Really, Nick?
Nick Cohen in today's Observer:
they ought to know that you never level an accusation you can't substantiate because you make life too easy for your targets when you do.
Is he taking the
piss?? His attack (naturally retracted a few weeks later) on Nick Davies is only the most recent example of his own form here.
Labels: Nick Cohen
The Anthony Browne twins
Nick Cohen - he never changes, does he?
A few years back he
attacked a man called Anthony Browne:
This line of cant has been developed by Anthony Browne, an occasional contributor to this paper, and a writer for the Times and Spectator, elite journals both. "Blair's epidemics" of Aids, TB and hepatitis B are being spread by asylum-seekers, he has asserted to great acclaim. You can understand the reasons for the applause. Browne has moved the debate on. Asylum-seekers are not only scroungers and terrorists but plague carriers, like the rats that brought the Black Death.
And ended the piece with a warning about what could happen if recession hit.
Today he declares his support - not in a shy way - for another Anthony Browne.
Browne has stood up for free speech and against liberal alliances with radical Islam, and exposed the civil servants who were pretending that a rise in HIV was due to poor sex education rather than immigration from African countries where the virus is raging. A former press officer at the Department of Health staff told me that his arguments caused consternation, not least because they were true.
And he ends the piece with a warning about what could happen if recession hit.
How spooky is that?
Labels: Nick Cohen
Is it Right to be Anti-American?
I spent my summer holiday reading Tony Judt's book on post-war Europe. That's hardly a fanatically pro-USA tome, but it does make one pause, and wonder exactly what motivates people like
Nick Cohen when they declare it is 'Right' to be
Anti-American.
Labels: Nick Cohen
More Nick Cohen
The antiques column is not as weird (or unpleasant) as this
one.
Apparently British people who support Barack Obama's candidacy for president do so out of anti-Americanism (the same reason Tories who support Clinton support her, apparently), and that Britain is not as anti-American as other European countries can be seen by the fact that more Britons than other Europeans say they support the Israeli's attack on Iraq's nuclear power plant (which the US Administration condemned at the time).
Neither of these arguments make sense. The Bush Administration is now America, as is Israel. One would expect more insight from an expert in this field, the author of the infamous,
"Why it is Right to be Anti-American". Labels: Nasty anti-Americanism, Nick Cohen
Buy old furniture
Nick's column today is a weird one. It contains many of his odder hobby-horses, such as his distate for the FrostFrench boutique, the closure of Camden Passage antique shops (partly related to the internet, I'd have thought), but essentially is a lament that middle-class households don't buy antiques anymore, and this shows that green politics is shallow, and come the recession it'll all collapse as poor people don't buy organic.
There is a point there, which is that 'green consumerism' is essentially an oxymoron. I'd agree you can't buy your way into environmentalism, and the simplest way to be more 'green' is to consume less and use old stuff more.
But his linking it to the antiques market is all a bit confusing, even if you accept the argument that prices are falling because of a lack of demand (I think dining room tables are relatively cheap, but (as Nick hints) I think that's more to do with an increase in supply than an intrinsic hatred of the old) [1].
If antiques are a hand-me down from parents then they're cheaper than buying in Ikea, not more expensive, and if people only go "green" in good times then they should have been buying antiques now, and then not in a recession, but Nick's point is that they aren't buying them in the boom times. Eh? And I think it might be a bit out of date - interior design as slick as a 'City office' is not really the fashion nowadays, he should perhaps ask Frost of French if they know someone who could help.
So a million times better than a column declaring Azar Nafisi has dedicated her book to people she didn't, though I do think Nick is getting a bit arrogant (surely more than 1/100 people could understand Alan Clark's jibe about Michael Heseltine? - I've just asked two people who'd never heard it and they worked it out)
[1] The Antique Furniture Price Index rose from 100 in 1969 (when it was founded) to a high in 2002 of 3,575. It then fell steadily in the next four years, to reach a low at end 2006 of 2,970, before rising again in 2007 to close at 2,986. This doesn't quite chime with 'lowest level for 20 years', but that might be a particular subset.
Labels: Nick Cohen
The "Coping Classes"
Good lord, households on £88,000 a year are now the "professional poor". Here's an article that surpasses even the whinging of
Nick Cohen or the entitlement culture of
Nigel Farndale. It might be a bit tongue-in-cheek, it's hard to say.
