Nick Cohen vs. “The Left” (again … and again … and again)

Nick Cohen used to be good. He used to be very good, in fact. Back in the mid-to-late 1990s, he was one of the few mainstream commentators willing to provide a sustained and comprehensive criticism of the New Labour project and of Blairism, as it went on to become known. At a time when most negative coverage of New Labour began and ended at a predictable discussion of ‘Spin’ and when most of the progressive media were still in love with the golden-boy who defeated the Tory Goliath, Cohen’s articles in the New Statesman, the Observer and elsewhere were must-read pieces dealing with corruption, links to big business and the reality and the detail of the neo-liberal policies being promoted by the newly installed government. Cruel Britannia and Pretty Straight Guys are still well worth getting a hold of, to see what good political journalism looks like.

Okay, now that the niceties are out of the way, and I’ve had my ‘throat-clearing moment’, he’s really gone nuts lately. As one of the most prominent ‘muscular liberals’ (Cohen chaired the meeting which launched the Euston Manifesto) he’s been steadfast in both his support for the Iraq War and his continuing contempt for ‘the Left’.

To be sure, he made quite a convincing left-wing case for intervention in 2003, not just in terms of anti-totalitarianism (even Oliver Kamm could manage that!) but also pointing to the need for solidarity with the Iraqi trades union movement. If the international Labour movement meant anything, he argued, it must mean supporting those organisation in Iraq under the fist of an oppressive, quasi-fascist regime. And anyone who hates George Galloway as much as Cohen does can’t be all bad.

Unfortunately, his recent criticism of ‘the Left’ displays none of the hallmarks of accuracy and detail which characterised his earlier work. As his denunciations of collaboration with fascism become more and more shrill, as well as more and more general, he risks becoming less a latter-day Orwell and more a latter-day Horowitz.

His attack on ‘the Left’ is the theme of his long (if not eagerly) awaited book, What’s Left?: How liberals lost their way. Due to be published in early February, it appears to be in stock at Amazon right now. Lengthy extracts from it appear in today’s Observer, and are worth a look until the full thing is available.

It’s pretty predictable stuff, in many ways, rehashing the old points about those who opposed the war abandoning the Iraqi people to tyranny. Persuasive, if not original. And, to be fair, he’s a little more nuanced in his attack on the anti-war marchers, giving Ariel Dorfman (reluctantly anti-invasion) a say indicating that perhaps not everyone who opposed the intervention were fans of Saddam’s courage, strength and indefatigability and didn’t get a kick out of the massacre of Kurds.

Still, there’s very little self-analysis in the piece. The anti-war protestors were still wrong, still objectively supporting fascism and the pro-interventionists were … well, Cohen doesn’t really get into whether they were right or not, just that they had the best of intentions. As I pointed out previously, this is a rather sneaky trick: ignoring the consequences of an action and focusing only on your own intentions, while attributing the basest of intentions to your opponents (e.g. supporting Ba’athism) based on the perceived consequence of their views being implemented.

I don’t intend to get into a sustained piece on Cohen right now. I’m interested in what his wider points about ‘the Left’ might be, so I’ll wait until the book arrives. One point raised in the extract today did, however, shock me and I can’t let it go unacknowledged. In describing the anti-war marches across Europe of March 2003 he writes:

On 15 February 2003, about a million liberal-minded people marched through London to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime. It was the biggest protest in British history, but it was dwarfed by the march to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in Mussolini’s old capital of Rome, where about three million Italians joined what the Guinness Book of Records said was the largest anti-war rally ever. In Madrid, about 650,000 marched to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in the biggest demonstration in Spain since the death of General Franco in 1975. In Berlin, the call to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime brought demonstrators from 300 German towns and cities, some of them old enough to remember when Adolf Hitler ruled from the Reich Chancellery. In Greece, where the previous generation had overthrown a military junta, the police had to fire tear gas at leftists who were so angry at the prospect of a fascist regime being overthrown that they armed themselves with petrol bombs.

The French protests against the overthrow of a fascist regime went off without trouble. Between 100,000 and 200,000 French demonstrators stayed peaceful as they rallied in the Place de la Bastille, where in 1789 Parisian revolutionaries had stormed the dungeons of Louis XVI in the name of the universal rights of man.

In Ireland, Sinn Fein was in charge of the protests and produced the most remarkable spectacle of a remarkable day: a peace movement led by the IRA.

It’s not often one does a double-take when reading something in the paper but … what????

In Ireland, Sinn Fein was in charge of the protests and produced the most remarkable spectacle of a remarkable day: a peace movement led by the IRA.

I’m certainly no fan of Sinn Féin, or of the IRA, or of the mysterious but ubiquitous Sinn Féin/IRA, but anyone with the least grasp of the facts about the anti-war movement(s) in Ireland would know that that is simply not the case. Certainly Sinn Féin were involved with that march, as was virtually every other left-wing organisation in the country, including the Labour Party. Even Bertie Ahern got on the bandwagon, welcoming the march as an endorsement of government policy on the proposed invasion (a moment of such incredible brass neck that you couldn’t but admire it). If anyone could have been said to have ‘led’ the anti-war movement, I guess it would have been the SWP but only insofar as Richard Boyd Barrett was treated as a spokesperson for the marchers. The truth was that it was a broad-based movement which achieved something pretty spectacular that day, but which has fallen into some disarray and acrimony since then (as is inevitable with anything touched by the SWP).

Why then does Cohen get it so incredibly, startlingly wrong? It’s not the first time he’s come out with this kind of nonsense about SF. In a column of his from last May he compared the electoral successes of the British National Party with those of SF, suggesting that he knows absolutely about the politics of SF, the differences between Northern Ireland and the Republic and the reasons why people vote for that party.

One wonders where Cohen’s rather warped and uninformed opinion stems from. I can’t help but think that it might be influenced to some extent by Gary Kent. Kent is the director of Labour Friends of Iraq and, with Cohen, was one of the leading lights behind the Euston Manifesto. Not only that, but he was also a prominent British member of the Peace Train organisation. While the explicit objectives of that group might have been hard to disagree with, I always found that their view of ‘terrorism’ was a little skewed. It was a little hard to stomach watching them protest outside Sinn Féin meetings, while enjoying a far more harmonious relationship David Ervine (every self-respecting liberal’s favourite former paramilitary) and the Progressive Unionist Party.

Incidentally, there’s an interview with Kent on Little Atoms here, where he draws some rather tenuous parallels between the situation in Iraq and Northern Ireland, as well as having a rather exaggerated view of the achievements of the ‘Peace Movement’.

I don’t want to get into conspiracy theories, and start suggesting links between people which don’t exist. But while I mightn’t agree with much of Cohen’s analysis I’m staggered at such an incredible factual inaccuracy in the piece and can’t help but wonder where it came from. And hope that it’s not indicative of the rest of the book.