let anyone know about, even, was spirited away; not to the Public Record Office (now the National Archives), the usual repository of government papers, which we all knew about, but to a seventeenthcentury country house in Buckinghamshire called Hanslope Park, once the scene of a famous murder – the squire shot by his gamekeeper in 1912 – but since 1941 the property of the government, and now a secret annex of GCHQ. I had no idea of that when I came to work on imperial history. It was only revealed when a couple of historians, David Anderson and Caroline Elkins, together with

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lawyers working on behalf of some of the victims of the Kenya ‘Emergency’ of the 1950s, began digging into that most ghastly of colonial events; the lawyers armed with court orders compelling the Government to reveal all relevant papers. (Historians don’t have that sort of pull.) It was found that Hanslope was housing many of them, together with thousands of incriminating documents covering the whole period after World War II. Most of them haven’t been scrutinized and released yet, with the authorities still dragging their feet. The excuses offered are that people’s lives may be placed in danger, or delicate diplomatic negotiations compromised. But the true reason is given away by the name that departing British colonial governments gave to these papers, which was the ‘Legacy Files’. Britain was concerned for its national reputation after it pulled out. It wanted to give the impression that its decolonization, by contrast with other European colonial powers’, had been peaceful, civilized, and voluntary on its part – a gift, in other words; reflecting a uniquely beneficent imperialism that had always been directed to this end. It was the old Empire’s final legacy to us, its inheritors, making us feel better about our national past. If that is not a deliberate ‘theft’ of history, I don’t know what is. This was deeply unsettling for historians, although thankfully most of us, professional sceptics that we are, had allowed for the possibility that important facts might be being kept from us. Personally I never trusted the authorities since they led me a merry dance some years ago over some Metropolitan Police papers I was seeking in connexion with my research into the very early Special Branch, which they eventually claimed had been destroyed by a bomb in World War II, obviously in order to get rid of me; only for the file to turn up years later when a serving Special Branch officer asked for it in connexion with a PhD thesis he was writing on the same topic. I also had my phone tapped over this (very crudely, which was how I could tell), so adding to my mistrust. It was obvious from corresponding and talking with Home Office officials that they had absolutely no concept of ‘openness’, or of any duty the State might have to reveal its secrets, even those, like the ones I was interested in, that were more than 100 years old. Documents performed functions, and when those functions no longer had a practical purpose they had better be destroyed. That is why legal papers were often not, but were preserved in case anyone wanted to re-open a case in the future on the basis of them. (It’s why the richest documentary source that has survived from the Middle Ages is deeds and wills.) They had no sense of history, these people. I truly believe that this was one of the main reasons they were so obstructive; that, and the time they told me it would take to vet old files in case they contained anything practical. Junior civil servants had better things to do. It

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may not have been nefarious. Though obviously it was, when one set of previously ‘open’ legal opinions was suddenly withdrawn from the National Archive in 1982. They related to Britain’s title – or not – over the Falkland Islands (Malvinas), over which war had just broken out. That was part of the ongoing plot. Most of these deceptions related to Britain’s treatment of its foreign subjects, enemies and allies. But they did not stop there. The bulk of Cobain’s book deals with the secrecy that has always surrounded Britain’s secret intelligence services: justifiably, one might think, and indeed obviously, but to an extent that far outruns any possible argument from ‘national interest’, or even privacy, however far the authorities tried to stretch those – perfectly reasonable – concerns. This is a fairly familiar story to us professional historians – viz my experience with the Met – but may not be known more generally. In the nineteenth century, secrecy was maintained informally by a code of honour amongst those who dealt with state secrets, who nearly always came from the same – upper-middle, publicschool-educated – classes. Even then governments could have problems with Members of Parliament, who weren’t always upper-middles, and whose constitutional right to demand sight of diplomatic and other despatches was cunningly circumvented in the 1840s by instructing ministers to send private letters along with the official despatches, which filled in any gaps, but weren’t ‘official’, and so weren’t even known about by MPs. Today, if they still survive, historians have to hunt for these papers in private collections, not in the National Archives. As the sheer amount of government paperwork increased towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the pool of dependable toffs diminishing relative to the new demand for people to process it, lower-class clerks had to be engaged, without the same inbred sense of honour, it was believed, and usually at poor pay, which could encourage them to sell secrets: to newspapers, for example, or even foreign powers. That provoked the first Official Secrets Act in 1889, outlawing the unauthorized disclosure of government papers. It must have been sad for the upper-middles that they could no longer rely on the decency of chaps: a bit like having to provide referees for football matches when the proles took to the game. A Corinthian could be trusted to own up when he committed a foul. Now they needed to be policed. The 1889 Act was followed by others in 1911, 1920, 1939 and 1989, all of them strengthening the previous ones in one way or another, although the 1989 Act also made it less ridiculous (a ‘secret’ had to be an important one, not just an order for paper clips); usually with MPs being deliberately misled about their motives and extent. The 1911 bill was rushed through the Commons – all its readings – in just an hour, in the eye of a

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diplomatic storm. There was ‘nothing novel’ in it, claimed the Attorney-General, which was a blatant lie. As well as the Official Secrets Acts, governments also had their notorious ‘D-Notice’ system, by which they persuaded newspaper proprietors – usually chums of theirs – to cover things up. That worked pretty well, from the authorities’ point of view, and was still apparently operating quite recently, in the ‘Skripal poisoning’ case. (The ex-double agent Sergei Skripal was poisoned in Salisbury by a nerve agent that the government claimed to be planted by the Russians – they denied it – but then a D-Notice was apparently slapped on, preventing the press’s reporting later developments.) Both these measures were flouted occasionally, but in most cases the flouters were dealt with severely; until a couple of occasions during the ultra-secretive Thatcher years, when juries of good and disloyal Britons threw out the more oppressive cases against ‘whistle-blowers’. (Thank God, or rather our Anglo-Saxon forebears, for juries.) The most famous acquittal was Clive Ponting’s, against the judge’s directions, for revealing government duplicity over the movements of the Argentinian battleship Belgrano in the Falklands War. Another dent in Britain’s official secrecy came when Peter Wright’s unauthorized memoir Spycatcher (1987) made some embarrassing revelations about his time in MI5. (But what more could you expect of a grammar school oik?) That laid the Secret Services open to ridicule, which was another reason to cover them up. But it wasn’t only their incompetencies, which were many, that the secret services feared being revealed. For several years, it was their very existence. This is another aspect of their history that Britons have been routinely lied about. The Metropolitan Police Special Branch was kept secret at the beginning, because Britons liked to believe that ‘political’ policing was a thing that only foreigners did. MI5 and MI6 were kept officially hidden until the late 1980s. That meant that questions could not be asked about them in Parliament. This was not in order to stop the Russians or the IRA from knowing about them – they already did – but people at home. The reason for this was to sustain another British historical ‘myth’: that Britain was above such ‘Continental’ practices as spying on people; certainly its own people, and in peacetime. It derived from old-fashioned values like (again) ‘honour’, on the upper-class side, and ‘solidarity’, among the working classes: the idea that betraying the trust of the people you moved intimately amongst was the ultimate social sin. Even a policeman hiding behind a tree to observe a crime was not allowed. (One was cashiered for this in 1852.) This was an essential part of Britons’ national self-identity in the nineteenth century, and for some time into the twentieth. It can’t be any longer, of course, in what may well be the most surveilled country in Europe – police spies, CCTV

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cameras, hacking, GCHQ, Amazon passing on your literary preferences to all and sundry, Cambridge Analytica – which may be the reason why people have forgotten this vital ‘Victorian value’ now. Earlier, however, it was a major reason for keeping all these activities under wraps. Again, it served to bolster a myth. * This had its downside from a liberal point of view, because unacknowledged agencies couldn’t, of course, be held to account. Another disadvantage was that it furnished a fertile soil for ‘conspiracy theories’ to sprout. MI5 and MI6 weren’t supposed to exist, but there were always rumours flying around. It was to counter these, I guess, that the government first formally acknowledged the existence and then commissioned a series of official histories of the intelligence services, by academic historians they felt they could trust. (I’m quite proud of the fact that I wasn’t one of them.) These were subject to vetting, which meant that we had to rely on the assurances of their authors that nothing important was left out. Even the ‘trusties’ occasionally baulked at this. The Preface to Christopher Andrew’s volume on MI5, for example, complains of one particular bit of censorship which Andrew believes is ‘hard to justify’. We don’t know what it was, exactly, but it comes in the chapter on the ‘Wilson Plot’ – the alleged Secret Service plot to get rid of Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the early 70s – of which more later. But we can never know for sure, until the blanket of secrecy is lifted from this, and from so many of the crucial events of the fairly recent past. Until then the conspiracy theorists will thrive, and the more sensible sceptics amongst us will never be quite satisfied. Plus: distrust may run so deep as to poison our view of British history more generally. Scepticism can slide into cynicism. Personally, I don’t think that the British Empire was always as awful as it was in Kenya in the 1950s. But after all these damaging revelations, and with so much more still hidden, it’s difficult to persuade anyone – even oneself – of this. Richard Crossman once described secrecy – rather than strikes, or homosexuality, the usual candidates up until then – as ‘the British disease’. Cobain claims that it’s more prevalent in Britain than in any other democratic country. He gives numerous examples of this over the past century: the continued ban on those ingenious and heroic Bletchley Park boys and girls revealing anything of their code-breaking work there for thirty years after the end of the War; espionage trials held in secret, or with crucial evidence kept back; the activities and the scope of the activities of GCHQ, and its secret collusion with the (American) NSA; the names of the heads of all these intelligence agencies; all those late- and post-colonial wars Britain was involved in, behind the scenes; and the fact – and this may be the most ludicrous

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example – that Jonathan Evans, who rose to be Director General of MI5, was not told that he was working for them until he had been there a few days. I can believe that; MI6 once attempted to recruit me without letting on who they were (see below). All this obfuscation is bound to affect the histories of these times that are written in years to come. Unless we can reveal the secrets of the 1950s-onwards pretty smartish, before the record is completely destroyed. This is partly what all the parliamentary and judicial enquiries we have seen recently into some of the most dreadful things that happened during that period can do for us – ensure that our history isn’t stolen from us; even though that might not be their immediate purpose. (Reparations for victims are more in the inquisitors’ minds.) Future historians will know more about the Iraq War, the Falklands war, the Miners’ Strike (but not apparently at Orgreave), policing, the British press, historical paedophile abuse by politicians, Black Friday, and dozens of other contemporary issues that will soon become historical ones, because of these inquiries, than they would have done otherwise. Cobain’s book, together with a number of other recent ones, will help the process immeasurably. My guess is that if all this evidence were put together it would require a substantial, if not wholesale, revision of the generally-accepted liberal narrative of recent British history. Perhaps a younger historian than I am could make a start on this now. If, that is, anyone is really interested. Secrecy does not seem to be a very vital issue in Britain – and possibly America – just now. Assange and Snowden, for example, are not great popular causes there. It may be the ‘post-Truth’ culture we are in. No one cares. Deception is expected, and shrugged away. In Halle a few years ago, I witnessed large demonstrations in support of the whistle-blower Edward Snowden, pressing the German government to grant him asylum; I’ve never witnessed anything like that in Britain, where there appears to be general apathy. But then, of course, Halle – once in the old DDR – has been subject to two highly oppressive secret police forces in modern times. We have not. So trust us, says William Hague, referring to Snowden’s revelations of mass electronic surveillance; ‘if you are a law-abiding citizen of this country going about your business and your personal life you have nothing to fear about the British state or the intelligence services listening to your phone calls or anything like that.’ Well, that’s reassuring, isn’t it? Hague seems a friendly little chap. But would you trust Theresa May, the authoress of Britain’s proposed ‘Snoopers’ Charter’ when she was Home Secretary, and later (briefly) Prime Minister – quite so much? Or, if you were an American before he got ousted, Donald Trump? I rest my case. And – reverting to history – must it not be a good thing to have a true, or true-ish, understanding of that in order to help you understand it, rather than

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your comfortable old myths? Remember what Winston Smith’s job was in George Orwell’s 1984: rewriting old newspaper articles to bring them in line with Big Brother’s version of the past. Cobain’s charge is not quite as serious as that; but it could be that what British governments have been doing recently – for example, with those files in Hanslope Park – is on much the same lines. ‘Theft’ is a good word for it. Remember this, when you are reading anyone’s writings on modern Britain; including my own. As well as our own biases and misunderstandings, you should allow for the possibility, at least, of government obfuscations and lies. * One problem with highlighting these things, however, is the danger of being tarred as a ‘conspiracy theorist’, which is almost fatal for an academic historian. First, the phrase implies a certain degree of nuttiness, through its association with a number of truly nutty people: Holocaust deniers, moon landing deniers, 9/11 sceptics, the royal family-as-shape-shifting-alien-reptiles nutters, global Jewish or Illuminati or British imperial or ‘Red’ or Masonic or capitalist conspiracy believers – none of whose crazy ideas any respectable scholar would want to be even slightly tarred with; but which are difficult to avoid if he or she suggests even a suspicion of a ‘plot’ behind any public event. No one wants to be associated with David Icke or David Irving. So we keep our niggling suspicions – in the interests of true scepticism, we shouldn’t dismiss the nutty ideas out of hand – to ourselves. A second consideration is that most historians like to believe that history has rational and deeper causes, rather than accidental ones, like a lottery, in which tiny groups of people (or aliens) can interfere with and divert the ‘natural’ course of things. Serious events, especially, deserve serious causes, which we – serious historians – can discover through diligent research. On the other hand, there can be no denying there are such things as conspiracies, in the sense implied by the word’s etymology. According to that etymology conspiracies need to be secret (‘spirare’, or breathed), and done by groups of people (the ‘con’). So, you can’t ‘conspire’ in the open, or on your own. It should be obvious with just a little thought that a great deal of this goes on all the time, in every walk of life, including politics. It went on in the past, too. It may not explain everything, as the hard-core conspiracy theorists would have us believe.2 But it undoubtedly holds some place in the history of the last 200 years, making a difference at certain points. And as it happens the British were particularly good at it. Hence MI5. MI5 is of course the domestic branch of the modern British secret services, dealing with foreign espionage in Britain and (formerly) the

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colonies and subversive threats at home. (MI6 sends spies abroad. The two agencies are often confused.) It was formed around 1909, but under cover of darkness, with no one outside a favoured governmental and military elite supposed to know. The reason was that in view of the supposed ‘un-Englishness’ of espionage knowledge of it would have been embarrassing; although Christopher Andrew, in his magisterial The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 (2009), has another explanation. It was just a ‘taboo’, he writes (quoting Sir Michael Howard), ‘like intra-marital sex’. Everyone knew it went on, and was ‘quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions about it’ was ‘regarded as extremely bad form’. But that was not so, certainly at the start, and in connection with MI5 in particular. Not everyone knew about it, or was ‘content’. They certainly did not know when MI5 extended its remit from counter-espionage to counter-‘subversion’ during and after the First World War. Those few who did were anxious to keep it from the majority not out of modesty, or ‘good form’, but in case it provoked an outcry. This is important, because it explains a great deal both about the way MI5 behaved and developed in its early years, and about how the wider public regarded it when they came to suspect it existed, as of course they eventually did. For a start, it influenced who staffed MI5. Clearly they could not be people who had these ‘English’ views of what was proper and decent. Luckily there were groups around that did not. Ireland and the Empire furnished many of them: two parts of ‘Greater Britain’ which did not share the liberal – naïve, if you like – public values of the metropole, in particular in the way they were policed. The early London Metropolitan Police Special Branch, which took most of the responsibility for counter-subversion before MI5 muscled in on it, relied heavily on both – India for its officers, Ireland for its other ranks; and similarly MI5, which was mainly officers, relied on the colonies to a huge extent. Andrew cites a figure of 65 per cent for the proportion of MI5 officers recruited directly from ‘the administrative services of newly independent colonies’ between 1955 and 1965; take that back to the beginning, and include the colonial police and military, and you probably come close to 100 per cent. Obviously this only lasted as long as the Empire did. The last Director General with, at any rate, post-colonial experience was Stella Rimington, who was originally talent-spotted in (independent) India, where her husband worked at the British High Commission. When this source dried up, it caused recruitment problems for MI5. While it still operated, however, its significance for the values of the Service is hinted at in the following exchange between a mature applicant and his MI5 Selection Board in 1981. ‘Have you any objection to reading other people’s mail?’ the latter asked him – suggesting that

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the old English prejudice was still alive in some quarters even then. ‘What did the Board think I had been doing for the past 20 odd years!’ he responded. That 20-odd years had been spent in the colonies. (The year, 1981, suggests his last posting could have been Rhodesia.) As well as being more relaxed about reading other people’s letters these people seem – from examples quoted here – to have been racist, anti-Semitic, sexist and homophobic (ostensibly) to a degree unusual even for their time, though perhaps not for their class. They also tended to be cheery, by most accounts, and fond of outdoor sports. It was largely because of the perceived domestic unpopularity of MI5’s work outside that class that it was still kept so very secret in its first eighty years. Towards the end of the First World War, a plan was put forward by a number of Secret Service heads to finance peacetime intelligence-gathering through a secret War Loan investment that would make it independent of any popular – that is, Labour – government it was feared might be elected in the future. Whether it ever came to anything Andrew doesn’t directly say. (Probably not.) In the meantime, to preserve confidentiality and esprit de corps, MI5 only recruited on the basis of personal recommendation, and consequently from its own class and type. This applied even to the female registry clerks, who as a result were far more ‘debby’ than clerks anywhere else. In the mid-1960s, when Labour MPs started complaining of this, the Secret Services made some effort to broaden their pattern of recruitment. I know, because I was targeted then. A grammarschool oik, with no imperial connections, but hopefully tamed and smoothed by my Cambridge experience, I was ‘talent-spotted’ by one of my college dons, and sent to be interviewed by a Rosa Kleb-like figure in a decaying Carlton House Terrace apartment. She asked me my politics; I said ‘Labour’. ‘Not a communist?’ ‘No.’ ‘Oh well, that’s all right then.’ So I passed that interview, and was scheduled for a second sometime later; but then withdrew when my postgraduate research grant came through. The extraordinary thing about this event, however, is that I had no idea at the time that I was being recruited for one of the Secret Services, until many years later: when I started working in this historical field; the don died and his obituary for the first time publicly revealed his work for MI5 in the Second World War; and I raised my new suspicion with Christopher Andrew. ‘Where was the interview?’ he asked. I told him. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘that was MI6’ (or IRD: I forget which). I could have been unusually naïve – I’m sure the public-school recruits were more worldly-wise – but I wasn’t alone. According to Andrew’s new book, several new recruits to MI5 still didn’t know whom they were working for until several weeks after they started. Now that’s what I call secrecy.