"The Coping Classes"Of course the premise the entire article is based on, that
According to research by the price comparison website uSwitch, disposable incomes have plunged to their lowest levels for a decade, thanks to a 42 per cent rise in the cost of essential household goods.
is utter hogwash, as even someone with the
slightest awareness of economic and price trends would know.
Let's just recap just some of the errors she makes
* The survey she refers to does not show disposable incnome is at its lowest level for a decade. In fact the survey (which is not reliable) shows household income has risen by nearly 50% in that decade.
* What it purports to show that the % of income that is left over after bills is at its lowest for a decade. It doesn't reall do this either, given its definition of bills is selective, and in some cases misleading (internet services?)
* She forgets that expenditure on many items has risen enormously as the costs have decreased. For example, she notes that "we're dolefully flying with Ryanair rather than BA", rather forgetting that people 20 years ago didn't fly with BA on weekend jaunts to New York or Madrid - they didn't fly at all. She seems to have been on holiday in the last three years to a small village in Spain, a five star hotel in Puglia, similar in Bahamas and Mauritius.
* House prices - these are always a cost in these whinges, until they are falling, when they are an indictment of the government.
And so on, but I can't go on.
Labels: house prices, Nick Cohen, Whinging
Ken Livingstone
Nick Cohen
here says why Livingstone must be defeated (I believe he is going to vote for Boris Johnson, but it is not clear from this piece). Cohen's main devastating charge (he starts and ends with it) is not that Livingstone wants to tax couples on £100k a year more, but that he gave the eulogy at someone called Gerry Healey's funeral (Oliver Kamm, who I don't think will be voting in the election, has some more
here].
There's something a bit puzzling however. Gerry Healey died in 1989, his funeral was in 1990. Presumably it was a public event - certainly Livingstone owns up to having gone - and as one that apparently was one of the most important events in the history of the British left (more important than even the Euston Declaration, maybe). Yet curiously Nick Cohen was an enthusiastic supporter of Ken Livingstone in 1999, ten years later, urging him to stand as independent (against the official Labour candidate, Dobbo, for whom I voted) and put his faith in democracy. A journalist as well connected and intelligent as Nick Cohen must have known about that eulogy (and the GLC) then when he was urging him to stand.
The other thing that confused me was that Oliver says of Livingstone's Fair Fares policy that "it was a straight subsidy to tourists". I was unaware of this - I thought Londoners also could take advantage of the lower-cost fares.
Labels: Nick Cohen
Nick Cohen's £100,000 a year couple only average in K&C
Yes, Nick's Cohen 'less fortunate' couple with their £100,000 household income
really are less fortunate in the Royal Borough.
Labels: Nick Cohen
Two years since Unite Against Terror
It's just over two years since the internet campaign, "Unite Against Terror", was launched. The
site seems pretty moribund now, although I think they have renewed the URL for another year.
On the face of it the campaign sounded a good idea. Britain had just experienced its worst terrorist outrage, killing 52 people from London and elsewhere. Unfortunately, the aims of the project were never clearly stated, and for reasons that are still unknown, some of the leading figures to sign the petition got the impression it was a campaign against "the left".
Nick Cohen
called the left morons, failed to condemn the bombings, and added, "What we have witnessed is a sinister attempt by liberal opinion to deny legitimacy to the very liberals, feminists and socialists who have a right to expect support. The authentic Muslim has become the blood-crazed fanatic rather than the reformer. The authentic liberator has become the fascist rather than the democrat. This is a betrayal on an epic scale which casts doubt on whether it is now possible to have a decent left."
Stephen Pollard
raved that the "The Guardianista fellow-travellers of terror, who stress its supposed causes, are the useful idiots of the Islamofascists" and in language that I can scarcely believe even two years on, declared that there was an 'enemy within', which "it is imperative that those of us who believe in democracy and liberty stand up and fight. Not just against the obvious enemy, but also against the enemy within - those who claim to be on the Left, but whose views have nothing in common with the decency for which the Left ought proudly to stand."
Peter Tatchell, bizarrely,
declared that the left should not pretend to be upset by the bombs, and "We are witnessing one of the greatest betrayals by the left since so-called left-wingers backed the Hitler-Stalin pact and opposed the war against Nazi fascism. Today, the pseudo-left reveals its shameless hypocrisy and its wholesale abandonment of humanitarian values."
