NICK COHEN
What’s Left?
HOW LIBERALS LOST THEIR WAY
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
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)
CONTENTS
2. ‘Sacrificed So Much for This Animal’
4. Academic Scribblers and a Defunct Economist
6. The Boy on the Edge of the Gang
Intermission: A Hereditary Disease
8. All the Russians Love the Prussians
10. The Disgrace of the Anti-War Movement
12. The Jews, the Muslims and – er – the Freemasons
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