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It had two further results. One was to give MI5 a very narrow social base, and the political culture that was almost bound to adhere to that. Andrew calls it ‘introverted’. There is strong evidence that it was pretty right-wing, and suspicious of the Labour Party in the early years: partly because Labour might want to clip its wings, but also because Labour policies were seen as either intrinsically subversive, or peculiarly subvertible (by Communists, of course). How deep and widespread these prejudices were in the Service, and how far up the hierarchy they reached, is difficult to tell without more evidence than Andrew provides; as difficult as it was in the 1920s and 1970s, two periods when rumours of MI5 ‘plots’ against Labour were particularly rife. Andrew dismisses these as ‘conspiracy theories’, which I think is unfair. And MI5 certainly didn’t downplay ‘conspiracy theories’, when they involved the other side(s): Germany during the war, for example, or the Soviet Union afterwards. In those cases its suspicions were usually reasonable, even if they turned out not to be true. That could have applied to its suspicions of members of the Labour Party, some of which were just credible, but not, for example, the one that made out that prime minister Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent (the same smear that was directed against Jeremy Corbyn later on). It was this kind of thing that gave rise to the ‘conspiracies’ that the secret services are supposed to have directed against Labour in the 1920s (the ‘Zinoviev Letter’) and the early 1970s (the ‘Wilson Plot’). No final verdict has been reached yet in either of those cases. (As it happens, I believe in a watered-down version of the second one. It was retired spooks; and they didn’t succeed. Wilson’s surprise resignation in 1976 was not their doing.) But in any event it is not beyond the realm of reason to suspect certain spooks or ex-spooks of plotting – effectively or otherwise – Harold Wilson’s fall. MI5 was bound to be a likely suspect: highly secretive, socially exclusive, largely unaccountable, right-wing, reputedly clever, and with all kinds of tricks, like ‘deniability’, and sub-contracting its dirtier jobs out to other agencies, up its sleeve. We now know it had a large file on Wilson, but using another name, so that any search for it would bring up ‘No Trace’. Bearing all this in mind, it’s surely a bit thick to label those who thought MI5 might have been involved in such ‘plots’ as members of the loony ‘conspiracy theory’ brigade. And of course we still can’t be absolutely certain that it wasn’t involved. It could have kicked over the traces. (That happens in history.) Or does this make me a ‘conspiracy theorist’, too? * One welcome result of MI5’s shenanigans, or suspected shenanigans, during the twentieth century was the commissioning of Andrew’s book. The agency

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realized that these had damaged its reputation. Andrew, it was hoped, would repair it, by giving an honest account of its achievements, which were undoubtedly a few, and hopefully pricking all those ‘conspiracy theories’ that surrounded it. That was MI5’s agenda. Andrew, their chosen historian, may have shared it to an extent (there can be little doubt of his genuine aversion to left-wing ‘conspiracy’ ideas); but he had another one too. This is spelled out in his final chapter, where he berates most academic historians for not taking more notice of the ‘intelligence’ aspects of their subject: he calls it history’s ‘missing dimension’; but also – and more to the point in this context – criticizes MI5 for its ignorance of its own history, and of the lessons that can to be drawn from that, especially from its past mistakes. There is obviously a tension here. The more mistakes Andrew can uncover, the more MI5 can learn from them, and the more important therefore it makes his (and my) discipline; but the less likely it is that his readers will trust the Service. The two prefatory chapters of his book, one by the author, the other by the then Director General of MI5, make clear how problematic this tension was. Jonathan Evans (the DG) spells out his ‘public interest’ case for suppressing a certain amount of material; Andrew tells us of the ‘vigour’ with which he contested many of these (and other departments’) proscriptions, at least one of which – relating to the ‘Wilson plot’ – he still finds ‘hard to justify’ by any criteria, and ought, he thinks, to be arbitrated on by the Intelligence and Security Committee (of MPs). In the meantime, of course, we are left wondering what on earth this suppressed evidence about the ‘Wilson plot’ might be. In fact there is quite a lot for us to wonder about, as well as at, in this book. Aware as we are of the constraints placed upon Andrew, though not apparently on his opinions, we’re almost bound to read it more critically – even the nonconspiracy theorists among us – than most history books. One problem is of course that we cannot check anything in it, most of its primary sources being simply listed as ‘Security Service Archives’, with no further reference or file number; which would make it difficult to follow them up even if any of us ordinary folk were allowed in. So we have to take these on trust. Historians don’t generally like doing this. Personally – but this is only a personal opinion – I’m prepared to do it in Andrew’s case, especially as he is often quite critical of the Service: of its obsession with Communist subversion, for example; of the indefensible scale of its ‘bugging’, which Andrew confirms, but only in those cases where knowledge of it is in the public domain anyway, which is disappointing, and may seem odd (surely the ‘whistleblowers’ didn’t reveal all); of the equivocal attitude, at best, of many of its officers towards Fascism in the

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1930s; of its myopia when it came to the subvertibility of its own class, like the ‘Cambridge Five’; and of its chronic lack of ‘strategic thinking’ – that is, about future threats. There is a tantalizing glimpse at one point of an MI5 ‘assist’ in Northern Ireland,‘whose details cannot be revealed’, but which ‘led to considerable soul-searching’ in the Service; ‘a gruesome business’, as it was later recalled to Andrew by the Director General at the time, ‘which kept him awake at nights.’ Other criticisms can easily be read between the book’s lines. Spotting these can be an interesting game. Sometimes a charge is made against MI5, and Andrew counters it vigorously: we presume in these cases on the basis of evidence he has seen, but we cannot. At other times, however, he simply quotes an official denial and stops there, leaving us to question why he hasn’t added his imprimatur. Beyond this, there are some obvious gaps. Andrew must be aware of the effect of all these silences, even if MI5 are not. (They don’t seem, on the evidence adduced here, to be a very subtle bunch.) The result anyway, at least in my view, is hardly to boost the historical reputation of MI5 at all. In the field of counter-espionage its achievement was uneven. One of its great early victories, celebrated over and over again in all the books, is supposed to have been its clever neutralization of the entire German spy network in Britain at the beginning of World War I by spotting all but one of its agents but delaying their arrest until the war started, when emergency measures could be put in place to prevent their replacement; but recent scholarship on this (by Nicholas Hiley, dismissed here by Andrew) suggests that this may have been an exaggeration on the part of MI5’s first Director. A more definite success – ‘spectacular’, Andrew calls it – was its ‘Double Cross’ system in World War II, or the ‘turning’ of German agents. That of course was when MI5 took in all those bright tweed-jacketed young dons, like my recruiter in the 60s, to help out the ex-colonial introverts. (They didn’t all go code-breaking and inventing the computer at Bletchley Park.) These mostly left after the war, however, leaving only the old guard behind. Thereafter MI5’s achievement was uneven – catching some spies, but missing a lot, including, of course, the notorious ‘Cambridge Five’ (or Six), and smearing several innocents. It was also hugely damaged in this department in the 1960s by suspicions, fuelled by a rogue defector, over the loyalties of its own Director General and his secondin-command, no less. Andrew counts MI5’s ‘Operation FOOT’ of 1971, when 105 Soviet agents were identified and then expelled en masse from Britain, making it a much ‘harder’ espionage target than it had been, as a great success; though what the practical gain from this was is hard to know. (OK: so our team beat theirs.) It should perhaps be mentioned in this regard that spies (pace the

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old English prejudice) are not necessarily a bad thing. They can reassure their employers. Paranoia is usually founded on lack of intelligence. So, on the counterespionage front, we can perhaps call it a draw. Counter-subversion was a much more problematical area. This is partly because ‘subversion’ itself is a slippery concept, depending – if we are to take it seriously – on a view of the political process that sees it as easily subvertible, by individuals (including foreigners) who are up to no good; depending, again, on how you want to define ‘good’. This is essentially, it seems to me, a ‘conspiracy theory’; and it could be thought to lie at the very heart of what MI5 does (or did) in its counter-subversive role. There may be something in it: I don’t want to knock the potential of ‘conspiracy’ in every circumstance. The problems are, however, that a concentration on ‘conspirators’ can blind one to the possibly greater importance of other factors (why is a group so easily ‘subverted?); and that, in MI5’s case, because of its social composition, it mainly concentrated on left-wing subversion, and may have over-egged that. Andrew reproduces what by now is a quite famous quote from Edward Heath on the ‘nonsense’ that MI5 people in his time could come out with. ‘If some of them were on a tube and saw someone reading the Daily Mirror, they would say, “Get after him, that is dangerous. We must find out where he bought it.” ’ Andrew finds that ‘surprising’, but Heath must have got the impression from somewhere. It is corroborated by others, including more recent – and enlightened – employees of MI5, quoted here. The results are likely to have been that the Service was less than effective against ‘subversive’ targets at other points of the political compass; over-effective against socialism, if you don’t regard that political doctrine as intrinsically ‘subversive’; but in general terms ineffective, because rather stupid: which was perhaps the best that could be hoped for. All this must I imagine be just a little exasperating for those who set this whole project – the ‘Authorized History’ – up in the first place. Convinced of MI5’s probity and contribution to Britain’s security over the past 100 years, chiefly because they hadn’t read their own history (except in sanitized in-house versions), they will have expected Andrew, with his great reputation, to back them up in this, at least in general terms; only to be presented in the end with what can be seen at best as a mixed assessment, and not – because of the restrictions placed on him – a necessarily convincing one. So it hasn’t done its job. Nor – arguably – has it done the job that Andrew conceived for it. Yes, there are lessons to be learned from MI5’s early history; the main one of which, however, is to be careful not to repeat most of that history, which should be seen as cautionary rather than exemplary. Andrew is critical of Sir

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David Petrie, ‘one of the Service’s most successful DGs’ (at the time of ‘Double Cross’), for claiming that ‘too much of a past that is now remote can help but little with useful lessons’, but Petrie may have been right in this case. (The key word is ‘useful’.) If MI5 needs to know its history, then it is only in order to turn its back on it. That may be what has been happening recently. We can only hope so. * Very unusually, and indeed surprisingly in a book of this kind, sponsored by a secret Government agency, The Defence of the Realm takes us up to the (then) present day. That of course creates its own problems – much less can be safely revealed about very recent and continuing operations; but it also gives the Security Service a chance to redeem itself, historically. There are signs here that it has indeed turned over a new leaf since the 1960s and 70s; ‘changed out of all recognition’, as Stella Rimington puts it. Three factors seem to have been responsible for this. The first was the greater openness that was forced on it, partly by European legal rulings, culminating in the Security Service Act of 1989, which first put MI5 on a statutory footing. The second was the shift of its focus from counter-espionage and counter-subversion to counter-terrorism, originating partly in the Irish Troubles of the 1970s, although it was some time before MI5 took over the ‘lead role’ in that area. The third was the gradual change that came over the character of its personnel, dating from roughly the same period, transforming it from the body of reactionary old soaks that Stella Rimington amusingly recalls from her own early days in the Service (in her memoir, Open Secret, published in 2001), to – well – presumably a more normal bunch of women and men. Counter-terrorism seems to have made MI5 broadly acceptable again, rather as the Second World War briefly did, with everyone now (as in that case) acknowledging the legitimacy and importance of its targeting, as they had not always done in the cases of ‘subversives’ and peacetime spies. Obviously it is too early as yet to be able to assess its achievement against Islamicist terrorism. Andrew’s interim judgment here is that it was very late on to it (lack of ‘strategic planning’, again), but then made up for lost time, with its successes so far having had ‘a chilling effect on the enthusiasm of the plotters’, so managing to contain the threat so far. On the vexed current question of the torture of suspected British Islamicist terrorists elsewhere (Binyam Mohamed, for example) he thinks MI5 should have made more effort to check it wasn’t happening, as the Service itself now acknowledges. He is on more solid ground, he thinks, in crediting it with helping to bring the Provisional IRA into the Northern Ireland peace

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process by foiling a number of its mainland British bomb plots in 1993; which is a terrific thing, if true. After the ‘war’ against the IRA we know – from the ‘Russia Report’ released in July 2020 – that MI5 and MI6 were slow in investigating accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum and the December 2019 general election: both to the advantage of the ‘Brexiters’. That may have been a serious failing, affecting British politics for years. More generally, Andrew is surely right to point out how intrinsically difficult it is to quantify – provide ‘performance indicators’ for, to use current jargon – the effectiveness of a body that is mainly designed to prevent things happening. On the matter of ‘subversion’, he argues plausibly that in more recent years it was government ministers – including Thatcher, but not only Conservatives – who were more paranoid than MI5 in this regard, and who took the initiative in urging it to hunt left-wing ‘subversion’ down, not vice versa; and that MI5 at least tried to resist this, if it thought it went against its ‘charter’, though not always successfully. ‘By the end of the Cold War’, writes Andrew, ‘the word “subversion” had become an embarrassment’. That marks quite a sea-change, and may be a reason why the security services fought shy of Vladimir Putin’s alleged ‘subverting ’of recent British politics. The personnel factor may be crucial. I’d have liked more on this: some kind of systematic analysis of the class structure, schooling, previous employment and so on of MI5’s establishment at various times. This is one of the things generally lacking, I think, in present-day academic intelligence studies: some social (and also cultural, political and ideological) context, to fill out the picture, and avoid the sort of trap that Andrew (and Sir Michael Howard) fell into when they assumed that everyone in the early twentieth century felt about ‘secret service’ as their sort did. You could call this intelligence history’s own ‘missing dimension’. It is important in the case of early MI5 because of the latter’s relative autonomy – Andrew calls it ‘essentially self-tasking’ – which allowed its officers to follow their whims, which must have been coloured, if not determined, by their social backgrounds; which were emphatically not typical of most of the compatriots they were supposed to be serving, especially when the ‘old imperial’ ingredient was added in. It is this that made those compatriots quite reasonably suspicious of them from the beginning; but which seems to have changed in the 1970s or 80s. That was when the imperial teat dried up; MI5 began advertising openly for recruits, including presumably some oiks; women started to make their marks as officers, not just decorative registry clerks, with two of them eventually rising to become DGs; and so the Service, for the first time in its history, came roughly into line with the nation generally.

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So far, so much better than it was – or so it would seem. Of course things might still revert.‘Everything secret degenerates’, as another Cambridge historian, Lord Acton, put it long ago; which is why we still need to keep a keen eye on MI5. In particular we might want to watch how it interprets a relatively recent (1989) change in its brief, which extends its duties to the safeguarding of ‘the economic well-being of the United Kingdom’ (not just political) – in case it takes that as code for defending simply capitalism as we know it. That was certainly one of its concerns over the IRA’s bomb campaign in the City of London in the 1990s: that it ‘threatened to put at risk its survival as Europe’s main financial capital’; and I happen to know that ‘the Anglo-American model of capitalism’ is still on MI5’s list of potential targets to be safeguarded against subversion, though I’m not at liberty to reveal my source (‘Chatham House Rules’, don’t you know). (Of course, if MI5 was really concerned about Britain’s ‘economic well-being’ one could argue – after the banking crisis of September 2008 – that it should have let the IRA go ahead.) Naturally, you don’t need to trust that last assertion, based as it is on evidence I can’t divulge. If I were you, I wouldn’t. Which must, however, apply to Andrew’s book too. It is a terrific work in many ways: rich, immensely readable, and fascinating. Anyone interested not only in MI5 specifically, but also in many of the famous and controversial events it became involved with over the last fifty years – the Profumo affair, for example; the John Stonehouse mystery, Peter Wright; a score of famous spy cases; the Northern Ireland conflict; the Miners’ Strikes; the Gibraltar shootings; the Lockerbie bombing; ‘Room 101’; the thrilling escape of the defector Gordievsky; the killing of PC Yvonne Fletcher; and the 7/7 London bomb plot, to mention just a few – will find nuggets of gold (as well as some baser metals) in its 1,000plus pages. There’s also quite a lot of sex (usually gratuitous); some levity (as when Andrew dismisses the rumour that Osama Bin Laden lived in north London for a time in the mid-1990s on the grounds that ‘since Bin Laden was then, at an estimated 6 foot 7 inches, probably the world’s tallest leading terrorist, had a long beard and dressed in flowing robes, it is unlikely that he would have passed unnoticed in Wembley’); and even a reproduction of an MI5 cricket scorebook that shows two future DGs making a century partnership together, but apparently against non-existent opponents. (Read into that what you like.) But of course we cannot take all this on trust. ‘Spooks’ – Andrew’s main sources – are vocational liars, dissemblers, falsifiers and hiders of things, not just occasional ones, like politicians. Even if we trust Andrew to be telling the truth as he understands it, it would be naïve to assume that MI5 has been as open and honest with him, or that its ‘Archive’, whose use by Andrew is what

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distinguishes this account from all others, can tell us everything. That, I’m afraid, is a cross that all secret services have to bear, and also their historians, even if they are ‘authorized’; indeed, even more if they are authorized, but restricted as much as Andrew has been: not allowed to see certain stuff, for example, or to reveal other stuff, or even – the fundamental requirement, this, for an academic historian in all other circumstances – to permit verification by others. Most of us would be chary of taking on a commission like this under such conditions. Andrew is to be thanked, on behalf of all weaker-stomached historians, for being prepared to hold his nose and risk it; and congratulated for doing almost the best that I think could have been done in the circumstances: apart, that is, from the missing (social) dimension, and over-use of the ‘conspiracy theory’ gibe. But he must be prepared for some scepticism. The nature of his topic calls out for it. And skepticism is, after all, what historians are supposed to do. * Indeed, it should inform all our studies of British history over the past 200 years. Working in the little sub-genre of ‘secret police’ history some years ago certainly alerted me to what might be being hidden in other areas of history, where it was not perhaps so obvious. Secret agents, after all, are professional and occupational liars: we might not spot such liars elsewhere – except perhaps among diplomats. (‘An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.’) Hanslope Park indicates that official deception goes wider even than this. Cambridge Analytica and Russia’s and probably Israel’s recent covert activities show that cunning deceptions can still work. In a way this could all be regarded as one great overall conspiracy by the ‘ruling classes’ or the ‘deep state’ (aided by Russia’s) – whoever they may be: some historians think they haven’t essentially changed – to control the people by deceiving them. If so, it must constitute a challenge to ‘democracy’. There may be something in this, although I should prefer to believe – as a ‘serious’ historian – that successful conspiracies require something more to nurture them: great interests, foreign pressures, a zeitgeist, a stage in the development of capitalism (it was this, I think, that powered Thatcher’s plotting), a powerful Fourth Estate, or some kind of national disaster or crisis, real or perceived. Of course none of this can be proved; so a belief in the efficacy of conspiracy alone is a reasonable one. And in any case it must be of interest to the historian to know where historical facts have been officially hidden, forgotten or distorted, effectively or not, in order to be able to speculate why this should have been. The truth of history may lie in the gaps.

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Notes 1 This is mostly new for this volume, but the latter part draws on material previously published in the LRB, 15 July 1999, 18 October 2001, 19 November 2009, 18 November 2010, and 21 March 2013; in the Guardian 12 January 2013, 6 July 2013, and 22 July 2017; and in Lobster 66, Winter 2013. 2 For a discussion of this, see Robin Ramsay, Conspiracy Theories (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2006).