To quote the last is a little unfair of me, as Tatchell subsequently apologised for the language, proving, perhaps, that there can be a decent Decent left.
Labels: campaigns, Decent Left, Iraq, Nick Cohen
How the Left lost it is way
I've unfortunately got to buy Nick Cohen's book for a second time and was seeing whether Amazon had discounted it, when I came across the
cover for his new paperback.
How the Left lost it's way? Last time it was how LIBERALS lost their way, so at least some of the criticism seems to have rubbed off. But it's? Oliver Kamm will be livid.
Labels: Nick Cohen, punctuation
More on Nick Cohen's 2002 suggestion that it was because we owed the US money we fought the Iraq war
Thinking some more about
this idea of his, it just doesn't seem plausible for another reason. Presumably the British government can borrow at dollars at LIBOR, or perhaps better. The rate in 2002 when Nick Cohen advanced this interesting and novel suggestion was just over 3%, so the government could have simply borrowed the money, paying an interest burden of around £14m a year - and repaid the US. Sure there would be a small loss due to the US loan being on better terms, but a tiny price in order not to have fought what Nick then called a 'needless' war?
Of course in fact we didn't need to borrow the money at all. Our dollar reserves were much larger than the remaining loan.
Labels: economics, Nick Cohen
Was the Iraq War fought because Britain still owed the US £243m from its post-WWII loan?
I'm not sure I agree with
this argument of Nick Cohen's from April 2002. £243m just wouldn't be enough money, not given the war must have cost a multiple of that (and that such a cost was easily foreseeable).
Ruth Kelly, the Treasury Minister, told Parliament the other day that Britain still owed £243 million. Rather than relieve the debt of Third World peasants, Britain, she said, intended to meet the bill in full by 31 December 2006. Ms Kelly is a revelation. Until her statement, Blair's sudden enthusiasm for a needless war against Iraq was a mystery; his failure to tell Bush that British troops can't be both peace-keepers and combatants in Afghanistan, a dereliction of duty; his inability to force a concession from Washington on any issue from Kyoto to steel tariffs, a national humiliation.
Now what was baffling is clear. Debtors are in no position to demand concessions from creditors. They must do as they're told. According to the Treasury, Britain will be free to have an independent foreign policy on 1 January 2007. I'll leave it to you to imagine how many wars Blair will have fought by then
Labels: economics, Iraq, Nick Cohen
Johann Hari reviews Nick Cohen
Former Harry's Placer Johann Hari
reviews Nick Cohen's book, "What's Left", for Dissent magazine. By and large Hari nails Cohen's bizarre views and illogical conclusions in a forceful piece:
Cohen seems, by the time he writes passages like this, to have lost touch with reality....This book appears to have been written as Cohen hit a personal tipping-point..and an admission that Cohen is sliding into full-blown neoconservatism....After this, there are even worse moments, when his views disintegrate into a drizzle of dismaying right-wing talking points.
He concludes:
Cohen, ostentatious claimer of George Orwell's mantle, has forgotten the quality that made Orwell great - the power to face inconvenient truths. He simply averts his gaze from the burning vistas of Iraq that contradict his thesis, turning towards George Galloway to give him another well-deserved - but increasingly irrelevant - spit in the face.
Anyway read it all, as they say. I would add two things (of many that could be said) about Cohen and the book. On the latter, I think much of it was summed up for me by his concluding, with a flourish, with a description of a dedication made by Azar Nafisi's which didn't exist. Remarkably, and stretching the bounds of probability, this was an identical mistake (and it wasn't an easy mistake to make - I spotted it immediately and I'm hardly a careful reader) to one Christopher Hitchens made a few months earlier. So did Cohen actually read the book he was claiming the virtues of? This seems to be a theme of What's Left.
On Cohen, as I have said before, his one clear consistent theme is a hatred of liberals. When, in the months
after September 11th 2001,
Nick Cohen was publicly
anti-American, he used to have a go at "liberals" for being too
pro-war. Neither of these pieces reflects well on him. He has never explained why his anti-Americanism changed (I've read his book, the nearest we got was something on Normblog) or why he held it in the first place. But anyway, now of course it is "liberals" who are anti-American and insufficiently pro-war, even though the first charge is impossible to substantiate and the second seems well supported by events.
Labels: Johann Hari, Nick Cohen
Nick Cohen raises his level of poverty wages!
