Nick Cohen - What's Left? - How Liberals Lost Their Way

HOW LIBERALS LOST THEIR WAY

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by Harper Perennial 2007

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2007

Copyright © Nick Cohen 2007

Nick Cohen asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

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Source ISBN 9780007229703

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN 9780007370030

Version 2015-06-12

In memory of Hadi Saleh ,

the last of the socialists

(1949 to 2005)

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

Part One: Morbid Symptoms

1. An Iraqi Solzhenitsyn

2. ‘Sacrificed So Much for This Animal’

3. Leftists Without a Left

4. Academic Scribblers and a Defunct Economist

5. Tories Against the War

6. The Boy on the Edge of the Gang

7. ‘What Do We Do Now?’

Intermission: A Hereditary Disease

8. All the Russians Love the Prussians

Part Two: Raging Fevers

9. ‘Kill Us, We Deserve It’

10. The Disgrace of the Anti-War Movement

11. The Liberals Go Berserk

12. The Jews, the Muslims and – er – the Freemasons

13. Why Bother?

POSTSCRIPT

KEEP READING

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NOTES

PRAISE

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Lest we should see where we are , Lost in a haunted wood , Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good .

W. H. Auden

IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES, my mother searched the supermarkets for politically reputable citrus fruit. She couldn’t buy Seville oranges without indirectly subsidizing General Francisco Franco, Spain’s fascist dictator. Algarve oranges were no good either because the slightly less gruesome but equally right-wing dictatorship of António Salazar ruled Portugal. She boycotted the piles of Outspan from South Africa as a protest against apartheid, and although neither America nor Israel was a dictatorship, she wouldn’t have Florida or Jaffa oranges in the house because she had no time for the then American President, Richard Nixon, or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

My sisters and I did not know it, but when Franco fell ill in 1975, we were in a race to the death. Either he died of Parkinson’s disease or we died of scurvy. Luckily for us and the peoples of Spain, the dictator went first, although he took an unconscionably long time about it.

Thirty years later, I picked up my mother from my sister Natalie’s house. Her children were watching a Disney film; The Jungle Book , I think.

‘It’s funny, Mum,’ I said as we drove home, ‘but I don’t remember seeing any Disney when I was their age.’

‘You’ve only just noticed? We didn’t let you watch rubbish from Hollywood corporations.’

‘Ah.’

‘We didn’t buy you the Beano either.’

‘For God’s sake, Mum, what on earth was wrong with the Beano?’

‘It was printed by D. C. Thomson, non-union firm.’

‘Right,’ I said.

I was about to mock her but remembered that I had not allowed my son to watch television, even though he was nearly three at the time. I will let him read the Beano when he is older – I spoil him, I know – but if its cartoonists were to down their crayons and demand fraternal support, I would probably make him join the picket line and boycott it as well.

I come from a land where you can sell out by buying a comic. I come from the Left.

I’m not complaining, I had a very happy childhood. Conservatives would call my parents ‘politically correct’, but there was nothing sour or pinched about their home, and there is a lot to be said for growing up in a political household in which everyday decisions about what to buy and what to reject have a moral quality.

At the time, I thought it was normal and assumed that all civilized people lived the same way. I still remember the sense of dislocation I felt at 13 when my English teacher told me he voted Conservative. As his announcement coincided with the shock of puberty, I was unlikely to forget it. I must have understood at some level that real Conservatives lived in Britain – there was a Conservative government at the time, so logic dictated that there had to be Conservative voters. But it was incredible to learn that my teacher was one of them when he gave every appearance of being a thoughtful and kind man. To be good you had to be on the Left.

Looking back, I can see that I got that comforting belief from my parents, but it was reinforced by the experience of living through the Thatcher administration that appeared to reaffirm the Left’s monopoly of goodness. The embrace first of monetarism and then of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism produced two recessions that Conservatives viewed with apparent composure because the lives wrecked by mass unemployment and business failure had the beneficial side effect of destroying trade union power. Even when the Left of the Eighties was clearly in the wrong – as it was over unilateral nuclear disarmament – it was still good. It may have been astonishingly dunderheaded to believe that dictators would abandon their weapons systems if Britain abandoned hers, but it wasn’t wicked.

Yet for all the loathing of Conservatives I felt, I didn’t have to look at modern history to know that it was a fallacy to believe in the superior virtue of the Left: my family told me that. My parents joined the Communist Party but left it in their twenties. My father encouraged me to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s exposés of the Soviet Union and argue about them at the dinner table. He knew how bad the Left could get, but this knowledge did not stop him from remaining very left wing. He would never have entertained the notion that communism was as bad as fascism. In this, he was typical. Anti-communism was never accepted as the moral equivalent of anti-fascism, not only by my parents but also by the overwhelming majority of liberal-minded people. The Left was still morally superior. Even when millions were murdered and tens of millions were enslaved and humiliated, the ‘root cause’ of crimes beyond the human imagination was the perversion of noble socialist ideals.