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14

The Battle for Brexit

Every event in history has a prehistory, or perhaps many prehistories jumbled together. Brexit – Britain’s decision on 23 June 2016 to leave the European Union that she had been a member of for forty-seven years – was of course no exception. Indeed, the people who first floated and then led the Brexit movement invariably took ‘history’ as one of their prime reasons for doing so: either a short-term view of Britain’s history, expressed in the slogan ‘take back control’, which implied that she had exercised that control in the recent past; or the idea that her longer-term history defined Britain as fundamentally apart and distinct from the rest of Europe, or ‘the Continent’. The middle part of this chapter will discuss that; before coming on to the real ‘historical context’ of the Brexit vote, which runs far deeper, and may have much less to do with Britain’s relationship with the Continent than is usually assumed. First, however, comes the actual ‘Battle for Brexit’; which effectively began in 2016, and seemed to be won in December 2019 with the election of an unambiguously pro-Brexit Conservative government, but whose ultimate result and practical effects were still not clear at the time – the winter of 2020–21 – when these words were being penned; and will – probably – remain so for some months or even years to come. * The Brexit vote came as a great shock to many British people – perhaps to most of them. It is worth emphasizing this, in order to show how abnormal a historical event it was, and therefore requiring to be explained. Even supporters seemed surprised at the result of the referendum of 23 June 2016, with commentators remarking on how Boris Johnson, who had backed the ‘Leave’ side, seemed nonplussed on the following day, and at a bit of a loss over what to do next. The people had voted to ‘exit’ the European Union by the narrow but as it turned out decisive margin of 51.89 per cent to 48.11 per cent; without in most cases knowing what they were voting for. This was against the advice of most of the British ‘Establishment’, which it had been assumed – including by Brexiters, who saw it as part of a ‘conspiracy’ against them – would prevail, as it invariably 203

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did, against them. After the vote the shock waves continued; with two prime ministers forced to resign as a consequence, one political party sorely divided, another which had used to be divided now swallowed up by Brexiters, and a man who had previously been regarded as a bit of a joke – the aforesaid Boris Johnson – at last achieving the position of ‘world king’ (well, British king, anyway) he was known to have hankered after since boyhood. This followed three and a half years of rancorous debate in Parliament and the Press over what should replace Britain’s EU relationship, huge public demonstrations for both sides of the argument, an increase in xenophobic abuse and even violence (with one young ‘Remainer’ MP being shot and stabbed to death), revelations of corrupt practices, mainly on behalf of the ‘Leavers’, undermining public confidence in government; and what was widely reckoned to be a ‘toxic’ atmosphere in the country generally. On the morning after the general election of 12 December 2019 which confirmed Johnson’s authority, Katherine Viner, the editor of the Guardian, wrote that ‘Britain already feels like a different place’.1 It was. To the calm and rational historian of modern Britain, this presented a challenge. Even tentative predictions based on past history were set at nought. Continuities were interrupted. So were old dichotomies: socialism versus capitalism, liberal versus authoritarian, Labour versus Conservatives, feminism versus the patriarchy, and the rest; all except ‘young versus old’, perhaps. In many ways what had just happened appeared like madness. And historians aren’t comfortable with madness, although they have seen plenty of it elsewhere in the past. For this historian the decision to leave the EU also appeared, if not mad, at least irrational; and it’s as well to admit this personal bias – ‘bias’, not ‘prejudice’, because it’s based on some knowledge – at the start. This will not be a balanced account of the ‘Battle for Brexit’, in the sense of one that fairly lays out both sides of the argument, because – in my judgment – one side of the argument, the ‘Brexit’ one, is deeply flawed. (And this is from one who thinks he remembers voting ‘No’ in the previous referendum on British membership of the EU’s predecessor in 1975. But circumstances change.) Readers can attribute this to my being an ‘Establishment’ figure if they choose to, though I would dispute that; or to my living abroad much of the time, in the remaining EU, latterly as a dual citizen. (I applied for Swedish nationality immediately after the Brexit vote, partly in order to preserve my European freedoms.) I of course prefer to see it as a rational and objective judgment, based on evidence and on general principles. Whatever: what follows will be a critical account of the ‘madness’, and of the politicians who led – or rode – it to victory. To outsiders – most of my Continental

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European neighbours, for example – men like Nigel Farage, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg appeared as comic Monty Pythonesque figures, illustrative of Britain’s much-loved ‘eccentricity’, but not people, surely, that a serious nation would trust with its existential fate? It is at least possible that this is how they will live on in history, after the recent crisis is properly over. And it is how this account will treat them; albeit with an attempt to prise out the ‘method’ that lies behind most kinds of ‘madness’, including this one; before we come on to – as promised – the deeper historical causes. * The first thing to be aware of in this connection is that ‘Europe’ was almost the last thing that Brexit was about. So far as the main actors in the drama were concerned, what it was about varied widely, but mainly according to whether they could be characterized as ‘officers’ of the movement, or ‘troops’. Another factor was one that historians are usually reluctant to credit, which was the role of ‘accident’. If Prime Minister David Cameron had not been so careless in calling the ‘Brexit’ referendum in the way he did, or the press were not so much in the hands of tax-averse right-wing billionaires, or Britain’s electoral system not what it was, or the Brexiters not so unprincipled (in my view) and – it has to be said – clever in their propaganda, or Eton College not so dominant still in the narrow ‘upper’ reaches of English society, or England not so dominant in United Kingdom affairs, or the pro-Europeans not so feeble and negative in their advocacy, or the EU not so beastly to Greece in the months before the referendum: then the narrow margin in favour of Brexit could well have turned out the other way. For, truth be told, ‘Europe’ had not been an important issue in British public opinion for forty-odd years before 2016, except to a small group of obsessives, led by men (they were all men) like the strangely charismatic ex-banker Nigel Farage, and the Tory MP Sir Bill Cash – who was old enough (just) to remember the last war, and appeared to regard the EU as essentially a continuation of Hitler’s ‘thousand year Reich’.2 Others of the ‘Chiefs’ saw Brexit more cynically as a means, only, to further other and often more venal ambitions, by convincing the troops that Europe lay behind their ill-treatment in the recent past. Up until then, opinion polls had suggested that few ‘ordinary’ people were at all concerned about their enslavement to Brussels, and indeed that most of them now felt quite comfortable with it. Yet still it happened, with Britain formally exiting the European Union at 11 p.m. on Friday 31 January 2020 – midnight Central European rather than British time, which irritated some Brexiters – albeit with a further ‘transition’

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period of eleven months added on in order to enable the country to adjust. Some rather feeble, Covid-limited celebrations were held in England (fewer in Scotland), but not to anything like the extent that the officers had wanted. They had asked that church bells be rung, like on the day that Bill Cash’s Second World War came to an end in 1945. But the Church of England was having none of that. The reason for this was that the whole process – unlike VE Day – had been far too divisive to want to risk the winners’ rubbing the losers’ noses in their victory too much. ‘Remainers’ were still resentful, understandably in view of the clear chicanery that had played such a part in defeating them, and their doubts over whether a poll of the people taken in the summer of 2016 still represented their real wishes in 2020. (Polls taken then suggested not.) These doubts were borne out by analyses of voting patterns during the referendum, which showed a startling age differential between pros and antis, with the elderly being far more likely to plump for Brexit than the young. Over four years, it was argued, many of the oldies would have died, making room for enough new young proEuropeans to join the electorate to swing it the other way. (That is, so long as the older young remained young in spirit, and didn’t become more Brexity as they grew older.) Even leaving aside this possibility, some ingenious Remainers argued that the youngsters’ votes should have been given more weight in the referendum than the oldsters’, in view of the fact that it was they who would bear the brunt of the result for longer. There were moves in Parliament and in the country for a second referendum in order to test this, which was however objected to by Brexiters on the grounds that it would be ‘undemocratic’ to ignore the first one – ‘you lost, get over it!’ – and was finally put to bed by the December 2019 general election result, which was taken to be the people’s final ruling on the matter, although it wasn’t really. By that time most people seemed tired of the whole issue, and so were attracted by Johnson’s main – indeed virtually his only – election promise, which was to ‘Get Brexit Done!’, the appeal of which trumped even his own well-publicized deficiencies of character. Shortly after the referendum, evidence came to light of the widespread lies, chicanery and illegality on the ‘Brexit’ side of the argument – very little from the other camp – which, taken all together, ensured that the Remainers were unlikely to accept their defeat gracefully. Resentment still simmered, and showed signs of continuing for some years yet. Over-celebration would smack of triumphalism, and make things worse. If they valued the equanimity of their country, the Brexiters could not afford to crow; although some did. *

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These were strange circumstances to have given birth to such a major revolution in Britain’s relations with the continent of Europe, and also, as we shall see, within herself – potentially, at any rate. So how did it happen? Again, we need to look at the ‘officers’ and the ‘troops’ separately. For neither group was ‘Europe’ a priority. So far as the latter was concerned, more general grievances totally unconnected with Europe lay at the bottom of it, with timing being the other crucial factor. This was clear to many at the time. It was to me. The following (slightly edited – additions are in square brackets) is taken from my personal ‘blog’ from then. It’s the entry for 16 June 2016, a week before the referendum, and headed, presciently, ‘Is it Really About the EU?’ Whatever we think of referenda generally, this really was a terrible time to hold one. Hardly anyone was really interested in the EU before now, apart from a few Tory obsessives. The rest of us have come to accept it, as a fact of modern life. It is very difficult to get any ‘Leaver’ to specify any particular harm it has done to him or her. The things we feel strongly about are jobs, prospects, the people who rule us, football, immigration, and who should be thrown out of the Big Brother house. Europe comes very low down this list. Which means that, when we are told we have to vote on this issue, our minds are on other things. And our stance on ‘Brexit’ or ‘Remain’ is determined by our opinions on those other things, rather than by the issue of Europe itself. Which might be fine if the European issue were central to any of these concerns. But it isn’t. One of the major problems is that when we were last given a national vote, in the 2015 General Election, the result didn’t reflect our views. A Conservative government came to power, and started acting in a very Conservative way, on the basis of a ‘democratic’ mandate granted in fact by only 25% of the electorate, and 33% of those who voted. Our first-past-the-post electoral system, of course, was to blame for that. This left millions of voters (and abstainers) discontented, and with a feeling of helplessness under the rules of the present electoral game. This is happening in a period of almost unprecedented economic depression for the great bulk of people; the unraveling of their welfare safety-net; widening social inequality; the almost daily revelations of various forms of gross corruption – mainly economic, but also moral – by the propertied and political classes and those they protect; the wholesale grab by those classes of what had used to be regarded as public assets (privatization), including, for example, basic social requirements such as water, education and health; the continuation in power of a class of men whose privileged education and lifestyles cut them off entirely from the mass of the people they are governing; the uncontrolled and unwelcome immigration of workers from within Europe and of refugees from outside;

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and – on top of all this – a new, alien and seemingly irrational terrorist threat, just when we thought we had put paid to the (relatively rational) Irish one. (At least Irish Unity is an achievable object; more so than an Islamic Caliphate in the West.) Behind all – or most – of this lies the apparently inexorable advance of the global capitalist hegemon, undermining democracy and taking power away from ordinary people; albeit in a way that only a few people recognize. It’s the non-recognition of this overwhelming factor, in fact, that is distorting the responses to our present situation. These are taking many forms. One is a turn to the Right – to Trump and his following in America, UKIP and its successors in Britain, the FN in France, and so on. People’s anger is turned against scapegoats who are not really responsible for their woes, but are easily identified, and disliked for other reasons. This – scapegoating – is a common phenomenon in history. Another is a turn in the opposite direction, to the Left: Occupy, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Podemos, and the multitude of other quasi-socialist movements that have sprung up recently. These sorts of reaction have historical form, of course, most notably in 1930s’ Europe. Opposites in one obvious way, they also share a common cause and origin, and in many cases curiously similar philosophies. Both Bernie and Donald, and both Jeremy and Nigel, rail against essential aspects of the free market capitalist system, for example, although in the cases of Trump and Farage there are obvious reasons to doubt their sincerity. They are also professedly anti-‘establishment’, which is a great draw for those disillusioned by conventional politics. Other manifestations of this powerful but poorly-focused discontent are various forms of anarchism, ranging from political apathy among the young to its more ideological and destructive forms; nationalism; the Islamicisation of native-born Britons and Americans; the widely remarked ‘toxicity’ of contemporary political discourse among people who feel disempowered, and politicians who pander to them; and even racism. (An extraordinarily high proportion of people say they are voting for Brexit because of the number of ‘blacks’ in Britain. Blacks! How many of those was Europe sending us?) All of this must be at least partly attributable to the spread of the effects of unconstrained capitalism amongst us, in the forms of austerity, inequality, and the primacy of commercial over democratic considerations. Perhaps. But people don’t realize this. So when an opportunity for another national vote comes up – the referendum, the only truly democratic one they will be allowed until our voting system is fundamentally reformed – they funnel all their discontents into that. But of course, they don’t really fit. The European Union is not the cause of all their woes. It may contribute to them. Since it became captured by the neoliberal tendency, it has done little to arrest the progress of the Global capitalist

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hegemon. It has done something: enshrined a ‘social chapter’, for example, which offends fundamentally against neo-liberalism – and which is one of the aspects of the Union the Tory Brexiters want to get rid of. But its underlying principle of the free movement of labour is a neo-liberal one. [Incidentally, it was also a fundamental principle of Britain’s in its earlier days of ‘splendid isolation’ when, as we saw in Chapter 4, anyone – even a suspected terrorist – was allowed to come in.] Those who saw the old EEC as a possible bulwark against global capitalism have been gravely disabused. That is clearly the main reason, and a pretty good one, for Leftists to be attracted to Brexit today. The trouble is, for Leftist Remainers, that Brexit probably won’t do the trick; won’t solve, that is, the major grouse they have, which isn’t against Europe per se. Just think: would a Brexit government be more or less likely to resist TTIP [a very neoliberal transatlantic trade deal being debated then]? Desperate to replace its European markets with American ones, and in view of most of the leading Brexiters’ known neo-liberal ideology, it might well be more likely to sign up. Might there not be a better hope of sinking it with the help of our European radical allies? Likewise, for those mainly interested in getting rid of the awful Cameron and Osborne [the Chancellor of the Exchequer then, and the main driver of ‘Austerity’ in Britain], would a Boris Johnson or Michael Gove government be any better? [They were thought to be the likeliest successors at the time.] Would those two – again in view of their neo-liberal leanings – really want to restrict the immigration of cheap labour into Britain? I’m sorry, but I’m afraid the question really does need to be addressed ad hominem. Otherwise frying pans and fires leap to one’s mind. It’s a question not of principle, but of tactics. That’s the basic problem with this referendum. It’s not about the issue that most people really care about. That is a vital one, but muddied and complicated by all these others. This is not the time to vote on Britain’s membership of the European Union. But we’re saddled with it; so let’s see what comes of it. I for one will be sitting up all night next Thursday, to follow the results. I have to say that although I’ll be relieved by a Remain vote, I’ll be excited by a Brexit one. It’ll be different, unpredictable, and – dare I say it? – more fun.3

That was written while I still anticipated, in common with most other interested parties, a majority for ‘Remain’. Needless to say, the eventual result and the ructions that followed it took away much of the ‘fun’, for both sides. Even Boris Johnson, much of whose pre-election appeal rested on his carefully cultivated (or was it genuine?) P.G. Wodehouse comic persona, and who (as noted above) had been as shocked by the result of the vote as the rest of us, lost a lot of his bounce. That’s what comes of winning anything in dubious circumstances. *

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That, then, was the ‘troops’ – the voters. So what of their ‘officers’? For David Cameron, the prime minister at the start of the crisis – and not to be included as an ‘officer’ of this regiment because of his opposition to Brexit – the motive was simple, and openly admitted. He brought the referendum on in order to lance a boil in his own (Conservative) party, which was the passionate Europhobia of some of its right wing, who had been threatening to split the party for several decades now. In the 1990s, John Major had famously called them ‘the bastards’. Cameron believed that a referendum on Europe would demonstrate how little support they had in the country, which should shut them up; just as one he had called on Scottish independence in 2014 had seen off the Scots ‘Nats’, and an earlier 2011 referendum had put paid to electoral reform. Referenda were his short-cut solution to every great existential issue of the day. This time, of course, it didn’t work. So far as the real leaders of the Brexit movement were concerned, their motives varied, but within certain limits. Some were genuine Eurosceptics, organized for example in the fairly long-established ‘United Kingdom Independence Party’ (or UKIP), and in a more ambiguously named ‘European Research Group’ within the Tory Party itself. In 2006 Cameron made a basic error, of taste if nothing else, when he referred to the former as ‘a bunch of fruit cakes, loonies and closet racists’, which was obviously provocative, and more dismissive, as it turned out, than UKIP deserved.4 Still, the new party did not appear to be a serious threat then, or until conditions in the country deteriorated in the ways just described. Then it became the main focus of protest for many of the most discontented and ‘left behind’ members of British (chiefly English) society; to the shocked surprise of socialists, who had assumed that this was their proper role. That it wasn’t taken as such may have been due to the compromises that the previous Labour government had made with ‘Thatcherism’ (Tony Blair had claimed to be building on Thatcher’s legacy); or, very conversely, and probably more likely, to working people’s perception of the Labour party – especially after the radical Jeremy Corbyn’s elevation to its leadership – as insufficiently ‘patriotic’. That was a line that the contemporary popular press plugged mercilessly, to Labour’s detriment in the election of December 2019. The broader Right in ‘high’ British politics seized on this; not so much because of its genuine feelings about ‘Europe’, but because it saw that this sudden animus against it could be exploited for other ends. Many Rightists, again, were genuine Europhobes, some of them for what could be regarded as ‘historical’ reasons: arising out of their (largely false) memories of what they saw as Britain’s past ‘independence’, or ‘splendid isolation’, or the myth that she had won World War II

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on her own; or even a certain reverence for the worldwide Empire that had been so pathetically let go of by the post-war ‘Left’. Boris Johnson played to this with his vision of the ‘global Britain’ that he believed could be created, or revived, once it was released from the restraints of Brussels bureaucracy; not another empire – ‘Heaven forfend,’ he protested5 – but very close to one. That fitted in well with the way many foreigners regarded Britain’s contemporary trauma in any case: simply as an exercise in imperial nostalgia. This was largely unfair – the wider world has always overrated Britain’s attachment to its Empire, for understandable reasons – because it was largely how it had presented to them; but there were old imperial nostalgics in Britain, for whom the idea of becoming merely equal to other European nations had always seemed an indignity.6 This also affected some of the troops. ‘We used to rule half the world,’ was an occasional cry heard among nativist mobs, albeit one not fully supported by history. (‘Half ’ is an exaggeration, for a start.) It is unlikely, however, that Empire nostalgia was pre-eminent in the minds or motives of all that many of the top Brexiters; certainly not a commonly expressed one, at a time when ‘imperialism’ had so many negative connotations – it was even equated with Nazism – as to seriously besmirch it as a rallying call. So, what were their underlying concerns? To answer this, we need to be aware of what sorts of people they were, socially and economically. It must be significant that nearly every one of the leaders of the Brexit movement was privileged, rich and with underlying attitudes that to other members of British political society appeared very ‘Conservative’, albeit in the modern, post-Thatcher, ‘free economy and strong government’ sense. (In other words, they were not really keen on ‘conserving’.) There was a fundamental irony buried in this, in view of their insistence that they were representing ‘ordinary people’ against the ‘elites’, on whom they laid the blame for ‘Europe’ and everything else that was bad. Two of them had been educated at Eton: Johnson, the prime minister, and his close ally Jacob Rees-Mogg, a caricature upper-class toff – in 2018, the Beano comic considered suing him for plagiarizing its character of ‘Walter the Softy’7 – with a whole quiverful of ideas that would have seemed reactionary back in the nineteenth century; as had the luckless David Cameron before them. Most of the rest of the Cabinet had also come from public schools. (Farage had attended Dulwich College – founded in 1619 as ‘the College of God’s Gift’ – before becoming a stockbroker.) That these men could claim to be speaking for ‘the people’ against ‘the Establishment’ was one of the curiosities of the Brexit moment. This however is a common feature of modern right-wing movements: to claim to be the voices of the downtrodden masses against the powers that be,

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however influential they – the Rightists – might be in reality. The name generally given to it is ‘populism’, and its strength lies in the way it can meet and combat the left wing on the ground generally chosen by the latter. In extremis it can morph into a kind of Fascism; which is what more and more commentators claimed they saw happening to many of the Rightist movements of the day, including ‘Trumpism’ in the United States. (Hillary Clinton, the losing Democratic candidate in the 2016 American presidential election, told a British audience in November 2019 that she felt the UK was heading towards that, too.)8 The proBrexit parties in Britain, starting with UKIP, certainly shared many of the characteristic features of proto-fascism; including, as well as their disdain for ‘elites’, or even for expertise (Michael Gove once famously dismissed gloomy economic predictions by opining that ‘the British people have had enough of experts’),9 their scapegoating of ‘aliens’ (in this case immigrants); their impatience with constitutional conventions like Parliament’s and the judges’ powers to hold governments to account: Johnson’s Saturnine-looking ‘special adviser’ Dominic Cummings early on announced plans for that; their appeal to a tribal version of ‘patriotism’; their reactionary social attitudes, in the main, particularly their hatred of ‘political correctness’; and their lack of conventional morality, especially in the areas of what most people regarded as honesty, veracity, and – to use what had by now become a rather passé word – ‘honour’. Boris Johnson, the new Prime Minister, was well known for his cavalier attitude to the truth. This isn’t a partisan judgment of him, but is easily documented, and was acknowledged even by his supporters, who either disregarded it, rather like Trump’s following in the United States, or comforted themselves with the thought that at least he was their liar, and effective as such. (His enemies comforted themselves with the hope that his amorality would find him out in the end, as it was about to in the case of Trump.) His duplicity was not confined to his career as a politician, but had preceded it in his former professional role as a newspaper correspondent in Brussels, where he was responsible for many of the flat-out lies that came to be believed about – for example – EU plans to ban curved bananas and prawn cocktail crisps, and to regulate the sizes of condoms. (That was before his editor sacked him for lying about something else.) Broadcast over the years in the notoriously right-wing British popular press, these fictions merely fed people’s prejudices about Brussels ‘bureaucracy’, which of course was the purpose of them. This could be said to bring us back to ‘Fascism’, in the hands of which ‘black’ propaganda is usually a characteristic weapon (viz Goebbels); but it would of course be wrong – a sign of Leftist paranoia, perhaps – to infer that Brexit Britain had reached that stage yet.