Regular readers will know that Nick Cohen believes an income of £100,000 is difficult to live on for "standard young couples" in London, whom he terms the "less fortunate" (see link and then comments for a version of the original post). That's household income, for a couple, in Britain's expensive capital. Obviously ludicrous, but in the Evening Standard two weeks ago, he went further. Talking about a game show apparently called, "What's My Wage", he said:
Except that I hear that the wage limit is 100,000, which is frankly a pittance in Gordon Brown's Britain.
So now it's £100,000 per person, and across the country, not just in London.
[The context - see comments - is that no Goldman Sachs employees or Linklaters (or anyone in the City from the headline) will take part either as the contestant or the person whose income is being guessed.
Labels: Nick Cohen
How hard it is to be middle class
Good lord...apparently Nick is writing an entire book on the plight of households with an income of more than £100,000 a year but less than 'the rich' get...
Evening Standard (London); Mar 15, 2007; p. 15
Cohen revealed that he is writing a new book. "I'm working on how hard it is to be middle class in London these days."
Labels: Nick Cohen
The super-rich and the Conservatives?
Nick Cohen in his latest
Observer column argues that Gordon Brown's lax taxation of the super-rich is driving the middle class, who he alleges are left paying too much tax [1], away from Labour and ... well I guess into the arms of the Conservatives given the opinion polls, but that seems an odd reaction.
The column focuses on
Ronald Cohen (no relation), whom Nick describes as "Brown's Lord Levy". Nick continues:
What's novel is the strong element of resentment of the rich, particularly in London and the south east, where the middle classes compete with the likes of Sir Ronald for decent homes and places in good schools.
Is this true? Nick's definition of the middle classes are, as we have seen, those on household incomes of £100,000 a year, and I presume the 'rich' are those on, say, £500,000 a year and above. It all seems a very small segment of the population to be driving major electoral shifts, though I suppose (particularly in local elections) their turnout might be high enough to make them a factor.
[1] I can't find the figures now, but when I last looked I think the top 20% of the income distribution pay a higher proportion of tax now than in 1997, but not by much. However I can't confirm or reject Nick Cohen's argument, as the distribution of taxes amongst the top 1% as opposed to the top 2-5% (what I think is Nick's middle class) is not easily available, if it is at all.
Labels: Nick Cohen
Nick Cohen on Welfare
Sadly I will be mowing the lawn, and so unable to tune in, but I would be intrigued to hear
Nick Cohen's views on welfare (he shares a panel with, in addition to Oliver Kamm, Charles Murray and Fraser Nelson[1]).
I'm not aware of much
Nick Cohen has written on welfare in recent years, except for his article in the Evening Standard in January this year in which he bemoaned the situation of a 'standard young couple' on "£100,000 a year", whose 'modest ambition to live an ordinary life' is now beyond them. This couple, part of the "less fortunate", find Council Tax to fall on them "with all its weight".
From this article I think we can see the seeds of what Nick Cohen's reform of welfare would be like. A primary responsibility of welfare is to help those who are 'less fortunate'. So presumably income support would be set at a higher level than £100,000 a year per household, as that is not enough money to live on (after tax it's about £200 a day). Council Tax benefit would also be given to those earning £100,000 or less. All that seems the logical outcome of his stated views. More fancifully, will he advocate subsidised Prosecco? Grants to renovate period houses in Islington? Free holidays in India for hard-pressed writers? To find out, and also how a man with such a ridiculous sense of who are the 'less fortunate' and who aren't will square the circles, I think you'll need to tune in.
[1] Fraser Nelson has been featured on this blog before. He made a breathless argument that New Orleans was
a richer city per capita than inner London, an argument made entirely on the
wrong assumption that a household is the same as an individual.
Update: I've listened to it. Cohen was a bit out of his depth, and I thought Charles Murray was impressive, although I think his assumptions that someone can put £2k a year into a pension fund and it will grow to £250k over 45 years could be optimistic if the funds grow as large as he thinks, as returns are likely to be much smaller. Simon's (in the comments) summary of John Rentoul's views is totally accurate. What I find most strange is there was no dicussion (I expect no-one really knew) of who this 10% below the poverty line actually are.
Labels: Nick Cohen
Oliver on blogging
Oliver has
another go at political blogging (which of course is a very small subset of blogs, but the one we tend to concern ourselves with), partly because it narrows the amount of comment available.
