In Media Guardian today (free registration required) Peter Wilby, former editor of the New Statesman, writes a column in which the positions taken by Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen on the Iraq war are treated as part of a broader phenomenon. This one:
Lots of people move to the right as they grow older, and newspaper commentators are no exception.Wilby reveals more about what his own concept of 'being on the left' must mean than about the questions he purports to address. Questions like:
What causes left-wing commentators to slip their moorings in their 40s?Some of Wilby's suggested answers to this question: property ownership or parenthood; getting mugged or burgled; wanting more income; getting bored (restless minds finding the left too much of a straitjacket). He gives not so much as a hint of any consciousness of a left broad enough to embrace more than one view about the Iraq war, foreign policy, bringing down oppressive tyrannies, ending genocides in progress, humanitarian intervention, that sort of thing. On the contrary, Wilby's left is delineated in terms of notions like 'betrayal' and 'deserting the cause'. He should look around him a bit. Beyond Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen - for all their deserved prominence - he will find there are quite a few people still on the left thinking differently from him, not because they're bored but just because they think, and because they didn't spend whatever time they did spend in acquiring left values in order to end up marching to the greater benefit of one foul dictatorship or another.
Update at 6.20 PM: With his permission I post here this letter sent by Jimmy Doyle to the Guardian:
Sir, Peter Wilby asks what makes leftists and, in particular, Nick Cohen, move to the right (When lefties turn to the right, August 1). Why is he so modest about his own contribution to the process? The main editorial for 17 September 2001 in the New Statesman, of which he was then editor, included the following passage, which deserves to be far more notorious than it is: "American bond traders [killed in the World Trade Center], you may say, are as innocent and undeserving of terror as Vietnamese and Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no... They preferred George Bush to Al Gore and Ralph Nader." How many read these morally imbecilic words, felt sick to their stomachs and began to wonder what was happening to the British left? "I don't underestimate the sense of betrayal on the left," writes Wilby of Cohen. The words are much more appropriately applied to himself.