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For one thing, the Brexit movement was not as statist as most Fascist movements have been; indeed, the very reverse. So far as its officers were concerned – not so much the ‘troops’ – one of their motives in wanting to escape from Europe was to free themselves and their enterprises from state – or in this case ‘super-state’ – bureaucracy, represented by the ‘Brussels’ restrictions and interference that Johnson had highlighted (or invented) in his Daily Telegraph columns, in order to soar above them in the free blue air of the ‘global market’. There may have been a personal and venal element to this – the EU was threatening to restrict the financiers’ and press lords’ access to their overseas ‘tax havens’ from the beginning of 2021 – but ‘free marketism’, or ‘neoliberalism’, as it had by now come to be called, also had philosophical – even idealistic – and theoretical roots in Britain going back to the eighteenth century. (Samuel Laing was a disciple: see Chapter 5.) A deep hostility to governmental control was common to nearly all the Brexit leaders, expressed in their opposition to the democratic socialism that was being preached by Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing Labour Party in the general election of 2019; and in early expressions of support for – for example – looser labour regulation, and the privatization of the National Health Service. (During the election, the Brexiters tended to row back on these ambitions, which they realized could jar with their followers; but they reemerged afterwards.) Such a motive could well have outweighed any feelings about ‘sovereignty’ – the line they took more publicly – in pointing them to the ‘Leave’ side. It also coupled them with their friends across the North Atlantic; both philosophically – Britain had invented free marketism, but America was its main temple now – and also practically, with the US’s likely requiring Britain to abandon its Europe-imposed ‘socialist’ trade and labour regulations in any future commercial relationship with the US. And Britain would sorely need the American market, if it were to have any hope of replacing the tariff-free trade it had been doing with Europe before the Brexit axe fell. This in fact had been the major difference between Britain and the European continent for many years. Britain was the land of (individual) freedom, which was seen as the root of its industrial and commercial primacy, as well as its social stability; and was why – back in the day – Britons had felt they could tolerate all those foreign refugees coming in (Chapter 4). The ‘Continent’ had usually resisted that, clinging to firm and sometimes autocratic rule and regulation – passports, for example, restrictions on travel, and import duties – to protect it from political and economic anarchy; and wedded to the spirit of what our friend Laing (Chapter 5) called ‘bureau and barrack’. During the second half of the twentieth century, these differences were rubbed down somewhat, with Britain’s becoming more

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‘statist’, especially with the advent of the Labour government of 1945, and the Continent more ‘liberal’ in a political sense, measured by the loosening of its police powers, for example, while Britain tightened its own. By the time Britain joined the Common Market, their societies seemed to be moving in parallel, if not in harness, towards the happy compromise held out by the ‘welfare state’. (Sweden, whose welfare state was the most developed, was regarded as British Leftists’ ‘shining city on the hill’; shinier, that is, than the capitalists’ US.) Even Conservative prime ministers accepted the route that their political SatNav was leading them along, which after all was consistent with the ‘noblesse oblige’ paternalism in which most of them had been (Public) schooled. There were always some low grumblings from the more upper middle-class sections of the party – those who were, to use the dismissive language of its born-to-rule members, ‘in trade’; but the toffs were still in charge. That was, until Margaret Thatcher came on to the scene, with her very different kind of Conservatism, and indeed morality, and within a generation emasculated what she called the ‘wets’ in her party (Chapter 12), leaving it in the charge of the drier free-marketeers. Boris Johnson completed this process when he purged the party of most of its surviving – and generally respected – ‘One Nation’ Tories shortly before the general election of December 2019. Of course there had been stirrings of this reaction earlier than 1979; but it is with the ‘Iron Lady’ that the neo-Liberal tide that was beginning to rise internationally during this period – possibly a natural ‘stage’ in the development of global capitalism – really washed around Britain’s shores. The Continent soon began to catch up, even ‘shining Sweden’; but by the 2010s free marketism had taken such a hold on Britain that the gap between it and the Continent widened again. There was an irony – or perhaps an inevitability – about this. In the 1960s, when Britain had first applied for entry to the EEC, it had been blocked by France’s President de Gaulle on the grounds that it was too close to America and American ways. True or not, by 2020 it was apparent that the portion of Britain’s governing elite which now held the reins of Brexit was amply justifying the General’s fears. Boris Johnson was turning out to be a great buddy of President (at the time) Donald Trump; which may have owed something to the fact that he (Johnson) had been born in New York, and so had used to qualify as an American citizen. A number of commentators pointed to the further irony that, by exchanging its membership of what some Brexiters called the European ‘empire’, but was better perhaps compared to what the British called a ‘Commonwealth’ (Chapter 2), for a position of effective subjection to America’s ‘informal empire’, Britain was diluting the ‘control’ that the Brexiters had made a great play of wishing to ‘win back’.

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This in fact may be the best way to appreciate and understand the ‘Brexit moment’. Concentrating for now just on the ‘officers’, there can be little doubt that some of them were genuinely concerned about the EU, like Sir Bill Cash and Nigel Farage: despite the latter’s French name (it was apparently Huguenot) and German (ex-)wife. For some of the others, however, their hostility to the EU, while not being in any way disingenuous – although doubts surrounded Boris Johnson when it emerged that on the eve of the 2016 referendum he had penned two articles for his newspaper, one anti the EU and the other pro, before deciding which side to come down on – may not have been particularly principled or deep. In Johnson’s case, his choice was widely interpreted as a means to satisfy his vaunting personal ambition. So far as the broader Right in British politics was concerned, however, the value of Brexit was that it could be used to rally the angry and disaffected troops to its side, in a campaign to complete the ‘Thatcher revolution’. That seemed about to be achieved when the results of the 2019 election came through, leaving Johnson’s ambitions victorious and Labour’s in tatters. Or, by another (sub-Marxist) way of putting it: Brexit was the horse that just happened to come along, quite fortuitously, to be hard ridden by the Right to victory for late-stage capitalism. The journalist George Monbiot described the leading Brexiters as merely ‘gaming’ it.10 So, for neither the officers nor their followers was it ‘about Europe’, essentially. * At the time of writing, just a few weeks after the formal separation, Brexit’s longor even medium-term effects on Britain and its place in the world cannot be accurately predicted. (Historians should keep clear of predictions, in any case.) The most immediate repercussions, however, were apparent straightaway. One set of them arose simply from the way Brexit had been engineered, the process of its passage. For there were always going to be problems with a policy of such magnitude decided by a simple referendum, in a country whose form of democracy was parliamentary and representative rather than plebiscitary, and with referendums not supposed to be binding, but only advisory. The simple reason why this one was not treated as such in 2016 was that Cameron had pledged himself to abide by its decision however it turned out, and a majority in Parliament felt, rightly or wrongly, that they had to honour that pledge, whatever their personal opinions might be. (Most MPs were, in fact, ‘Remainers’.) A second problem was that it was never made clear in the referendum what voters were voting for, among the myriad of options that were opened up by Britain’s decision to leave the EU. Individual Brexiters themselves offered different and contradictory answers to this: from an absolute break with all the EU’s structures

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and policies, to an arrangement with it that preserved the common market aspect of it – together with the rules that accompanied that, on common standards, employment protection and freedom of movement, for example – which was usually presented as the ‘Norway option’. (Norway was not in the EU, but was closely linked to it.) Whichever alternative they offered, most Brexiters insisted that the task of negotiating it would be ‘one of the easiest in human history’. (That was Dr Liam Fox, MP, who was put in charge of the negotiations for a while.)11 ‘What does Brexit mean?’ people asked, quite reasonably; to which Prime Minister Theresa May’s Delphic reply, oft repeated, was that ‘Brexit Means Brexit’, which hardly helped. That it did not turn out so easy was the major reason why the debate over the form Brexit would take continued so long and so angrily after the referendum result, and was only partially settled with the snap ‘Get Brexit Done’ general election of December 2019. Thereafter, the fact of ‘Brexit’ was confirmed – it now appeared that it really would happen, which some people had never quite believed; but with its details being put off to another day. There were other problems with the decision, quite apart from the issues of constitutionality and definition. Much discussion arose over the Leave side’s propaganda in 2016, which – again – was widely taken to be unusually dishonest. A particular object of criticism was a statement painted in large letters on the side of the ‘Brexit battle [campaigning] bus’, seeming to promise an injection of £350 million a week into the currently cash-strapped NHS, recouped from the savings that leaving the EU would allegedly bring. That promise was based on false figures and reneged on almost immediately after the result of the referendum was known. Soon after that some of the Brexiters’ ‘dirty tricks’ – lies, illegal overfunding, use of Cambridge Analytica computer programs to influence voting patterns, covert assistance from supposedly hostile foreign countries – were revealed, but too late to do anything about them. (The courts declared that if this had been an election, it would have needed to be re-run; but because it was strictly only an advisory plebiscite, the same rules did not apply.)12 All this naturally provoked a great deal of resentment on the Remain side, and a change for the worse in the tone of the public debate thereafter, which became more bitter than it had been in British politics since – perhaps – the 1956 Suez Crisis; or even ever before. Right-leaning newspapers called the Remainers ‘traitors’ and ‘enemies of the people’; a kind of verbal tarring and feathering reminiscent of some of the most authoritarian regimes of the past. On their side, the Remainers claimed – or implied – that pro-Brexit voters were ignorant, stupid, or (at best) conned. It was at this time, on the very eve of the referendum, that the young

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‘Remain’ MP Jo Cox was brutally murdered in the streets of her constituency by a man who shouted ‘Britain first’ when he attacked her. Others had to be guarded by police. The venom was compounded by the recently emerged ‘social media’ – especially Twitter – which enabled ill thought-out and abusive views to be immediately broadcast, un-edited. All this heightened feelings, and made it virtually impossible to reverse or rethink the result, without risking something very close to civil war. Indeed, in 2017 Nigel Farage spoke of arming himself for the fray and manning the barricades if Parliament obstructed his – extreme – version of Brexit.13 It seemed far-fetched, in the context of Britain’s ostensibly calm and non-revolutionary modern history; but serious domestic conflict could not be ruled out. Just as serious, albeit in a different way, was the effect the whole affair had on Britons’ confidence in their particular mode of democracy, which was now becoming widely regarded as unfit for purpose. Brexiters’ anger was mainly directed at Parliament and the courts, which in the British system were designed to test and scrutinize government policies, in order to act as a brake on executive actions that might, after proper consideration, be seen as requiring amendment, at least. For Boris Johnson, however, they just appeared needlessly obstructive, and in his party’s election manifesto of 2019 he pledged to reduce their powers. That could have a fundamental effect on the whole British constitution (socalled; it isn’t written down), restoring it to the position it had been in before the great Parliamentary battles (and one civil war) of the seventeenth century. (These ideas were credited to Johnson’s ‘Special Advisor’, one Dominic Cummings, a kind of Machiavelli pour nos jours, who was intent on undermining Civil Service neutrality, too.) Liberal and more conservative (with a small ‘c’) observers feared the authoritarian implications of all this. Yet it seemed unlikely that the ‘people’ (or ‘troops’) would object to it, only too aware as they were of their elected MPs’ unrepresentative opinions on the question of Brexit; persuaded by their newspapers of the ‘treachery’ of certain MPs, Lords and judges; and encouraged to infer, from the deceitful conduct of the ‘Brexit’ side of the argument, that ‘all politicians were the same’. Even the transparently honest Jeremy Corbyn was tarred with this brush. That boded ill for any likelihood that the people would trust those same politicians to restore their ‘ancient liberties’, if a form of authoritarianism did take hold. It also prepared the soil for ‘conspiracy theories’, which are a particular threat to democracy, casting doubt as they do on any person or party or policy that might be ‘manipulating’ things behind the scenes, and even on the nature of ‘truth’ itself. The Brexit case rested very largely for its effect on the idea that

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British politics was being covertly manipulated in favour of the EU and contrary to the people’s wishes by an ‘establishment’ – or ‘elite’, or ‘the Westminster bubble’ – that needed to be brought down before genuine (that is, ‘direct’) democracy could be implemented. This was Johnson’s secondary message during the 2019 general election, fought on the issue of ‘the People versus Parliament’; which would have come as a surprise to the many generations of Britons – seventeenthcentury anti-monarchists, Chartists, the Labour Party, Suffragettes – who had fought for Parliament as the means to represent the ‘People’s Will’. On the Left, suspicion of ‘conspiracy’ fell on the Tories and press barons, obviously; although to be fair they were quite open in their prejudices. But for a short time it also fell on ‘the Jews’, which was an appalling thought for most people in the light of the previous century’s darkest times, but gained some credibility when a section of the Jewish community in Britain put its weight behind the Conservatives in 2019 by spreading its view, a largely false one, that Labour’s leadership was ‘antiSemitic’: probably on the grounds of Jeremy Corbyn’s criticism of some of the state of Israel’s policies, and his support for Palestinian statehood. That was disappointing for those who had always admired Judaism as a principled, moral and indeed in the British political context ‘progressive’ faith. Too much reliance on these explanations is problematical, as are all ‘conspiracy theories’. The main problem is not so much to prove or to disprove them, as to prove that even where they can be proven they have the effects – the success – that is claimed for them (see Chapter 13). One can be pretty certain that there were a number of ‘conspiracies’ against Remainers and the Labour Party in 2019, some of which can be sourced to Cambridge Analytica, Dominic Cummings, Russia and what was called the ‘Israel’ (not ‘Jewish’) lobby; but not that any of these was decisive in the outcome.14 In fact, the main outcome was probably public distrust. The plethora of lies that accompanied the Brexit campaigns of 2016–19, although mainly confined to one side of the argument, stained all sides equally – ‘politicians are all the same’ – understandably in the case of people who were not given access to the sort of knowledge that would enable them to discriminate between fact and fiction; and so further undermined trust in politics, or democracy, more generally. ‘Truth’ suffered from all this because so many politicians were suspected of lying; chief among them Boris Johnson, whose serial dissembling was well known and documented. Of course politicians have always lied, and electors have never altogether trusted them; but the Brexit farrago – together with parallel developments over in Trump’s America – seemed to normalize the situation, so that no one was any longer surprised.

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* Another immediate repercussion of the ‘Brexit moment’ was on Britons’ personal and social relations with Continental Europeans living amongst them. Xenophobia was not an effect of Brexit, and indeed was generally regarded as one of the causes of it, among the ‘troops’ who felt, rightly or wrongly, that the immigration of cheap and willing labour from countries like Poland – a recent entry to the EU – was undermining their living standards, and putting pressure on Britain’s social, education and health services, especially in the deprived postindustrial north of England. Some of these complaints were hardly evidencebased: many of the jobs that the immigrants were ‘taking’ from native Britons were those – like fruit-picking – that home-grown workers were reluctant to do in any case, and a succession of government reports showed that immigration actually added to the viability of the social services – hospitals were highly dependent on foreign doctors and nurses, for example – and on balance actually boosted the country’s coffers. In addition, many of the anti-immigrants seemed not to be able to discriminate between European and extra-European immigration – the latter were the most visible at the time because of their colour, and the most feared because of their supposed association with Islamic terrorism; or to be unaware of the tools that Britain-in-Europe did indeed possess to limit their numbers, but had chosen not to use. But if Brexit did not beget antialienism, it clearly encouraged it to some extent. The number of racist attacks in England increased significantly. Nativist organisations like ‘Britain First’ (it should really have called itself ‘England First’; Scottish nationalism being a rather different animal) proliferated and took to the streets threateningly. (Jo Cox’s murderer was suspected to have been an affiliate.) In December 2019, Britain First announced that it had infiltrated 5,000 members into the Conservative Party, which had already been more or less taken over by the old UKIP, and shorn of its ‘moderates’ by that Johnsonian fiat. All this gave comfort to xenophobes, and added to the discomfort of many Europeans who had been living in Britain happily and companiably for years. Many of these feared summary expulsion from Britain by a still strict and unfeeling Home Office – the legacy of the immigration-obsessed Theresa May – even if they had family and valuable tax-paying jobs in the United Kingdom. Cases were legion, and distressing. Those who were permitted to stay reported feeling unwelcome. The following is just one example of many, taken from a Facebook ‘Brexpats’ site (for bi-nationals) after the royal wedding in May 2018. (It is reproduced here with permission but anonymously, because the Swedish author is still nervous of xenophobic reactions.)

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This morning I dragged my 5 year old girl with me and went to Windsor. You see, she is 5 and though I have raised her to be an independent little feminist, there is nothing, nothing as amazing as princesses and a real live gorgeous princess beats all the Elsas and Cinderellas in the world, even her favourite Moana. I could tell you the amazing story how we ended up right by the fence, sharing prosecco and laughter and smiles and hugs and happy tears with our neighbours, how we saw the new Duke and Duchess of Sussex right in front of us. I could tell you how our hearts were full because of the wedding, but that’s not the story I have to tell you. I’m standing at the roundabout at the bottom of the high street in Windsor, my little girl in one hand, waving her union jacks as we are waiting to cross the road, and my heart is overflowing. Not because of the wedding but because this is the Britain I fell in love with, this is the feeling that made me go to London that summer so many years ago – I then just happened to meet my now husband, but to be honest, I loved this place before I knew and loved him. This is the coming together of differences, the jolly happy helpful policemen, the warmness and helpfulness, the pitching in when someone is too hot and tired and don’t have water. This is my Britain, the celebration and coming together even if secretly or maybe not so secretly, you really don’t like royalty and the class system. It’s the backing up, the propping up, the cheering up of feelings and people. It’s the politeness and happiness and togetherness. And this is half of my two kids. And then I think that in a year’s time, I might not be here. I think of that the last almost two years the togetherness of differences has been a fracturing of society, of putting groups of people against other groups of people. I think of that in a year, if I’m still here and I still haven’t managed to get my settled status, I might look at every police I meet with fear, fear that one small mistake will get me deported, or maybe not even the need for a mistake. I feel the warmth radiate around me right now, but I have been so cold for almost two years. I don’t ask for help anymore, not from people or from the NHS even though I really should, because I’m scared of the responses, I’m scared to say something wrong, or ask for something that cost the society money and hence me my possible future here. I’m scared that my accent will offend, I’m scared to be told off. And I think of my two kids, bilingual, bicultural, accepting and loving, that maybe circumstances will take them away from their home, their childhood, their happiness. And I loved the big society idea so much, I loved that I lived in a country where it mattered that you pitched in and helped and propped and cheered. But this here today, here in Windsor with all the union jacks (that I have normally grown allergic to), the laughter, the people of all colours and cultures and background, the kindness, this is my Britain. I came home, after writing this, to the street party. And my amazing neighbour who is so upset in our behalves, who thinks the whole Brexit thing is crazy. He

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laughed and said how amazing it was that the only one who went to see the wedding in place was the Swede. And I told him about the AMAZING atmosphere, about how the place just shone with love and happiness and togetherness, and guess what he said, ‘that is the real Britain, that is the Britain I know’. Please can we bring it back?15

There speaks the voice of one part of the essential Britain of old, by one way of looking at it, albeit possibly a naïvely rose-tinted way: inclusive, multicultural, generous, and socially and culturally enriched by the presence of these strangers in its midst. By this way of looking at it, our Swedish expatriate mother was part of what made Britain British. For the roughly three million Brits who had crossed the other way, to settle for various lengths of time on the Continent, taking advantage of the ‘freedom of movement’ which to them had been the EU’s main attraction, but still they reckoned remaining British, with for example the right to vote in British national elections for their first fifteen years abroad: for these, the repercussions of Brexit were equally disturbing. The material adjustments it required could be troublesome: seeking rights of residence which had been automatic to them as citizens of Europe, or even dual nationality (8,000 Britons became Swedes during 2019 in order to escape from Brexit, including the present author; and warmer countries will have attracted more); reassuring themselves that they could still retain their British pensions; having to make new and expensive healthcare arrangements to replace their reciprocal rights to medical treatment in their countries of exile; sometimes losing their jobs; suffering delays and paying unanticipated taxes on beloved foodstuffs – Marmite, mince pies, haggises – imported from Britain; and needing now, in many cases, to go to all the trouble of applying for visas before travelling back to Britain to visit their families. They also had to cope with the sense of rejection that many home-clinging Brexiters showed towards them and their internationalist spirit; especially after Theresa May’s notorious display at the Conservative Party conference of 2016 of her own narrow, pinching nationalism: ‘if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.’16 That was regarded as offensive by many British abroad, who did not accept that one could not embrace multiple identities. It could also be seen as – again – un-British; a point made by many of the contributors to a collection of testimonies by British expatriates published in book form in 2017– 18 as In Limbo and In Limbo Too, expressing a range of ways in which Brexit had caused them emotional as well as material harm. In Europe itself there was little