If, say, Polly Toynbee or Nick Cohen did not exist, a significant part of the blogosphere (a grimly pretentious neologism) would have no purpose and nothing to react to.
Modesty and realism, alas, make me assume this is not a dig at this blog, but I do think this is very unfair on Oliver's friends over at Harry's Place. I think there is a case to be made that Nick Cohen has relied on blogs, in particularly the Harry's Place blog, for many of his columns and that book, just as much as they have relied on him.
Labels: Bloggy, Nick Cohen
Nick Cohen was wrong about Iraq war
He's hinted at it before, but apparently to a New Zealand journalist
Nick Cohen said:
“You never get it from the reviews, but I say in the book, opposition to American policy and George Bush is entirely justified. The protestors were more right than most of the so-called intelligent people in government.”
But, naturally:
Now he wants people to stop fixating on why it was wrong to go to war. They need to move on.
This remarkable view, suggests the Euston Manifesto's demand that critics stop "picking through the rubble of the arguments over intervention" (yes, those are the words) was written by
Nick Cohen. He also declares of Ayaan Hirsi Ali:
"She was driven out of Holland. By the left.” I don't think this is entirely accurate either.
Labels: Nick Cohen
The Shame of the Left, part XIVIII
Next week's
Evening Standard column brought to you this week.
What kind of moral sewer has relatavism got our left-wing academics into when they can
describe the execution of Saddam Hussein as "one of the worst days of my life.I was just so upset, even on the verge of tears". And did you know Kate Winslet can't get a parking space at 9am outside Fresh & Wild in Islington? And why didn't Gordon Brown's budget do more for the hard pressed couple on £100,000 a year?
Labels: Decent Left, Iraq, middle class, Nick Cohen
The Shame of the Left
May I pre-empt
Nick Cohen by noting that with the
honourable exception of the Social Democratic Party and the Green Party,
no-one on The (German) Left has denounced
the decision of a German judge to not grant a women a quick divorce because violence was to be expect and allowed as noted in the Koran (English mini-translation
here).
Labels: Decent Left, Europeans, Nick Cohen
Nick Cohen appeals to right-wing Americans
In
Opinion Journal, no less:
I hope conservative American readers come to Britain. But if you do, expect to find an upside-down world. People who call themselves liberals or leftists will argue with you, and when they have finished you may experience the strange realization that they have become far more reactionary than you have ever been.
Thank God for the Wall Street Journal and its endless coverage of Egyptian bloggers.
Labels: Nick Cohen
The Shame of the Left, part XXVIX by Nick Cohen
Apparently, except for bloggers, only
Human Rights Watch and
Amnesty International [1] have been protesting 'here' [2] against the jailing of Egyptican blogger Abdel Karim Suleiman, which apparently backs up
Nick Cohen's book which argues that the liberal-left (with a special focus on Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International) have turned their backs on the poor world in gruesome alliance with Islamists [3].
[1] Reporters without Borders certainly
have to, but I suspect their Frenchness ruled them out.
[2] 'Here' I think means the UK, which is a little odd as I thought Human Rights Watch was based in the United States.
[3] Aside from this ridiculous argument, I agree with most of the post.
Labels: Decent Left, Nick Cohen
Nick Cohen update
You will be pleased to know that the most blatant instance of his
untrue claim has now been removed from the Observer website. Though it remains
here.
A commenter in the post below finds
an online version of Nick Cohen's remarkable article bemoaning the fate of childless couples who earn £100,000 pear year, and suggesting that Labour needs to think of their financial plight if it is to win the next election.
Update: According to
Stephen Pollard a second print run is already under way, so if any readers pick up a new copy can they tell us how (or if) Nick has changed his book to correct his misunderstanding.
Labels: Nick Cohen
Nick Cohen on middle class poverty
I didn't think it could be possible that Nick Cohen's articles on other topics would be worse than his pieces on Iraq. But it is true. Three week ago in the Evening Standard he went on a rant about "Labour were losing the South" because of the rising cost of living for a couple on....£100,000 a year.
Take a standard young couple who want to have children...They both have good jobs - he's in human resources, she's at the BBC - but every penny of the Pounds 100,000 a year they bring in shoots back out again.
The difference now is that it [London] is a hard city for the middle class. The modest ambition to live an ordinary life is beyond the means of hundreds of thousands in jobs their parents assumed would guarantee them a secure future.
A 'standard young couple' - £100,000 a year!
It never fails to suprise me the extent to which these upper middle-class journalist types who live in Islington or similar have no idea about how much most people earn. Median household income in the UK in 2004/2005 was £24,700. London's median income is slightly higher, but not much (mean income in London is much higher) so it's probably currently a little under £30,000. The lower limit of the upper decile of the household income distribution, ie the point where only 10% of households earn more than yours, is £53,209. A couple, both working, might earn more than this (but if they're young, they might not), but there's no way £100,000 is typical. Cohen's couple are going to be in the top 3-4% of the income distribution, even in London.
I'm not saying that people in this income bracket do not have money concerns. But they clearly don't have the money concerns of those on half or a quarter of that level.
Labels: Nick Cohen
We told you this would happen
A letter in today's Guardian (in a collection responding to Martin Kettle's review of
Nick Cohen's book:
The dimension Martin Kettle entirely ignores is the economic one. Britain now is a profoundly unequal society. However, nationalisation proved in the end to have been a failure in extending democratic advance, and the cooperative movement has never really take off . But without economic democracy political democracy has no muscle.
All power to Alan Johnson as he tries to steer a new course, and Billy Bragg as he tries to gather the scattered remnants of a forgotten national identity. But it will take more than Bragg's exhortation, and Johnson's efforts to ensure that history is properly taught, to revive the ideals which have animated the lives of those of us who still call ourselves socialists.
Wendy Mantle
London
Does she mean Alan 'Not the Minister' Johnson, or Alan Johnson, the Cabinet Minister and Trade Unionist? I'm genuinely not sure - in a way Alan 'Not the Minister' Johnson is the more obvious candidate, given I wasn't aware Alan Johnson was trying to steer a new course. But then again he is the Education Minister, at least presumably for a few more weeks until John Reid resigns, and so he would be in a position to 'ensure history is properly taught' (or at least attempt that). But then again Alan 'Not the Minister' Johnson is a co-founder (with Nick Cohen) of the
Euston Declaration and is a lecturer, so it might be him.
This confusion was easily avoided, and we did say so.
Labels: Decent Left, newspapers, Nick Cohen
Cohen's book arrives
Nick Cohen's tome has arrived courtesy of Amazon, and I can confirm that the excerpt in
The Observer is correct - he does invent a dedication by Azar Nafisi to Paul Wolfowitz. The actual text goes further - it is on the "title page" so he's clearly not referring to the acknowledgement, and he declares it a dedication.
A cryptic dedication on the title page of Reading Lolita in Tehran, a memoir published by Iranian feminist Azar Nafisi in 2003, encapsulated how warped the liberal left had become..Once she would have seen the liberal left as her natural ally - she was fighting for its principles, after all. But Reading Lolita in Tehran was dedicated 'to Paul' [Wolfowitz]
This really raises questions about Cohen's research. Has he actually read the book? It seems highly unlikely that he would have read the book, and independently of Christopher Hitchens, made the same mistake as Hitchens. But then again if he had read the book because he read Christopher Hitchens, surely he would have realised it was not dedicated to "Paul", nor that it was on the "title page"?
Anyway, on his website he is still making
the untrue claim. Perhaps the dinner guests were silenced by the audacity of the claim?
Once, when book editors were heaping deserved praise on Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi’s poignant account of educated women suffering under the Iranian mullahs, I managed to silence a literary dinner party for the first and I suspect only time in my life by asking if they realised the ‘Paul’ Nafisi had dedicated her book to was Paul Wolfowitz.
Labels: Nick Cohen
Nick Cohen
Nick Cohen, the famed author of
"Why it is Right to be Anti-American" and "
Come on you Liberals if you think you are hard enough" has
excerpts from his new book,
"What's Left - how Liberals lost their way", in today's Observer.
There are only
two chapters (or bits of chapters), and they deal with somewhat different themes. The first is essentially 'how the left (or liberal-left) lost its way' and the second is how dealing with Iraqis made Cohen support the war.
On the development of his own views it is a little disappointing. There is a great big gap between the end of the 1990s and 2003, of which very little is mentioned. But this was the time of "Why it is Right to be anti-American", the attacks on liberals for supporting the Afghan war, the attacks on Blair for supporting Bush's Iraq policy. The criticism of America in his first article is based on three things unrelated to Iraq - Kyoto, the anti ICMB treaty and its failure to sign up to the ICC, none of which I think he has changed his mind on. But there's nothing here about that (it could of course be in the other chapters), and also nothing to note that a lot of the criticism he makes of liberals really apply more accurately to himself.