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evidence that Brexit had greatly affected the ex-pats’ personal relationships with their Continental friends, unlike in Britain; apart from the patronising sympathy with which they were usually met, which was kindly but embarrassing, and the signs of contumely in which their nation of origin – once widely respected in many ways, if not all – was now held. For the 48.11 per cent – or more, now – it marked a sad decline in their nation’s reputation. A contemporary work of fiction, Jonathan Coe’s prize-winning ‘Brexit novel’ Middle England (2018), illustrated this general transformation perfectly. Coe first described the mood, as his (‘Middle Englander’) characters experienced it, at the time of the London Olympics of 2012, and especially after its spectacularly radical-patriotic opening ceremony, choreographed by Danny Boyle (and described in Coe’s book), which surprised and was appreciated by everyone save a few Tories, who didn’t like immigration and the NHS being featured as objects of national pride. ‘England felt like a calm and settled place tonight: a country at ease with itself ’, wrote Coe. This impression could hardly be sustained just four years later, however, when ‘Brexit’ had taken hold. By then no one could any longer regard England – let alone Britain – as ‘calm and settled’. This may have been the most devastating – albeit intangible – domestic effect of the great ‘Battle for Brexit’ in 2016–20. A final one was the way Brexit distracted attention from other important matters that needed to be addressed during these years: the National Health Service, housing costs, homelessness, poverty, policing, fire safety, rising inequality, knife violence, the natural environment, and more; most of which issues were debated in Parliament and in the media, but never with the scrutiny they deserved, and always with half an eye on this much bigger elephant in the room. In the 2019 general election, the Labour Party tried to draw attention back to these questions in a wide-ranging and apparently popular election manifesto, but without success, at least in the short term. Brexit blotted out everything. Many people by now it bored to bits; which was half the attraction of Johnson’s ‘Get Brexit Done’ – i.e. finished and out of the way – slogan. Outside the field of parliamentary politics, it was responsible for diverting others from important issues and concerns, including academic historians who felt compelled to waste several years of serious research time commentating on it fruitlessly. (That was because of the Brexiters’ appeal to history, of which more anon.) While Brexit burned, the rest of the country stood still. This may have had the calamitous effect of weakening Britain’s response to the unforeseen coronavirus pandemic of 2020, which had to be handled by new government ministers, still wet behind the ears, who had been appointed originally (after Johnson’s pre-election purge

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of the more experienced Remainers) for their fidelity to the creed of Brexit, rather than for any administrative wisdom or competence they might possess. Coronavirus also exposed the deep cracks in Britain’s social safety-net (in particular in the NHS) that ‘Austerity’, coupled with the Brexit distraction – both of them the responsibility of the same right-leaning ‘officers’ – had brought about. These were some of Brexit’s immediate repercussions, which could be clearly discerned even at the time. So far as longer-term and more tangible effects are concerned, in the winter of 2020–1 it is obviously too early to tell. There are too many unknowns, despite the confidence expressed by Brexiters like Liam Fox, and the bleaker certainties predicted by the ‘doom-mongers’ on the other side. One very real and material worry was the effect that Brexit might have on two of Britain’s constituent kingdoms, Scotland and Northern Ireland, in each of which a majority of the population had voted to ‘remain’; which meant that the kind of Britain the Scots, for example, had voted to stay united with in 2014 would no longer exist. Surely that invalidated their referendum? Northern Ireland was similarly inconvenienced by no longer being able to trade tariff-free with its southern neighbour, which of course remained in the EU. Immediately after the confirmation of Brexit in 2019, Scottish Nationalists started agitating for a new independence plebiscite on their own behalf, and some in Northern Ireland began talking of breaking away from the UK to rejoin the Republic. That really would be a game-changer. For members of the Conservative Party – since the 1880s, at the latest, when it had been officially re-named the Conservative and Unionist Party – the integrity of the whole United Kingdom was always supposed to be one of its core values. Prime Minister Theresa May shed tears over it – ‘my beloved Union’ – on the day she announced the resignation that had been forced on her, in great part due to the Irish difficulty, in July 2019. Without Scotland and Northern Ireland, Great Britain would be reduced to a ‘Little England’, quite literally. (The ‘Great’ was always meant to refer to its size and plurality, rather than to anything more grandiose.) Yet surveys seemed to show that a majority of English Brexiters would be willing to accept these losses, in return for the ‘independence’ of their English rump.17 So far as Britain’s economy was concerned, the picture was unclear. Johnson’s new government kept back an official Treasury report on it, probably in the knowledge that it was too discouraging. By 2020, few Brexiters still believed in the immediate fillip to the economy some of them had promised once Britain had Brexited; indeed Jacob Rees-Mogg was honest enough to admit in June 2018 that the benefits might not be felt for fifty years.18 (One wag suggested that

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perhaps he could be cryogenically frozen until then.) But that was little better than a guess. (Rees-Mogg was not an economist, although he was economically savvy enough to spirit his own fortune out of Britain before the gate slammed shut.) Many of the signs – of manufacturing firms switching their operations to the Continent, for example, and investors doing the same – were not exactly promising for a future island economy standing on its own. This became even clearer when Britain’s economy became further wasted by Covid-19. On the other hand, until the full implications of Brexit had worked themselves through – ‘freedom’, fewer regulations, new trade deals outside Europe, the final settlement with Europe itself – no one could know the results for sure. Johnson’s bright promise of a spectacular future just could be met. If optimistic rhetoric could help it on, Johnson had that in spades. And if it failed, then the Brexiters could always blame it on the pandemic; which could be regarded as a compensation for all those deaths. Besides, as the more ideological Brexiters emphasized, Brexit wasn’t only about trade. It was also about national ‘sovereignty’ and dignity. Becoming poorer or even littler as a nation might be an acceptable sacrifice if it meant getting these back. According to another poll taken as early as January 2017, 61 per cent of Leavers considered that ‘significant damage’ to the British economy – and even to their own personal welfare – was ‘a price worth paying for bringing Britain out of the European Union’.19 That was big of them; although it still of course needed to be tested in the forge of real events. * Finally, what about the effects of Brexit on Britain’s relations with its Continental neighbours? Again, this cannot be predicted. One possible result, much feared by Europhiles, but apparently devoutly wished for by the contemporary leaders of Russia and the United States, was that it could weaken and even smash the EU, as a powerful or potentially powerful actor on the global stage. (Russian interference with the Brexit process was one of the subjects of a Parliamentary Intelligence Report finally published in July 2020, after Boris Johnson had tried to hold it back.) Short of that, it all clearly depended on what kind of settlement Britain could make with the remaining EU; or, in popular (and rather reductive) terms, whether it was ‘hard’ – a complete break – or ‘soft’. The more extreme Brexiters, like Nigel Farage, favoured the former: no truck with the European single market, no submission to any European court, and so on; and indeed initially seemed to regard anything short of that as a betrayal: a ‘Brino ’ – or ‘Brexit in name only’ – to adapt a shorthand used by the American Right to describe dodgy Republicans. Farage also openly wanted the

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whole EU to collapse. ‘Softer’ Brexiters, and those who had come to accept Brexit but were now arguing for a less damaging form of it, favoured a still close relationship with the single market, but short of full EU membership. This was the outcome recommended by the Labour Party in the December 2019 election, seeing it as an honourable compromise, and a way of reconciling its own ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ constituencies; only however to be confused by the voters with indecision, and so rejected by them. As the current chapter was being written, it appeared that Johnson was taking the ‘harder’ route, but there were those who believed that his comfortable Commons majority would enable him to face down his ‘hard’ men eventually. (Most of them were men, incidentally, which may or may not be significant.) On the other hand there was a considerable head of steam building up, not only in Britain but across Europe and America, for Right-wing and ‘nativist’ solutions to this kind of problem; and ‘Brexit’ – with a few exceptions – was undoubtedly part of this rising movement of the ‘populist’ Right. The ‘independence’ or ‘sovereignty’ sought by those in favour of Brexit, however, may have been a chimera. By 2020 there were plenty of people pointing out that formal liberty, for any country or even person, did not necessarily equate with genuine freedom for that country or person to do what they liked. Anyone coming from a liberated British (or anyone else’s) colony could have told them this: that the ties of subjection are not always seen as such, or so clearly marked, for example on maps. J.A. Hobson, the great critical theorist of ‘capitalist imperialism’, was aware of this; it was one of his reasons for his not wanting colonies simply to be ‘liberated’ to the mercy of the capitalist sharks that infested the seas around them without safeguards. One of those sharks at this later time was conceived to be the US under Donald Trump (President 2017–21), who made it clear that any trade ‘deal’ he made with a ‘free’ Britain would be subject to certain conditions, both commercial and political, which would in reality limit the latter’s freedom of action considerably. By imperial historians this sort of thing is known as ‘informal’ or ‘indirect’ imperialism, or ‘soft power’, or ‘an empire of influence’. Formal alliances, confederations or even ‘empires’ can protect isolated countries from this, as the European Union was thought to do; which is why Trump and Putin were so much against it. Those who talked about ‘winning back control’ needed to look beneath the surfaces of things. In particular Johnson, Farage and the rest might have benefitted from reading some modern imperial and post-imperial history. One imagines that few Brexiters would have approved of Britain’s escaping from the European confederation merely to become an informal colony of the American empire. (Although some libertarians on the

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Right might not have minded too much.) But they may have been too ignorant, historically, to grasp this. * Unless, that is, they were schooled well enough in British imperial history to know about Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes is particularly interesting in this context. As well as being almost the archetypal capitalist imperialist, and of course the man who founded the colony that used to be known as ‘Rhodesia’ (now Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia), he was more far-sighted than many of his ilk, and worried in particular, and reasonably, about the capacity of little Britain – even without Ireland, whose independence he was in favour of, unusually among imperialists – to shoulder alone the weight of her enormous Empire in a near-future of world-domination by far larger powers, like the US, whose future ‘greatness’ was universally anticipated. Rudyard Kipling’s famous ‘Take Up the White Man’s Burden’ poem, addressed to the Americans, reflected the same anxiety, and a similar solution. Rhodes had a vision of a new Anglo-American empire, based on the racial affinity (as he saw it) of all of it – all, that is, the ‘white’ bits – with the US returning to the British fold again, and eventually running the whole thing from Washington. Thirty-two out of his fifty-eight ‘imperial’ Rhodes Scholarships for study at Oxford University were allocated to American students with this in view. After Rhodes’s death, a secret society was set up to further advance co-operation between the two nations with this kind of merger in mind. Several members of successive American ‘establishments’ have been Rhodes Scholars, including President Bill Clinton. That has sparked conspiracy theories in the US that Anglo–American relations have been subvertly run by the British ‘establishment’ ever since World War I; and in Britain that the same applied, but the other way around.20 In the light of international developments since 1945 the latter sounds more plausible, but without requiring an underlying ‘conspiracy’ to explain it. In any case, the idea that Britain could become, if not an American colony, at least a minor partner in an Anglophone empire run from Washington, is not new. The American-born Boris Johnson may have heard of it. American leadership or no, he was certainly enamoured of a vision of a future ‘global Britain’ which had some imperial resonances, and which he defined in July 2018 thus: By Global Britain I meant a country that was more open, more outward-looking, more engaged with the world than ever before. It meant taking the referendum and using it as an opportunity to rediscover some of the dynamism of those bearded Victorians; not to build a new empire, heaven forfend.21

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‘Heaven forfend’ indeed; but Johnson might have noted that this was precisely how the original British Empire had originated, before ‘those bearded Victorians’ were pressed by circumstances into making it more ‘formal’. (Incidentally, not many Victorian imperialists were ‘bearded’. Rhodes wasn’t.) But why just Britain? Other European nations had had empires too. France’s had been almost as extensive as Britain’s, and arguably more significant domestically. Spain’s and Portugal’s empires went back longer, and their remnants in Africa were still prized by their European rulers (especially Portugal’s), at least as much as Britain’s colonies had been. Even little Belgium had had one substantial (and notoriously badly treated) colony, still commemorated in one of her museums, which is more than can be said for present-day Britain;22 and Germany and Italy, too, for a short time. Global imperialism was a pan-European phenomenon, and emphatically not one that distinguished Britain from ‘the Continent’. Later on even her ex-colony America outdid her imperially, though in a disguise that didn’t fool many ‘anti-imperialists’.23 But there we are; because of sad old imperial nostalgics like Johnson, modern empires have become particularly associated with Britain, just because hers was the biggest, by most ways of measuring it. If Johnson thought that Britain was somehow marked off from her neighbours by her Empire, he was wrong. Quite apart from this, the British Empire was never unchallenged in Britain. If Britain didn’t invent ‘imperialism’ – far from it – she could be said to have invented ‘anti-imperialism’; or the idea that empires – even one’s own – were in principle wrong. American revolutionaries don’t count here, as neither do most movements that oppose the imperial forces that are oppressing them, but not imperialism per se. The American rebels against King George III’s British Empire, for example, turned out to be not at all adverse to the creation of a new American empire; starting with the conquest of the native American nations to their west, then the Spanish territories to the south and – hopefully – the British to the north, before striking out all over the world. There is even a theory that this – westward expansion – was one of the motives lying behind the ‘War of Independence’, rather than the usually favoured ones, like taxation; just as the idea of incorporating British North America (later Canada) was undoubtedly behind the war of 1812. (That is sometimes called the USA’s ‘Second War of Independence’, which is nonsense.) A proper ‘anti-imperialism’ should embrace one’s own country’s expansion as well as others’. In this form it effectively originated with the maverick English economist J.A. Hobson, already mentioned, whose seminal Imperialism: A Study reflected and inspired a powerful and principled anti-imperial tradition in twentieth-century Britain and further afield.

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The persistence and effectiveness of that tradition can be followed in the domestic debates over imperial policy that dogged the British Empire right through its later existence, to the period of its eventual dismantling, and afterwards in the student movements to bring down ‘imperial statues’ that so irritated old Tories (and also, it should be said, this author, although for different reasons) in the later 2010s. Anti-imperialism was as least as ‘British’ a tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as was its opposite, and – as part of a broader ‘liberal’ trend – arguably more distinctive. We really need to have a few statues erected to the ‘antis’, for balance. Notwithstanding this, the old empire clearly carried some resonances among the British upper and upper-middle classes – or what one author has called the ‘harrumphers’24 – at the time of Brexit, adding some Tory spice to the otherwise quite reasonable argument that Britain might expand her commercial horizons beyond the continent of Europe, where Brexiters claimed they were presently confined. (In fact this was controversial, with the EU, because of its size, arguably able to negotiate at least as good terms with the ‘wider world’ as any of its members could have done on its own.) In September 2020, Johnson appointed an ex-Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, as a ‘trade adviser’ to the new Brexit Britain, despite his highly harrumphish views on a range of issues – race, women, homosexuality, climate change: the full ‘politically incorrect’ hand of cards, in fact, which won’t have gone down ill with many of Johnson’s supporters – but clearly mainly because of his ex-imperial background. White Commonwealth leaders and the British upper classes, trained prefectorally as they were at their public schools, had always been the most imperial-minded Britons while their Empire had lasted. The working and lower middle-classes were far less so. Occasional barks of ‘we used to rule half the world’ coming from plebeian neo-Fascist rioters (as noted already), and occasional signs of ‘workingclass imperialism’ in the nineteenth century highlighted by one school of British imperial historians, shouldn’t blind us to that.25 Johnson’s class and education – mainly in the ancient ‘Classics’, it appears, which are not a very dependable guide to modern imperial history – suggest that he will have been brought up as a harrumpher too. (Though that doesn’t necessarily follow. George Orwell went to Eton, after all.)26 If imperial nostalgia was a factor for certain high-status Brexiters, it really should not have been. The world had changed mightily since Britain last ruled over palm and pine; which in any case, so far as effective rule was concerned, was a lot longer ago than many people assumed. (I would push the date back to 1858, or 1902 at the latest.)27 Also, the conditions that favoured her original empire-

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building were obviously long past resurrecting in the twenty-first century; in particular the facts that her expansion had been conducted in a virtual international vacuum in those early days; and was based on her substantial leadership in manufacturing industry, whose almost-last traces had been effectively rubbed out by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. In other words, the old Empire had ridden on the back of a successful economy, and in an open field, which could hardly be said to be the situation now. Maybe that formula could be turned on its head, as the ‘Global Britons’ seemed be implying, with ‘trade’ now following the ‘flag’ (or the economy being boosted by the availability of wider markets) in a way it had rarely done in the old days; but with the world now filled with ‘polities’, and without the weight of the European Union behind Britain, that would be at the very least a gamble. The basic point was this: that the old British Empire, whether conceived ‘formally’ or informally’, was built from the bottom up, and because of the material forces acting on and around it; which in 2016–20 – and after – simply did not exist. * The old Empire, therefore, in whatever guise, was a false trail to follow in the twenty-first century; a part of Britain’s history that bore almost no relevance to these new times. In fact history provided very little other guidance in this war between Leavers and Remainers; although the ‘Leave’ side, inevitably, liked to think it did. (In its rhetoric, Churchill and the Second World War came up a lot.) Granted, and to return to Europe: Britain’s relations with its nearest neighbours had always been somewhat uncomfortable – ‘semi-detached’ was one phrase often used to describe them; but no more so, it should be said, than those neighbours’ relations with each other. British ‘xenophobia’, though much commented on, was probably never greater than any other nation’s, with the English Channel (the literal and symbolic barrier between them) making little real difference to this. In any case it was balanced by a good deal of Europhilia, too. Geographical ‘insularity’ did not make Britain noticeably more ‘insular’ in other ways. She and her peoples were always more part of Europe than they were of any other grouping of nations, including their Empire/Commonwealth, despite the ‘racial’ angle; and less distinctive, or ‘exceptional’, than they thought they were. In 1973 Britain’s final accession to what was then called the European Common Market, and then became – more snappily – the EU, seemed to acknowledge this. That met with some opposition in Britain at the time; but when it was tested two years later in the first of its referenda on membership it turned out to be only from a minority, which it was assumed would diminish as people got used to the idea. Hence the degree to which the core of it had still

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survived forty-three years later, took most people by surprise, and the result of the 2016 referendum even more. Brexiters claimed that they were merely returning their country to its historical roots, which had never been truly ‘European’, but always firstly ‘independent’, and secondly ‘global’. There was something in this. Chapters 2, 3, 5 and 6 of this book illustrate some of the key ways in which the Victorian British (or was it merely the English?) believed they stood apart from their neighbours then: in their conception of ‘freedom’, especially economic; the beneficence of their Empire; their ‘splendid isolation’; and their proud philistinism. (Other things could be added, like their fairly relaxed state church; their urge to wander; their utilitarianism; their poor food; and their principled stand against Hitler (Chapters 8 and 9); but those were the main ones.) These did mark it out for a time, but no more (again) than any of the nations of the Continent was marked out from all the others. If it was unique, it was not uniquely unique. And this should not have stopped it co-operating – joining, or even federating with – other nations if it was to the advantage of all of them. Indeed, this could only augment and enrich its essential and multicultural ‘Britishness’, by one view of it. It was the Brexiters who emphasized the historical differences between Britain and the Continent listed in the previous paragraph, while ignoring, or missing, the points of similarity and connexion. These of course went back to the time – 10,000 years ago – when Britain was physically bound to Europe via ‘Doggerland’, with mammoths and primitive humans walking freely to and fro across a then firm and verdant ‘English Channel’; and then for several thousand years afterwards when the Channel itself, and the waters to the north, presented no kind of barrier to human and cultural interchange, sizeable migrations, and the conquest of parts of Britain by first the Romans, then the Vikings, and lastly the Normans. (See Chapter 1.) The sea was always an easily travelled highway, and never an obstacle. But of course all that was far too long ago to be considered relevant to the question of Britain’s relationship with Europe today: and rightly so. We cannot allow cavemen and the beastly Danes to cast such a long shadow. Only to Israelis can history that far back appear ‘relevant’. And theirs was written by God. Otherwise the histories of Britain and its neighbours followed parallel and connected paths. Climate-wise they are all pretty temperate. In terms of ‘race’, which was felt to be important at one time, they share a common pinkish skin coloration; always allowing for recent DNA tests on the 10,000-year old ‘Cheddar Man’ recently dug up in Somerset, which suggest that he was darkish brown.28 The different prehistoric tribes of Europe went through the same stages of social