Furthermore Cohen also can't resist his usual tactic of conflating tiny subsections of the left with the left, liberals, and the liberal-left. For example:
why were men and women of the left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps?
On the Iraq war, his criticism is some of the strongest I have seen from him.
The protesters were right to feel that Bush and Blair were manipulating them into war...they were manipulating the evidence..Cook told his special adviser David Mathieson after the meeting that Blair did not know about the detail and didn't seem to want to know either...if democratic leaders are going to take their countries to war, they must be able to level with themselves as well as their electorates...If the Labour party had forced Blair to resign, there would have been a rough justice in his political execution...The war was over soon enough, but the aftermath was a disaster.
and at times he appears to want to say that opposition to the war was justifiable, and even perhaps right, but that it was the failure to support Iraqis since that has been the true betrayal. At other times he seems to think that supporting the war was the only 'moral option'.
Alas, I can't help agreeing with him when he says "All right, you might say, but the reaction to the second Iraq war is not a good enough reason to write a book". A lot of the behaviour he writes about from far-left groups seems indefensible. But it's also atypical of the left, and more so the liberal-left. Most people who opposed the war did so from a strong feeling that it would make things worse. So far, at the very least, it's hard to say that they were wrong. We know at a minimum 150,000 Iraqis have died (and Cohen might profit from asking why so many people on the
right and pro-war left seek to downplay or deny this) and probably two or three times more. There's no way those deaths would have been avoided if more liberals or more leftwingers had written columns saying how much they supported Iraqi trade unions.
These observations that there is a small subsection of the left who have lost the plot wouldn't make much of a book (and despite Cohen's denials that there was any anti-Americanism in 1960s Vietnam protests, I suspect he could have written much the same book in 1972). You could make much the same charge against the right if you could be bothered, with hatred of Muslims and demand for oil obviously behind
some people's support for the war. For Cohen, however, whose previous position was on the far-left, it's obviously personal. Add to that his bizarre hatred of liberals (maybe because history was kinder to their views than his when he was on the far left, and kinder now he has outflanks them to the right?) and you get this latest tome.
I said, "outflanks them to the right", and I think this is fair due to what I've read in his columns more than in these pieces. Cohen doesn't talk much about his non-foreign policy positions in the two chapters in the Observer, but we get a glimpse when he talks about economics.
Socialism, which provided the definition of what it meant to be on the left from the 1880s to the 1980s, is gone. Disgraced by the communists' atrocities and floored by the success of market-based economies, it no longer exists as a coherent programme for government. Even the modest and humane social democratic systems of Europe are under strain and look dreadfully vulnerable.
This adds to the feeling that its the far-left he is writing about, not the liberal-left or even the soft-left. And maybe it means "Why it is Right to be anti-European" is in the offing?
In any case, though I think this was best left in its Observer and Evening Standard column form, I do want to know what he says in the other chapters, and am pleased to say you can get it for
under £8 from Amazon.
Update:
Hitchens' review suggests other chapters may have more on Cohen's bizarre reaction to September 11th. It also contains this strange bit:
In one telling example, Cohen cites the work of Iranian feminist Azar Nafisi, who three years ago dedicated her book Reading Lolita in Tehran to Paul Wolfowitz. “By 2003 it was no longer surprising that an Iranian feminist should turn to an American neoconservative,” Cohen writes pointedly, “for where else was she to look for support?”
This is Decency gone circular mad. The populariser of this story is Christopher Hitchens himself, and it isn't true and he
knows it isn't true. "Paul", almost certainly Wolfowitz, is mentioned in the acknowledgements, along with lots of other people from 'all sides of the political spectrum'.
UPDATE II: That wasn't Hitchens' fault, but
Nick Cohen's. Apparently the last paragraph was formatted in the print edition of the Sunday Times as a boxed excerpt from Cohen's book, and Cohen must have just taken it from a Hitchens' piece without bothering
to check the details. I'm not surprised about Cohen, but I'm surprised it got through all of the proof-reading and editing stages, and of course that the Sunday Times itself made no checks (they could have done it on Amazon's Look Inside the Book, if they didn't want to use google).
Labels: Nick Cohen
Nick Cohen
No, not another link to
Nick Cohen's classic piece,
"Why it is Right to be anti-American", but instead to one of his whinges:
On the one hand, there am I delivering a ’scathing’ critique of the Left, and on the other, there is the ‘brave’ figure of old Footie offering his long life as a rebuke and reply. Except that What’s Left? is a book suffused with the anti-totalitarian and internationalist values of the democratic Left, of which Michael Foot is a part.I consulted him, quoted him in the chapter on the 1930s and thanked him in the acknowledgements.
If "Why it is Right to be anti-American" gave us some clue about what would be in his latest book, we can go one better with this new nugget of information. Cohen has reviewed a Michael Foot book in the past (no web link, but it was in the Independent on Jan 10th, 1999), "Dr Strangelove, I Presume", and indeeed found himself agreeing with much of it:
To my knowledge Foot, a Labour loyalist, ignored for years the repeated urgings of his friends to stand up against the Blair leadership until the Prime Minister supported the US attacks on Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq. The folly of recent Anglo-American foreign policy was too much for him and his anger inspires a book which starts as an oddity and concludes with a convincing synthesis. Gradually, Foot's passion and intellect take hold and by the end you are presented with a picture of the globalisation of the nuclear menace in which the supposedly incompatible forces of fundamentalism and the West mesh together neatly...The UN weapons inspectors in Iraq might have been a model for monitoring world disarmament, but were hopelessly compromised by their subservience to the US and, at American insistence, Israel another breaker of UN and nuclear proliferation resolutions and manufacturer of weapons of mass destruction which receives no punishment, even though fundamentalist not to say lunatic factions are honoured by and represented in its government. It is truly eccentric to see Foot as a silly old man.
This new book from Nick Cohen is going to be a classic.
Labels: Nick Cohen
Friends of Nick
Watch our for the (rather amusing, it must be said) plugs for
Nick Cohen (the famed author of "why it is right to be anti-American" - it's ONLINE, it's ONLINE!) book from various people. Oliver Kamm mentioned the idea behind it:
I have in front of me a bound typescript of Nick Cohen’s book What’s Left?, to be published in Feb. The author says it’s part of the publisher’s “viral marketing campaign”, whereby – ahem – influential people can go to dinner parties and say “I’ve just read a brilliant book by Nick Cohen”, and thereby make everyone else feel envious and out of the loop for not having a copy. If we are not invited to dinner parties, then Mrs Kamm and I must wander the streets of Hove looking out for dinner parties in strangers’ houses, crash them, and say “we’ve just read a brilliant book by Nick Cohen”.
So I’m writing to let you know that I’ve read a brilliant book by Nick Cohen. It’s called What’s Left?, and it will be published in February. There is a fantastic section on Gerry Healy, which I’m pleased to say I prevailed upon the author to leave in when he was wondering whether to take it out on grounds of its esotericism.
Now John Lloyd in the FT also mentions its "brilliance":
It has not conquered because it still has doughty opponents. One such is journalist Nick Cohen, whose book What’s Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way appears next month. If it does not have a profound effect on the political debate, I will be surprised and disappointed. It is an essay of wide reference and great brilliance...
I don't, btw, doubt that they do think it's brilliant.
Labels: Bloggy, Decent Left, Nick Cohen
Nick Cohen
It's been said many times, but that makes it no less true - he's such a right-wing Islingtonian hack these days, isn't he?
In this week's Evening Standard he notes:
IF I WERE a Romanian or Bulgarian, I would find the European Union's lectures on corruption hard to take. It's not that EU membership shouldn't be a spur for investigating the graft of Balkan politicians, civil servants and judges. But when, for 12 years in a row, the European Court of Auditors has refused to sign off the EU's accounts because they cannot account for billions of euros, anticorruption investigations appear as necessary in Brussels as Bucharest.
It's certainly true that the accounts weren't signed off, and it is not a good situation. But this is right-wing hackery because his desire to attack the EU (in the guise of the Commission) has prevented him (though I doubt even his supporters would say that he puts much research into any of his work these days) from making the slightest enquiry into what 'not signing off the accounts' means. As I understand it, the nature of the Commission's position means that it unlikely they will ever be signed off in their entirety (which means they won't be signed off at all), because the Commission cannot control many of the bodies that spend the money (as they are parts of the national governments). The Commission's books, which is what we would call the accounts of a PLC, are seen by the auditors as 'reliable'.
Labels: Nick Cohen