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development at roughly the same times, albeit with the Brits usually lagging behind a little; always traded with each other over large distances; and expanded into neighbouring territories at different periods, but with roughly similar results. About half of Europe came under the Roman Empire for three or four centuries. At the end of that period Christianity came to envelop all of them, bringing with it the Europe-wide religious civil wars which all broke out at the same time. Part of Europe succumbed to militant Islam, but only for a while (so far). All countries had cultural (Classical) ‘Renaissances’. Extra-European exploration and trade started out from a number of European centres, and almost every coastal European nation amassed an overseas empire, as we have noted; so that Britain was not ‘exceptional’ in this respect either. The ‘Industrial Revolution’ began in one or two places, mainly northern Britain, together with the various forms of modern capitalism, but soon spread overall. Artistic and architectural styles were Europe-wide, especially in the Middle Ages, when ‘Romanesque’ and then ‘Gothic’, with its pointed arches, were – with a few national variations – common to all. Today Shakespeare, Mozart, Midsomer Murders and Kurt Wallander are known everywhere, and regarded as parts of Europe’s heritage. Modern organized and codified sport began in Britain, but everyone plays football today, and to the same sets of rules. (Cricket, with its imperial spread, is an exception, and a genuine peculiarity of the British, although some Dutchmen – with lots of room for flat pitches – are currently proving quite good at it.) The major ways of organizing societies, and the ideologies connected with them – feudalism, democracy, nationalism, socialism, feminism, fascism – put down roots everywhere, though in different degrees and stages depending on local material circumstances. (Britain could have turned Fascist in other situations, and – as we have seen – is thought to be in danger of doing so today.) Almost every country feels it is ‘free-er’ than others, with ‘freedom’ being a slippery concept. ‘Neo-liberalism’ has hit us all. We are all affected by American culture, itself influenced by European to a considerable degree; and by what today is called ‘populism’. We all shared the great global pandemics, from mediaeval times until today. So there are important ways in which we can talk of a common ‘European’ history, despite the Europeans’ internecine quarrels and battles: which is another thing they share together, in a way. (Sweden, inordinately proud of its 200-year-old history of pacifism, may be a modern exception here. But its history was pretty bloody before then.) Most European countries – even Sweden – were involved in some way or other in the twentieth century’s two world wars: Italy on both sides; and in many of the continent’s bouts of terrorism. Britain was particularly involved with the Continent in two other ways, both

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the subjects of previous chapters (3 and 4): sheltering refugees, and tourism. That gave it some knowledge of European ‘foreigners’. So Britain is not so ‘different’, after all. It may have been more so in former times, but in ways of which the Brexiters may not be fully aware. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, Britain was ahead of most of its neighbours in the extent of its liberalism, at least inasmuch as it affected the state, and its economy. (It could be pretty illiberal in its social mores.) It led Europe (and the world) in reducing tariffs on imported goods, in most cases to nothing. There was an idealistic as well as a practical motive for that: free trading countries, it believed, would be less likely to go to war with one another. Samuel Laing the Elder (see Chapters 5 and 6) is a representative of this way of thought.‘Freedom’ applied to movement too, with virtually no immigration laws to enable Britain to prevent foreigners coming into the country – no passport requirements, even – or to kick them out once they were there. That even stretched to what today we would call ‘terrorists’. (See Chapter 4.) Britons were inordinately proud of this, which they took to be one of their very fundamental and distinctive national ‘values’. At home Britain became more and more inclusive as a polity, ‘emancipating’ Jews, Catholics and religious dissenters quite early in the century – allowing them to stand for Parliament, attend the great universities, and so on – and admitting more and more men (only men, until 1918) to the parliamentary franchise. The capital code – crimes that carried the death penalty – was reduced by stages. Slavery (in the Empire) was brought to an end. Policing was believed to be a regrettable necessity in a ‘free’ society, and exerted far more lightly than abroad. ‘Secret’ and ‘political’ policing were – in theory at least – absolutely anathematized. Britain’s standing Army – excluding India – was tiny by the side of several Continental nations’, and pretty inefficient on the whole. (Armies were illiberal by definition. The Navy seemed less so. It’s not clear why; perhaps its literal freedom of movement, and the image of the Jolly Jack Tar.) Britain usually made a great play of upholding the ‘rule of law’, including international law, which it took a leading part in formulating; until September 2020 when its government reneged on that in order to facilitate Brexit. The other side of this liberalism was an almost complete lack of state involvement in the welfare of its people, except in a disciplinary way (workhouses and prisons); restrictions even on private charity, to ensure that its recipients ‘deserved’ it; minimal state provision of education after the age of about twelve; and of course no direct state aid for anything, like the arts, not considered to be ‘useful’. At the same time, driven by its industry, foreign investments and Empire, Britain prospered mightily economically, albeit very unequally – there was

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terrible poverty – and with three or four serious trade depressions before 1914. All this was frequently remarked on by Continental visitors, all of whom would have agreed that Britain was highly distinctive then, even ‘exceptional’: for better or (more usually) for worse. That was the period when Britain and the Continent stood most apart, qualitatively speaking; not because of the Channel, or Britain’s Empire, or anything as indefinable as ‘national character’, but by virtue of its relative ‘freedom’, as it liked to use that word. But this situation, and consequently the différence, didn’t last. Britain’s fall from liberal grace in many of these respects began in the early twentieth century; in the economic sphere when pure free marketism was first realised to be unsustainable socially, and so state ‘welfare’ started creeping in. Thatcher of course tried to reverse this, on the basis of a particular reading of history (Chapter 12), but with results that only seemed to bear out those early twentieth-century doubts. (This is of course politically controversial, and obviously stems from my own bias – see above – but it’s an educated bias, and consistent with the facts.) Politically the decline began at around the same time, accelerating through the twentieth century, partly because of the challenges thrown up by total war, terrorism and bolshevism – all of them mainly external – but also due to what seems to have been a seepage of national self-confidence, beyond a tendency to bluster which may itself have been a symptom of it: bullying being usually understood as a sign of weakness. Britain’s relative industrial decline, starting in the 1870s, will have contributed to that. In any event, the bricks continued falling from its carefully built Victorian liberal edifice throughout the next century:‘secret political policing’ being brought in in the 1880s – clandestinely, so that no one knew; Britain’s secret services around 1910; immigration control in 1906 – and so on; press censorship (‘D-Notices’) in the 1930s; until the whole building collapsed in a cloud of white liberal dust at the very end of the twentieth century, and the beginning of the twenty-first. From being an ‘open’ society with regard to immigration, Britain became one of the most closed; from being pacifist it turned pretty militaristic; from regarding ‘state surveillance’ as one of the dirtiest phrases in the English language, it began surveilling nearly everyone, with CCTV cameras on every corner, phone and internet-tapping, police infiltrating (and even impregnating)29 protest groups; from open trials to ‘closed’ ones in sensitive cases; all of this controlled from a huge doughnut-shaped complex of offices and laboratories in Cheltenham (previously mainly known as the town where exIndian Civil Servants retired) where secrecy reigned supreme; with Hanslope Park as a kind of adjunct, keeping a close watch on Britain’s dirtier historical secrets, in case they got out (Chapter 13 again).

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It was a mighty fall; and it altered Britain’s relationship with its continental neighbours fundamentally. Now they were the relatively liberal ones, politically; some of them – Germany especially – having learned from the horrors of their own over-regulated and strictly surveilled pasts. (Leipzig, in the former East Germany, even has a chilling ‘Stasi Museum’ to remind present-day passers-by.) By contrast with Germany, and most of the other north-western European countries, Britain stands out for its present-day authoritarian tendencies: which was one reason for Prime Minister Theresa May’s determination to escape the jurisdiction of the European Courts of Justice and of Human Rights as part of the ‘Brexit’ package in 2017, and then appeared to be confirmed in the first months of Boris Johnson’s government. This was despite the leading part that Britain had taken in setting the ECHR up in more liberal times. This is not to come down on one side or the other in this and related debates – although I imagine it’s obvious where my preferences lie – but only to point out the seachange that had occurred in Britain’s very identity and much-bruited national ‘values’ over this period. If Britain continued to argue that it should not be part of the EU because it was different, as the Sun newspaper proclaimed with a frontpage banner headline in March 2018 – not a trustworthy source, it must be conceded – the differences were either less different now, or were very different from what they had been historically. Indeed, in many respects their roles, and even identities, had been reversed. Mention of the Sun must inevitably direct us to another great difference between Britain and its European neighbours, although it is not one that in itself would support an argument for its detaching herself from them. This has to do with the ways they were ruled, and the sources of power in each of them. All were formal democracies, although with Britain standing out as virtually the only one with an unqualified ‘constituency’ system of voting. One result of this was that small political parties had far less chance to exert influence there than in countries where ‘proportional representation’ was the method; leading to situations where – in nearly every case in Britain – one party could gain power (that is, a majority of seats in the House of Commons) with a minority of the popular vote. Even with the much-derided but still useful House of Lords acting as a possible corrective in the most blatant circumstances, this clearly watered down the democratic credibility of Parliament, leading, as was suggested earlier in this chapter, to the sort of discontent among the electorate which may have contributed to the ‘Brexit’ vote in June 2016. The other political difference – a quasi-constitutional one, this time – lay in the power that the ‘Fourth Estate’ – the press – could exert on either side of the Channel and the North Sea. One of

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Britain’s most distinctive characteristics was the right-wing leanings of most of its popular newspapers, usually owned and directed by overseas-based millionaires (the Sun’s owner, of course, was the Australian-American Rupert Murdoch: perhaps the most important – and noxious – influence that Britain inherited from its old Empire), who felt no compunction about treating their papers as purveyors not of ‘news’, properly understood, but of political propaganda, some of it very ‘black’ indeed. Britain’s press was rated only thirtythird in a global ‘Press Freedom Index’ compiled by one ranking agency in 2019: the lowest of all the EU countries bar Poland.30 A promise by the ConservativeLiberal Democrat government of 2011 to institute a public inquiry into British press ownership (‘Leveson Part II’) was reneged on by another Conservative government in 2018, persuaded by the ‘press lords’ – and probably by their own political interests – that such an inquiry would threaten the ‘independence’ of their journalism. The flagrant bias of the popular press is undeniable; its influence over the political views of its readers may be more doubtful; and the decline of the print media recently in competition with the internet raises the possibility that its relative impact may be on the wane. Nonetheless, at the time of the Brexit debate, Britain’s press was still one of its most distinctive features. There can be little doubt that politicians were cowed by it. Labour Party leaders and prominent EU ‘Remainers’ were terribly calumniated against, as we have seen. This is bound to have had some effect in persuading that crucial 2 per cent of voters that Britain was ‘different’ from the Continent, in other ways too. Which Remainers took as yet another argument for a second (or third) referendum. All of which suggests that the vote to leave the EU had no very good ‘historical’ basis to it. This is certainly true if Brexiters believed that, by leaving, Britain could somehow return to the situation it had been in before it left; or even to a ‘greater’ period of its history, when its trade and reach had spanned the world. The idea of switching back to a ‘global’ role from its present narrowly European one sounded attractive, and was a clever way of trumping the pro-Europeans’ much-bruited ‘internationalist’ hand of cards; but we have seen that by now (the 2010s and ‘20s) it was long past its sell-by date. Some of us ‘Commonwealthists’ – not the same as ‘imperialists’ – had also been seduced by it at the time of the 1975 referendum on Common Market membership, regarding a merely European trading zone as little better than a ‘white man’s club’, by contrast with the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and egalitarian sub-United Nations that we were all hoping the Commonwealth would become. We were mortified too when countries like Australia attacked us for ‘betraying’ them. But those were different times. As was pointed out in the 2000s, ex-Commonwealth trade – mainly seen

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now in terms of the ‘white’ Commonwealth – could no longer compensate for Britain’s potential loss of its now much vaster European market; and the only extra-European country that might do so, the US, was likely to impose conditions that would be unacceptable. Again: this might not be the best way of ‘taking back’ the ‘control’ that Brexiters were always going on about. In any case, decisions like this should not be based on ‘History’ – certainly not on restoring historical situations artificially – but on present-day circumstances. We are what we are, not what we were. What we were was a largely liberal country dominating other countries illiberally; a set of circumstances it would be impossible to replicate today. History – and as a professional historian, I never thought I’d catch myself writing this – is irrelevant. * The historical argument for ‘remaining’ is no more conclusive, but has some persuasive points. Britain has always been closer to its European neighbours than many have thought. This was partly because – as I’ve tried to argue in another book, albeit controversially – ordinary Britons were never as besotted with their Empire as contemporary imperialists would have liked, and as some modern ‘post-colonial’ historians have tried to persuade us. They were always far more aware of their European neighbours than of their colonial friends and even relatives, apart of course from those who themselves emigrated to the Empire; and there were, incidentally, quite a number of literal if informal British emigrant ‘colonies’ in Europe too, unfairly neglected by historians in favour of their more adventurous contemporaries; there for the climate, their health, on business, to flee from creditors, or seduced by foreigners; and often forming little British subsocieties of their own, like Pau, la ville anglaise, in southern France (see Chapter 3). That may dent the common assumption that ‘colonialism’ was always a matter of seeking ‘power’. Stay-at-home Britons learned of ‘the Continent’ via travel books – a considerable literary genre – and novels; via art, most of the best of which was ‘foreign’; and from newspaper reports of exciting goings-on there. They also met them, albeit not as frequently as today, as economic immigrants or refugees (Chapter 4). There was more voyaging there and back than in the case of the overseas possessions. ‘Semi-detached’ Britain may have been all this time; but the prefix ‘semi’ there is important. Strictly speaking, this should have made Britons feel more relaxed about their European connexion after 1973. The evidence of the ‘Brexit’ vote seemed to suggest otherwise; but it was only a narrow victory for the Leavers, and muddied, as we have seen, by the means by which it was secured. Large and important areas of the country voted to retain their existing relationship with Europe,

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including London and the larger cities, as well as Scotland and Northern Ireland. For the rest, it seems likely (to recapitulate) that entirely other considerations lay behind their voting the way they did: widespread unfocussed unrest, resentment against ‘elites’, and stupidity (although of course it’s more than an academic’s reputation is worth to suggest this); all exploited by unscrupulous politicians, for reasons of personal ambition, or – maybe – at the behest of clever Russians out to destabilize the EU. For a historian, this is a deeply unsatisfactory conclusion to come to, as chance, stupidity and conspiracy are not the kinds of explanations for events that he or she, as an academic, would ideally prefer to be able to analyze in more ‘rational’ terms than this. Looked at in an even broader context, however, it can be seen to make a kind of sense. The Brexit vote came at a time of general dissatisfaction with ‘establishments’ and ‘elites’, and in particular with the economic model that was being pressed upon them in many Western countries, giving rise to ‘nationalist’, or what were called ‘populist’, movements, on the one side, and socialist on the other. Donald Trump’s America, with Bernie Sanders representing the socialist side, is the major example; in Britain it was UKIP that expressed the ‘populism’, with Jeremy Corbyn challenging it from the Left for a while. Much the same was found in Italy, Spain and Greece, and also – though here the ‘Centre’ held rather better – in France and Germany. It could also be seen, way back, in 1930s Europe: a precedent that seriously worried some of the historically-minded. ‘Populism’ affected more Left-leaning countries like Sweden and Norway too, but with less drastic and damaging results; partly, perhaps, because of the ingrained social-democratic defences that still stood there against the most damaging effects of ‘austerity’. Two of the countries that suffered most – from populist agendas, charismatic and authoritarian-inclined leaders, appeals to prejudice and hatred, know-nothingness, proud ignorance (despising ‘experts’ and ‘elites’), feelings rather than knowledge, romance rather than reason, and the unprincipled exploitation of simmering discontent – were the ones in the very vanguard of the (query) ‘natural’ development of late-stage capitalism: the US (for most of its modern history), and Britain (since Thatcher). Karl Marx would have understood this. Uncontrolled, the internal dynamic of capitalism was creating contradictions which would eventually destroy it. The nature of those contradictions however, and the ways they were expressed, varied from country to country, according to regional cultures and circumstances. Local manifestations, like Brexit, might seem irrational, even ‘stupid’; but there was an ominous logic to it underneath. *

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This is my answer to the question ‘why are we’ – Britain – ‘where we are now?’ It is an opinionated one, and not very ‘balanced’, I realize; but balance – ‘the truth lies somewhere in between’ – is not always the best solution to any problem. Besides, this moment in Britain’s history – perhaps the most crucial since Britain entered the last war – may not be a time for ‘balance’, unfortunately. My own study of history has convinced me that the kinds of historical argument that were often trotted out in favour of British ‘independence from Europe’ were, as are so many political decisions, deeply flawed, in this case with potentially disastrous results. I think I have shown that. ‘Why we are where we are now’ is a result of accident, ill-fortune, manipulation, bad faith on the part of politicians, and, yes, stupidity in a population brought up to assess the latter on the basis of their performances in popular TV quiz programmes and guided by a ‘low’ press. It has little to do with Britain’s history, which can be selectively mined to bolster either side. I have argued here that it has something to do with the history of global capitalism; but only in an indirect way, and one that will be controversial, even among historians. But then history is bound to be controversial. This is partly because it is complicated. In fact the rich complexity of Britain’s history in particular is one reason why some of us like to study it. In doing so, we often find ourselves coming against ‘fake’ or oversimplified versions of it, especially popularly, which can be irritating if we care for historical ‘truth’. If we believe historical untruth to be potentially dangerous – used to draw unreliable lessons to guide present-day policies, for example (like American neo-Cons did to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003) – then it is incumbent upon us professional historians, in the public interest, to correct the misunderstandings, mistakes and lies. Not that we usually get very far with this. The ‘general public’ doesn’t usually want to be bothered with our sort of scholarship. Besides, ‘fake’ history is often more beguiling than the truth. ‘Never mind the history; feel the myth.’ This is not to say that the ‘truth’ is ever simple, or can be finally established objectively. Swedish schoolchildren, admirably, are taught from very early on to respect what is called källkritik, or going back to original sources before accepting a proffered opinion; but as we saw in the previous chapter even the most authoritative källor can be falsified, hidden or destroyed. It is important to be aware of this possibility, so long as it doesn’t cause us to distrust all evidence, which can lead on to unfounded ‘conspiracy theorizing’, and thence to a kind of intellectual anarchy. ‘I’m a free American, and so can believe whatever I like,’ as I heard one contributor to an American radio phone-in programme declare after being picked up on an obvious falsity. (He had claimed

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that the London Blitz was in retaliation for the Allied bombing of Dresden.) His kind seems to have proliferated in very recent years, encouraged, of course, by President Donald Trump, who side-stepped the problem of his own untrustworthiness by labelling all the facts adduced against him as ‘fake’. Much of Boris Johnson’s colourful rhetoric is similarly fact-free. Countering this is difficult, especially in the face of those who distrust scholars automatically, as ‘elitists’ who have their own agendas, as élitists, to interpret things in certain ways. These days it is not easy to persuade the general public of even the most certain and self-evident ‘facts’. And that doesn’t bring an end to the problem. Material facts are one thing; interpretations something else. Because of the aforesaid complexities of history – causes uncertain, motivations mixed (and in any case not necessarily identical with causes), background factors not always clear, trends and developments interweaving constantly and confusedly, and our selection of the most significant ones very often based on our general philosophies and predilections, as well as our interests and preferences (readers of this book will have noticed some of these in my own case) – we can’t be sure about anything. All I can say in defence of the observations and analyses I have offered in this collection of essays is that they are consistent with the known evidence; and that, if they are wrong, they will not be as wrong as some. * Finally, insofar as the relations between Britain and the continent of Europe are concerned – the main theme running, albeit often allusively and even only marginally, through this collection – the conclusion can only be that they have changed, quite fundamentally, over the past century or so; not just formally, in terms of alliances and treaties, like those associated with the EU, but in far more fundamental terms, crucially affecting the ‘identities’ of each ‘side’, and so the practical inferences that should be drawn from them. Indeed, as I suggested earlier in this chapter – and hinted at in others – those identities seem actually to have been reversed in many ways: so that the British have taken on some of what used to be regarded as ‘Continental’ characteristics, in exchange for the Continent’s acquiring ones that were once associated with Britain, but no longer are. Our respective attitudes towards immigration, political terrorism and art are three ways in which Britain and at any rate the north-western parts of the Continent have virtually swapped places; together with our press ‘freedoms’, the purity of our democracies, our reputations for public probity, our respect for international law, the competence of our respective governments (shown clearly in their reactions to the coronavirus pandemic), the intensity of

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our politics, and – just possibly – our vulnerabilities to the sort of right-wing political extremism (or populism, or even ‘Fascism’) that Britain so fortunately avoided in the 1930s. The reasons for these role-exchanges can be debated, and hopefully will be, by historians in future times. For the moment, however, it suffices merely to note that neither Britain nor her Continental neighbours are what they used to be in any of these respects, as well as of course in terms of their respective political powers and influence. The lesson of this is that any conclusions we might like to draw from the historical relationships between the two ‘sides’, such as are described in the previous pages, should not be taken to be reliable guides to the way those sides should relate to each other at the present day. Whatever arguments we might like to make for or against Brexit, for example – still a hot issue while the book was going to press – should not bother too much with history. And this advice comes from a professional historian.

Notes 1 This was in a circular letter to subscribers. 2 E.g. in House of Commons, 20 June 2020. 3 Blogsite: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/06/16/is-it-really-about-the-eu/ (accessed 29.8.2020). 4 Daily Telegraph, 5 April 2006. 5 Quoted in Stuart Ward and Astrid Rasch, Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 3. 6 The ‘imperial’ dimension of Brexit is more fully discussed in the final chapter, ‘Brexit and the Empire’, of my The Lion’s Share (6th ed. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). 7 ‘Jacob Rees-Mogg accused of “copying” Walter the Softy’, on BBC website, 4 April 2020: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-43642564 (accessed 29.8.2020). The Beano’s top-hatted ‘Lord Snooty’ might have made a better role model; but he had disappeared from the comic years before. 8 NBC News, 14 November 2019: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/hillary-clintonwarns-u-k-headed-fascism-over-lawmaker-abuse-n1082031 (accessed 29.8.2020). 9 Michael Gove interview with Faisal Islam on Sky News on 3 June, 2016: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=GGgiGtJk7MA (accessed 29.8.2020). 10 Guardian, 9 June 2020. 11 ‘Ten politicians who claimed Brexit negotiations were going to be easy’, in Independent, 30 March 2019: https://www.indy100.com/article/brexit-easy-nigelfarage-theresa-may-david-davis-boris-johnson-8846041 (accessed 29.8.2020).

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12 ‘Brexit Referendum Was Corruptly Won, But Result Stands Thanks To Loophole’, on LBC Radio (James O’Brien), 25 February 2019: https://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/ presenters/james-obrien/brexit-referendum-corruptly-won-but-result-stands/ (accessed 29.8.2020). 13 Tom Peck, ‘Nigel Farage would pick up a rifle if Brexit is not delivered’, in Independent, 17 May 2017: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/ nigel-farage-brexit-rifle-pick-up-uk-eu-withdrawal-ukip-leader-liberaldemocrat-a7741331.html (accessed 29.8.2020). 14 There can be no doubt that a section of the British Jewish community, including its influential ‘Board of Deputies’, actively campaigned against Jeremy Corbyn in the 2019 general election, probably because of his defence of the Palestinians – that may have been sadly understandable in view of the existential threat that the latter were felt to present to the state of Israel – but on the entirely spurious charge that Corbyn was ‘anti-Semitic’. Some of this campaigning was subvert, with its agents afterwards boasting of their contribution to the election result: e.g. Asa Winstanley, ‘We “slaughtered” Jeremy Corbyn, says Israel lobbyist’ (recorded interview), in Electronic Intifada, 10 January 2020: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/ we-slaughtered-jeremy-corbyn-says-israel-lobbyist (accessed 29.8.2020). There were also prominent Jews on the other, pro-Corbyn, side; but the ‘anti-Semitic’ mud, spread enthusiastically by the right-wing press, stuck to the party afterwards, leading Corbyn’s successor as Leader of the Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer, to act against members who were critical of the State of Israel – a different issue – in ways that appeared to others to be excessive, but may have been electorally necessary. It is always risky however to bring this matter up, for fear of being labelled an ‘antiSemite’ or a ‘conspiracy theorist’ oneself. Chapter 13 of the present book alludes briefly to the problem of ‘conspiracies’. 15 Reproduced on Facebook, 21 May 2018: https://www.facebook.com/ groups/1651274305191879/?post_id=2037613483224624 (accessed 29.8.2020). 16 Independent, 5 October 2016. 17 Alain Tolhurst, ‘Grassroots Tories would sacrifice the Union if it meant Brexit being delivered, new poll reveals’, in Politics Home, 18 June 2019: https://www.politicshome. com/news/article/grassroots-tories-would-sacrifice-the-union-if-it-meant-brexitbeing-delivered-new-poll-reveals (accessed 29.8.2020). 18 ‘Brexit benefits? You’ll have to wait 50 years,’ says Rees-Mogg: New European, 23 July 2020; https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/jacob-rees-mogg-interviewwith-channel-4-news-1-5619425 (accessed 29.8.2020). 19 ‘Greater number of Leave voters willing to risk their own or family members’ jobs than those unwilling, poll finds’; in Politico, 8 January 2017: https://www.politico.eu/ article/uk-voters-believe-economic-damage-is-price-worth-paying-to-get-theirway-on-brexit/ (accessed 29.8.2020).

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20 See Robin Brown, The Secret Society: Cecil John Rhodes’s Plan for a New World Order (2016); and – in more conspiratorial mode, tracing the plot up to President Clinton – Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment (New York: Books in Focus, 1981). 21 Quoted in Ward and Rasch, Embers of Empire, 3. 22 The Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium. 23 See my Empire and Superempire (Woodstock: Yale University Press, 2006). 24 Jeremy Paxman, Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British (London: Viking, 2011). 25 See my The Absent-Minded Imperialists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); but with the warning that the argument there is controversial. 26 I wrote to the History specialist at Eton College to ask about their syllabus, but received no reply. 27 1857–8 was of course the date of the Indian ‘Mutiny’, and 1902 marked the end of the (second) ‘Boer’ War; both of which revealed serious weaknesses in Britain’s ruling capacity, which were to persist. For an account of British imperialism that sees it mainly as a response to perceived decline, see my The Lion’s Share (6th ed. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). 28 Guardian, 10 February 2018. 29 Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police (London: Guardian/Faber, 2013). 30 Reporters without Borders, World Press Freedom Index 2020: https://rsf.org/en/ ranking_table (accessed 29.8.2020).

Epilogue: National Identity Back in 2012, stimulated and provoked by the Coalition government’s efforts to spell out the nature of British citizenship for immigrants who were seeking it – two of my children-in-law, one an Australian and the other an American, were going through the process at the time, so it felt personal – I decided to have a stab at it myself. The following was published in the LRB Blog, and in the Guardian. I’m prouder of it – the sentiments, at any rate – than any of my other literary efforts. Here goes. The Home Office has been struggling for some time to devise a model of ‘Britishness’ to which immigrants seeking British citizenship should aim. Many of its efforts lean heavily on history, and on teaching prospective citizens about the great events and people of Britain’s past. Usually this is done in order to foster admiration for our past achievements. The latest manifestation of this is the Home Office’s 180-page ‘syllabus’ on Britishness announced in that year (Guardian, 28 January 2012), on which prospective citizens will be tested before being allowed to stay. Much of this looks pretty good to me: most of the present ‘values and principles of the UK’, for example, listed early on, in a ‘sample chapter’ online. I particularly liked the very early passage, referring to Britain’s record of ‘welcoming new migrants who will add to the diversity and dynamism of our national life.’ It’s the historical chapter I’m sceptical of: both its title, which we are told is ‘A Long and Illustrious History’, which may indicate its flavour; and also some of its content, as it has been reported in the press. Of course any ‘national history’ is bound to be controversial. This applies in this case not only to the version of our ‘long and illustrious history’ presented here, which seems highly distorted on all kinds of issues, if press reports are reliable; but also to any alternative one: my own, for example, which might carry a very different – but equally contentious – selection of key people and events. But there is more to it than this. It may be because I’m a professional historian, and so somewhat proprietorial towards my subject; but I’ve always objected to British history’s being used – ‘prostituted’ would be my word for it – in order to inculcate patriotism. For a start it must be questionable how far our history really does ‘define’ us as a nation, as opposed to our present-day circumstances, and influences from abroad. Most of our ancestors’ national self-perceptions were very different from 243

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ours. (CCTV cameras – to give just one example – would have been regarded as quite fundamentally un-British by the Victorians.) Secondly, history taught in order to teach patriotism must be ‘patriotic’ history, which is bound to be selective at best. Thirdly, how – in logic – can any of us who were born here possibly feel ‘proud’ (or ashamed, for that matter) of anything that happened in our country before our time? We had no part in it. Indeed, it is arguable that those who are now choosing to become British citizens are entitled to feel prouder of it, than those of us for whom Britishness was an accident of birth. Lastly, I rather like the official Swedish view of their national identity, taught in their schools, which is defined much more in terms of their aspirations – equality, and the like – than of their history. Just as well, perhaps; Sweden has quite a number of skeletons in its historical cupboard; as of course do we. Still, if the government is set on this, there may be a better way of doing it. Here is a suggestion: a short account, directed specifically to immigrants, of the history of the country they are aiming to join. A positive effect of it should be to make them proud of being immigrants, as well as of being British. That must help them blend. And it is less contentious, I think, than most other approaches that have been tried. Here it is. It’s very brief as yet, but of course could easily be filled out, probably more interestingly than the Home Office’s present effort. (I’m happy to have a go, if I’m ever asked.) ‘As immigrants to Britain, you are following in a long tradition. Britain’s origins lie in successive waves of immigration from the European continent and Ireland: Celts first of all, then Romans, northern Germans, Scandinavians and Norman-French, most of them coming as conquerors, but some just to settle; and then bands of refugees from political tyrannies and economic deprivation from the 17th century to the present day. Many of her most distinguished later citizens have been, or have been descended from, these immigrants. They include some of her greatest artists, scientists, industrialists and statesmen and -women; most of her older aristocracy; and her present Queen. ‘To complement this, Britain has also been a nation of emigration, sending “settlers” to countries like North America, Australasia and Southern Africa, usually displacing their original inhabitants; traders, investors and slavers all over the world; and conquerors and rulers to India, Africa and elsewhere. Some of the settlers could be regarded as ‘economic’ refugees from Britain and Ireland, driven thither by hunger. You will very likely have come across their descendants and the legacies of what is called ‘British imperialism’ in your countries of origin. There are differing opinions over whether the latter has overall been a force for good, or for ill.

Epilogue: National Identity ‘Back home, Britons have long prided themselves on their toleration, which was what made possible their extraordinarily generous ‘political asylum’ policy in the past; the ‘freedom’ of their institutions, especially the law, and the jury system that underpins that; and – latterly – their parliamentary democracy. All these however have had to be struggled for, usually by the ‘common people’ against a political class that has not always shared the same values; and they can never be said to be absolutely secure. ‘Britain’s historical “identity” is confused, differing not only according to class, which is still a powerful factor; but also according to nationality (English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish); region (north-south); religion (Protestant, Catholic, secular, Muslim etc.); and gender. Like every other nation in the world it has a mixed history of proud achievements, usually in defence of “liberty”, both its own and others’ (slaves, Nazi-occupied Europe. . . .); and of egregious sins, some of them in its former colonies. ‘Britain is not defined by her history, but is ever developing, in response to internal dynamics, and global pressures, including movements of population. To become British is to identify with this complex and changing identity. To become a good citizen will involve embracing the best and most liberal features of it, and rejecting the worst.’

Looking back over that, I think it might be salutary for existing Britons, too.

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Bibliography Sources for the essays in this collection are cited either in the texts or endnotes of the chapters themselves, or in the versions – again cited – in which they originally appeared. This is a list of some of the more substantial of them. Addison, Paul, and Jeremy Crang. Listening to Britain. London: Vintage, 2011. Andrew, Christopher. The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5. New York: Knopf, 2009. Beckett, Francis, and Tony Russell. 1956: The Year That Changed Britain. London: Biteback, 2016. Best, Geoffrey. Churchill: A Study in Greatness. London, Penguin, 2002. Brown, Robin. The Secret Society: Cecil John Rhodes’s Plan for a New World Order. Cape Town: Penguin Random House: 2016. Carr, Gilly, et al. Protest, Defiance and Resistance in the Channel Islands. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Cobain, Ian. The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation. London: Portobello, 2016. Coe, Jonathan. Middle England. London: Viking, 2018. Coles, T.J. Britain’s Secret Wars: How and Why the United Kingdom Sponsors Conflict around the World. West Hoathly : Clairview Books, 2016. D’Este, Carlo. Warlord: The Fighting Life of Winston Churchill. London: Penguin: 2009. Emden, Richard van, and Chambers, Stephen. Gallipoli: The Dardanelles Disaster in Soldiers’ Words and Photographs. London, Bloomsbury, 2015 Hall, Simon. 1956: The World in Revolt. London: Faber & Faber, 2016. Laing, Samuel, ed. R.P. Fereday. The Autobiography of Samuel Laing of Papdale. Port Ludlow, WA: Bella Vista Publishing, 2000. Lever, Charles. The Dodd Family Abroad. London: Chapman and Hall, 1864. Lewis, Paul, and Rob Evans. Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police. London: Guardian/Faber, 2014. Lochery, Neill. Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light. New York: PublicAffairs, 2012. Porter, Bernard. The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Porter, Bernard. Plots and Paranoia. A History of Political Espionage in Britain 1790– 1988. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Porter, Bernard. ‘ “Monstrous Vandalism”: Capitalism and Philistinism in the works of Samuel Laing.’ Albion, vol. 23, 1991.

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Bibliography

Porter, Bernard. The Lion’s Share: A History of British Imperialism. 6th ed. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. Quigley, Carroll. The Anglo-American Establishment. New York: Books in Focus, 1981. Ramsay, Robin. Conspiracy Theories. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2006. Remigi, Elena, Véronique Martin and Tim Sykes. In Limbo: Brexit Testimonies from EU Citizens in the UK. Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 2017. Remigi, Elena. Testimonies from UK Citizens in the EU. Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 2018. Reynolds, David. Island Stories: An Unconventional History of Britain. William Collins, 2020. Roodhouse, Mark. Black Market Britain. Oxford: OUP, 2013. Thatcher, Margaret. The Path to Power. London: HarperPress, 1995. Thatcher, Margaret. The Downing Street Years. London: HarperPress, 2012. Ward, Stuart, and Astrid Rasch. Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Weber, Ronald. The Lisbon Route: Entry and Escape. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011. Wollstonecraft, Mary. Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. London: Joseph Johnson, 1796.

Index 9/11 attack 21, 52–3, 56 Abbott, Tony 228 academics 166, 174, 176, 222, 239 accident 205 Acton, Lord 199 Adams, Mary ch.9 passim Africa 14–15, 227 age differences 206 air raids 125–6 alcohol 68, 139 Aliens Act (1906) 55, 233 alliances 97 Amazon 188 American War of Independence 183, 227 Amritsar massacre 25 anarchism 52–3, 57, 208 Anderson, David 184–5 Andrew, Christopher 188, 191–4 Anglo-Saxons 4–5, 70, 187 Anti-Anarchist Conference (1898) 53 anti-communism 112, 149, 155, 157, 174–6, 194 anti-fascism 121 anti-imperialism x, 24–5, 149, 161, 227–8 anti-intellectualism 167–70, 172–3, 179 anti-socialism ch.11 antisemitism 5, 57, 59, 113, 192, 218 Anzacs 103–4 appeasement 111, 129, 166 Arabs and Arabia 106 see also Palestine architecture 22, 83, 231 aristocracy 5, 9–10, 17, 21, 43, 66, 69, 71, 73, 92 see also upper classes Armenian massacre (1915) 106 army see British Army Arnold, Matthew 84 art see high culture Assange, Julian 189 Astor, Lady, 133

asylum ch.4 Attlee, Clement 113, 120, 133, 170 ‘Austerity’ 162, 208–9, 237 Australia 14, 19, 28, 42, 105–6, 228, 235 Austria 37, 55, 58 Balance of Power 97 Baldwin, Stanley 110 bankers 135 Barthelemy, Emanuel 52, 54, 57 Bavaria 90 Beaton, Cecil 144 Beaverbrook, Lord 129 Beckett, Francis ch.11 Benn, Tony 154 Bernard, Simon 53–4 Bevan, Favell Lee 37–8 billionaires 205 Bin Laden, Osama 199 Björnstjerna, Count Magnus 76, 78 black market 126, 130–3 Black and Tans’ 25 Blackadder Goes Forth 9 Blair, Tony 210 Bletchley park 188, 196 Blitz, London 118, 125, 127, 129, 137, 239 Boer War 21–3, 26, 62, 98, 114 Bombay famine 25 Boudicca 4 Bourdin, Martial 52, 57 Boyle, Danny 222 Brassey, Thomas 40 Brexit ix, xii, xiv, xviii, 13, 24–5, 159, ch.14 Brexit bus 216 ‘Britain First’ 217, 219 British Army 21, ch.7, 232 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 128 British Brothers’ League 58 British Empire see Empire British Union of Fascists 59

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250 ‘Britishness’ xiii, xix, 11–12, 80, 94, 191, 221, 230, 233–4, 243 see also national identity Brooke, Rupert 103–4 bureaucracy 35, 37, 211, 213 Burma 120 Cable Street (1936), battle 121 Cambridge 91 Cambridge Analytica 188, 200, 216, 218 ‘Cambridge Five’ 195 Cameron, David xv, 135, 184, 205, 209–11, 215 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 155, 175, 177 Canada 19, 28, 42 capitalism xvii, 8–10, 40, 84, 92–4, 132, 160, 162, 166, 169–70, 177–9, 184, 199, 204, 208–9, 213, 225, 231, 233, 237–8 see also middle class Caractacus 4 Carlyle, Thomas 84, 93 Carol II, King of Romania 146 Carr, Gilly 137 passim Casablanca 145–6 Cash, Sir Bill 205, 215 Castle, Barbara 162 Catholics see Roman Catholic church Celts 4, 68 Chamberlain, Neville 123, 127 Channel Islands xvii, 5, ch.10 Chartism 60, 218 cheating 206, 216 ‘Cheddar Man’ 230 Chinese 49, 61 Christianity 5, 106, 138–9, 167, 230–1 Churchill, Winston xvii, 58, chs.7–8 passim, 123, 125, 127, 129–30, 133–5, 148, 229 citizenship 21, 243 Civil Rights Movement (USA) 155, 157 Class war 178 classics 103–4, 228 Clinton, President Bill 172, 226 Cobden, Richard 16, 91 Cobain, Ian 184ff Coe, Jonathan 222 Cold War ch.11

Index Coles, TJ 184 Collins, Wilkie 40 colonial emigration 6 ‘colony’ 14, 16, 33, 42, 225, 236 Commonwealth 25, 214, 228–9, 235–6 communism 60, 91, 124, 149, 154ff, 160, 162, 176, 178, 193, 233 Communist Party of Great Britain 155, 160 Conrad, Joseph 52 consensus 170–1, 176 Conservative Party and governments 111, 123, 132, 134, 160, 162, 165–7, 173, 203–4, 207, 210–11, 214, 217–19, 221, 223 conspiracy theories xviii, 59, 175–7, 188, 190–3, 196, 203, 217–18, 238 constitution, British 217 Cook, Thomas 33–6 cooking 89, 92, 163, 230 Cooper, Duff 123–4, 127 Corbyn, Jeremy 193, 208, 210, 213, 217, 237 coronavirus ix, 206, 222–4, 239 corruption 207, 239 Counter-subversion 191, 194, 196, 198 see also MI5; Special Branch Counter-terrorism 197 Coward, Noel 133 Cox, Jo 217 cricket 25, 60, 79, 199, 231 crime 171 Crimean War 97–8 Crozier, Brian 175–6 culture see high culture Cummings, Dominic 133, 212, 217–18 Curzon, Lord 27 Cyprus 157 Czechoslovakia 154, 160 Dad’s Army 131–2 Daily Mail 158 Daily Mirror 133, 157, 196 Daily Telegraph 213 Dardanelles see Gallipoli ‘Dark Ages’ 4 Daughters of the British Empire 28 death penalty abolition 156 decolonisation 156, 159, 185

Index Delius 84 democracy 20, 23, 26, 66, 176, 217, 231, 234, 239 Denmark and Danes 7, 9, 28, 65, 75, 86, 230 see also Vikings D’Este, Carlo ch.8, 129 ‘D-notices’ 187, 233 Dickens, Charles 45–7, 49, 84, 86–7 Disarmament 117 Disraeli, Benjamin 20, 59 Doggerland 3, 5, 230 ‘Double Cross’ 196 Douglas-Home, Sir Alec 166 Dowland, John 7 Dresden bombing 118, 239 Dunkirk 129 Dutch see Netherlands ecology 162 economic depression 207, 233 see also ‘Great Depression’ Eden, Anthony 119, 154, 156 education 20, 91–2, 168, 207, 232 see also public schools; universities Edward VII, King 9, 33 effeminacy 90 Egypt 33 Eisenhower, Dwight 156 electoral system and reform 205, 207, 232, 234 Elgar, Edward 84, 93 elite see ‘Establishment’ Elkins, Caroline 184–5 Ellis, Ruth 158 Eltzbacher, JO 27 emigration to Europe 7, ch.3, 221, 236 Empire, British x, xiv, 6–7, 10, 12, ch.2, 112, 116–17, 120, 120, 130, 156–7, 184–5, 188, 191, 211, 226–9, 232 popular interest in, 18, 20–5, 159, 211, 236 Empire Day 28 Engels, Friedrich 6, 9, 52, 56 English Channel 33, 229–30, 233 equality and inequality 178, 232–3 Ernst, Max, 147 espionage see spying Essex 3

251

‘Establishment’ 5, 203, 208, 218, 226, 237, 239 Eton College 103, 129, 146–7, 205, 211 European Common Market 15, 159, 161, 214, 229, 235 European Courts of Justice and of Human Rights 234 European Research Group 210 European Union xviii–xix, 15, 27–8, 172, ch.14 Europhobia 210 Evans, Jonathan 189, 194 ‘exceptionalism’ xii, xiv, 229–31, 233 exploration 231 extradition 54 Fairbairn, Sir Nicholas 174 ‘fake news’ 183, 238 Falklands and Falklands War 2, 119, 172, 186–7, 189 Farage, Nigel 205, 208, 211, 215, 217, 224–5 Fascism or proto-Fascism in Britain 59, 126, 128, 194, 212–13, 228, 231, 240 feminism see women Fenians 52, 56 Ferguson, Niall 27, 120 feudalism 8, 92, 231 finance 15, 232 Fleming, Ian 147–8 Fleming, Peter 157–8 Foot, Michael 175–6, 179 Foot, M.R.D. 137 football 7, 28, 102, 139, 186, 231 Foreign Office 17, 43, 97, 143 ‘Fourth Estate’ see press Fox, Dr Liam 216, 223 Foyle’s War 130 France and French 4, 7, 10, 14–15, 27, 36, 38–42 passim, 49, 56–7, 68, 75, 98, 102, 126–8, 133, 137, 143, 172, 208, 236–7 Franco, General 145 free trade/free market 16, 19, 37, 40, 66, 90, 177, 208, 213, 230, 232–3 freedom see liberalism freemasons 140 French Revolution and revolutionary wars 20–1, 54, 169 Fukuyama, Francis 177

252

Index

Gallipoli ch.7, 115, 120 Garibaldi 55 GCHQ 188, 233 General Election (December 2019) 204, 206, 216–17 generation differences 204, 206 George VI, King 133 Germany 7, 9, 15, 23, 33, 37, 39–40, 51, 58, 90–3, 98, 112, 117–18, 123, 133, 193, 195, ch.10, 215, 237 Gladstone, W.E. 19, 53 global market 213, 226, 229–30, 235 Globalisation xvii, 208–9 Goering, Hermann 133 Goon Show 155, 157 Gove, Michael 183, 209, 212 Great Exhibition, xiv, 7, 52 ‘Great Depression’ (1930s) 167 ‘Great Labour Unrest’ 23 Greece 205 Greer, Germaine 161 Guernsey see Channel Islands Guggenheim, Peggy 147 Gulbenkian, Calouste 146 Hague, William 189 Haley, Bill 157 Hall, Simon ch.11 Hanslope Park 184–5, 190, 200, 233 Harney, GJ 61 Harold, King 4–5 Hartlepool 49 ‘Haw-Haw, Lord’ (William Joyce) 128 Hayek, Friedrich von 134 Healey, Dennis 28 Heath, Edward 168, 173, 177, 196 Heimskringla 69, 93 ‘heroic failures’ 98 Herzen, Alexander 61 ‘high’ culture xiv, 7–8, 10–11, 17, 21–2, 39–40, 43, 66, 68, 73, 75–6, 80, ch.6, 232, 239 Hiley, Nicholas 195 history and historians chs.12–13, 185–6, 190, 194, 200, 203, 211, 215, 222, 225–6, 236–40, 243 Hitchcock, Alfred 58 Hitler, Adolf 59, 112–13, 116–18, 126, 128, 130, ch.10 passim, 205, 230

Hobson, J.A. 24, 225, 227 Holocaust denial 149 Home Intelligence Department (1939–45) ch.9 Home Rule 56 homophobia 192, 228 homosexual law reform 156, 160 Howard, Leslie 148, 175 Huguenots 5, 54, 215 human rights 234 Hungary 154–5, 157, 160 Hyndman, H.M. 60 Iceland 14, 69, 93 immigration, xiii-xiv, xix, 4, 6, 27–8, ch.4, 207, 209, 212, 219, 232–3, 236, 239 243–4 imperialism 106, 112, 161, 184, 211, 225–7 see also Empire In Limbo 221 India 17, 19, 21, 25, 27, 33, 97, 112, 114, 170, 191, 232 individualism 161, 167, 169, 177, 213 industrial revolution 8–9 industry 15–16, 40–1, 87, 160, 162, 171, 229, 232–3 ‘informal empire’ 15, 19, 161, 214, 225, 229 Information Research Department, 193 insularity 229 International Brigade (1936–9) 121 internationalism 25, 177, 221, 232, 235 Iraq War, 23, 189, 238 Ireland and Irish, 6, 28, 51–2, 60–1, 109, 124, 148–9, 191, 197, 208, 223, 237 see also Fenians; Ulster Irish Republican Army 187, 197, 199 ISIS 184 Islam and Islamicism 37, 118, 208, 219, 231 Ismay, Lord 118 Israel 59, 200, 230 Italy and Italians 39–40, 56, 61, 68, 88, 93, 126, 231 Jazz 158 Jenkins, Roy ch.8 Jersey see Channel Islands Jews 5, 52, 55, 57–61 passim, 106, 133, 140, 145, 190, 218, 232, 241

Index jingoism 22–4, 159 Johnson, Boris xii, xvii, 25, 109, 133, 159, 203–6, 209, 211–14, 217–19, 222–4, 226, 228, 234, 239 Joseph, Sir Keith 168 judiciary 212, 216–17 Julius Caesar 4 juries 54, 187 Kemal Atatürk 104 Kenya 25, 27, 185, 188 Keynesianism 168 KGB 179 Khruschchev, Nikita 154 King, Martin Luther 155, 157 Kinkel, Joanna 56 Kipling, Rudyard 27, 103, 226 Kitchener, Lord 118 Koestler, Arthur 145 Kossuth, Lajos 55 Kropotkin, Peter 52 Labour Party 116, 133–4, 156, 160–2, 166, 169, 188, 192–3, 204, 210, 213–15, 218, 225, 235 Laing, Samuel xvi, 8, 10, 40–1, chs.5–6, 213, 232 laissez-faire see liberalism land ownership 67–9, 72–3, 77, 88 Lapland 68 Laurence, T.E. 104 Lawson, Nigel 176 ‘leadership’ 119, 171 League of Empire Loyalists 156–8 League of Nations 25, 59 Leale, Rev. John 141 Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre 52 ‘Legacy Files’ (Kenya) 185 Lenin, VI 24 Lever, Charles 35, 41–3, 84 Leveson Commission 235 Liberace 157 Liberal Party 111, 114 liberalism, libertarianism and ‘liberty’ 9–10, 16, 24, 26–7, 40, 55–7, 68, 73, 76, 90, 92–4, 176, 178, 184, 188, 204, 213–14, 217, 225, 230–4, 236, 238 see also free trade ‘lions led by donkeys’ 99, 105

253

Lisbon xvii, 144 passim ‘Little England’ 223 Loach, Ken 130 Lochery, Neill 144 passim Macaulay, T.B. 25 McCarthy, Senator 155 MacKenzie, John 21, 24 Macmillan, Harold 159–60, 166 Major, John 171–2, 210 Malthus, Thomas 69 Malvinas see Falklands Marx, Karl, and Marxism 11, 24, 52–3, 56, 60, 160, 162, 178–9, 215, 237 Mass Observation 125, 134 Masterman, J.C. 148 May, Theresa xiii, xix, 189, 216, 219, 221, 223, 234 Mazzini, Giuseppe 52 Methodism 167 MI5 123–4, 177, 187–99 MI6 188–9, 191 Michel, Louise 52 middle classes 9, 26, 89, 104, 126–7, 173, 178–9, 214, 228 Middle East 98, 106 migration, internal 61 militarism 233 Mill, John Stuart xvi, 77, 86 Miners’ Strike (1984) 189 Monarchy 9, 25–6, 92, 218–20 Monbiot, George 215 Morris, William 84 Moslems see Islam Mosley, Sir Oswald 59 Most, Johann 52, 57 multiculturalism 7, 61, 221, 235 Munich 111 Murdoch, Keith 105–6 Murdoch, Rupert 235 Murray’s Handbooks 34–5, 39 music hall 23 and musicians 51, 56–7, 84, 92, 157 Mussolini 126, 128, 149 myth 28, 174, 183–4, 238 Napoleon Bonaparte, 19 see also French Revolution

254 Napoleon III, Emperor 16, 53 National Archive see Public Record Office National Health Service 156, 207, 213, 219–20, 222 ‘national identity’ or ‘character’ x, xii, 11–12, 18, 232–4, 240 see also Britishness National Service 153 nationalism 208, 231, 237 Navy see Royal Navy Nazism see Hitler Neave, Airey 177 Neo-Liberalism see capitalism Netherlands 39 Nobel Prize 109–10, 113 Nordics see Scandinavia Normans and Norman Conquest 5, 14, 230 Norway 41, 46, ch.5 passim, ch.6 passim, 216, 237 nostalgia 28 Novello, Ivor 133 nuclear bomb 116 officer class ch.7 Official Secrets Acts 186–7 oil 106 Olympic Games (2012) 222 Omdurman 118 opinion polls 205–6, 224 Orkney Isles 65–6, 74, 92 Orsini, Felice 16, 52–4 Orwell, George 190, 228 Osborne, George 209 Osborne, John 155 Ottoman Empire see Turkey ‘Oxbridge’ 170 Oxford University 148, 226 pacifism 126, 231, 233 paedophilia 189 paganism 5 painting see high culture Palestine 58–9, 106, 218 Palmerston, Lord xvi, 14, 16, 54–5, 61 pandemics 231 see also coronavirus Paris Commune (1871) 53

Index Parliament 9, 53, 55, 57, 66, 70, 110, 114, 184, 186–7, 204, 206, 212, 215, 217–18, 222, 232 paternalism 25, 169–70, 214 patriotism 20–1, 102, 133, 135, 141, 148, 155, 169, 210, 212, 222, 244 Pau 42, 236 Percy, Thomas 47 Peter the Painter 58 Petrie, Sir David 197 Philistinism xvi, 8, ch.6, 230 Poland 154 219, 235 police 57, 185, 214 see also Special Branch political crimes 54–5 discourse 208, 216 policing see secret services, Special Branch poll tax 171 Ponting, Clive 187 populism 212, 225, 231, 237, 240 Portugal 14, ch.10 Powell, Enoch 168 prehistory 3–4, 13, 66, 230–1 Presley, Elvis 157 press x, 68, 123–4, 187, 200, 204–5, 212–13, 218, 234–5, 238–9 Priestley, JB 129 primogeniture see land ownership Prior, Jim 171, 173 Private Eye 157 privatisation 207, 213 Profumo 199 Propaganda 129, 212 Protestantism 38, 59 proto-Fascism 17, 240 Public Record Office (National Archive) 184, 186 public schools 10, 15, 20, 47, 103, 105, 107, 112, 169–70, 186, 214, 228 see also Eton Pugin, Augustus Welby 84 Putin, Vladimir 198 race and racism 27, 77, 155, 192, 208, 210, 219, 229–30 radicalism 20, 25, 75 rationing 134

Index Reagan, Ronald 19, 160, 172, 175 Rees-Mogg, Jacob 205, 211, 223–4 referendum (2016) ix, xii, 11, 13, 203, 206–10, 215, 230, 236 (1975) 229, 235 refugees xiii, 6, 43, ch.4, 145, 207, 213, 232, 236 religion 92, 105–6, 119 see also Roman Church; Protestantism ‘remainers’ 206, 215, 229 Renaissance 231 ‘respect for betters’ 158 revolution 91 Rhodes, Cecil 226 Rhodesia 27, 159, 192, 226 see also Zimbabwe Rimington, Stella 191, 197 Rock’n’roll 155, 158 Rocker, Rudolf 58 Rogers, Samuel 46 Roman Church, Catholicism 5, 37–8, 52, 59, 61, 73, 90, 126, 149, 232 Roman Empire 4, 13–14, 16, 20, 25, 230–1 Roodhouse, Mark 131–3 Royal Air Force 129 Royal Navy 98–9, 104, 232 royalty see monarchy rule of law 232, 239 Rumsfeld, Donald 18, 116 Ruskin, John 84 Russell, Tony ch.11 Russia 15, 34, 41, 52, 57–8, 61, 97, 104, 110, 115, 116, 118, 149, 154–6, 158, 160, 174–6, 187, 193, 198, 200, 218, 224, 237 Russian Revolution 99 Said, Edward 20 Salazar, Antonio 144 passim Salisbury poisoning 187 Salvation Army 138 Sanders, Bernie 208, 237 Sanders, Paul 138 passim Sandon, Viscount 61 Scandinavia 4, 7, 11, 14, 15, 41, 47–8, 66 see also Denmark; Norway; Sweden; Viking scapegoating 208 Scargill, Arthur 175

255

Scotland 8, 10–11, 38, 41, 44, 65, 68, 74, 88, 91, 206, 210, 219, 223, 237 secrecy xvii, ch.13 secret intelligence and security services xviii, 176–7, 186–8, 232–3 Security Service Act (1989) 197 Seeley, J.R. 26 ‘semi-detached’ 229, 236 Shakespeare, William 7, 231 Sherwill, Ambrose 141 Sidney Street siege (1911) 57–8 Sinatra, Frank 158 Skripal, Sergei 187 slave trade 15 slavery (USA) 183 Smith, Adam 10–11, 16 Smithers, Sir Waldron 132 Snowden 189 Social Chapter 209 social media 217, 235 unrest 171, 179, 217, 237 socialism and social democracy 91, 123, 135, 165, 169–70, 173–4, 178, 204, 210, 213, 231, 237 South Africa 156–7, 160, 172, 176 see also Boer War Sovereignty xiii, 213, 224–5, 238 Soviet Union see Russia Spain 14, 145 Special Branch 53, 124, 185, 187, 191 ‘special relationship’ 10 ‘splendid isolation’ x, 14–15, 209, 210, 230 sport 231 Spycatcher 187 spying 124, 132, 139, 141, 148, 187, 191, 233 Stalin, Josef 133, 154 statues 228 Stimson, Henry 19 Stockholm 71, 79 Stone, Norman 165 Stonehenge 4 Stonehouse, John 199 Strikes 162 Sturlason, Snorri 69 Suez invasion (1956) 119, 154, 156, 158–9, 216 suffragettes 218

256

Index

Sun newspaper 234–5 surveillance see spying Sweden xix, 28, 41–2, 47–8, 68, 70–80, 86, ch.6 passim, 110, 148, 160–1, 204, 214, 221, 231, 237–8, 244 Tacitus 4 Tax havens 213 Taylor, AJP 119 terrorism 52–3, 56–7, 172, 208, 219, 231–3, 239 Thackeray, WM, 34, 76, 93 Thatcher, Margaret, and ‘Thatcherism xvii, 11, 111, 119, 130–1, 135, 153, 158, 161–2, ch.12, 200, 210–11, 214, 237 Thomson, James 47 Tonypandy 111 torture 184, 197 tourism 6–7, ch.3, 232 trade xiv 5, 13–16, 19, 97, 231 unions 172–3, 177 travel snobbery 36, 43 writing, chs.3 and 5, 236 Trollope, Anthony 47, 76 Trump, Donald xviii, 189, 208, 212, 214, 218, 225, 237, 239 TTIP xiii, 209 Turkey and Turks ch.7 passim Ulster 27, 109, 223, 237 United Kingdom divisions 205–6, 223 United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) xiv, 29, 208, 210, 212, 219, 237 Universities 65, 83, 86, 90–1, 148, 160, 167, 174 see also academics upper classes 105, 126, 170, 173, 186–7, 200, 205, 211, 228 see also aristocracy, middle class urbanisation 8 Urquhart, David 61 USA x, xix, 10, 14–15, 18–21 passim, 24, 27–9, 33, 42, 54, 56, 68, 88, 93, 115, 119, 127, 144, 146–7, 149, 155–9, 165, 172, 183–4, 188, 199,

208–9, 212–14, 218, 224–7, 231, 236–8 utilitarianism ch.5, 230 utopias 48, 92 Victoria, Queen 9, 52–3, 55, 84, 98 ‘Victorian values’ 169, 178, 188 Vietnam War 26, 155, 160 Vikings 4, 14, 28, 65, 66–7, 70, 230 violence political 204, 217, 219 Wales 4, 44, 126 ‘war against terrorism’ 55 see also Anti-Anarchist Conference Weber, Ronald 144 passim Weiner, Martin 169–70 welfareism 11, 156, 160–2, 178, 207, 214, 232–3 Welldon, J.E.C. 112 Wellington, Duke of 97 West Indies 15, 19 ‘Westminster Bubble’ see Establishment Whisky Galore 135 Wilson, Harold 160, 175, 193 ‘Wilson plot’ 177, 188, 193–4 Windsor, Duke of 128, 147 wine 41 ‘Winter of Discontent’ (1978–9) 162 Wollstonecraft, Mary 46–8 women 14, 23, 47, 68, 72, 102, 107, 123, 126, 128, 138, 142, 153, 156, 158, 160–1, 163, 204, 218, 231 working classes 5, 9, 19, 21, 26, 51, 60, 89, 97, 125 passim, 170, 173, 187, 228 World War I 58, ch.7, 114–15, 118, 132, 191–2, 195, 226, 231 World War II xvii, 27, chs.8–10, 169, 185, 197, 210, 229, 231, 238 Wright, Peter 199 xenophobia x, 11, ch.3, 55, 61, 177, 204, 219, 229 Young, Lord David 169 Zimbabwe 159, 171, 226 Zinoviev letter 193

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