Not quite there yet
Matthew Parris THE FALL-OUT: HOW A GUILTY LIBERAL LOST HIS INNOCENCE by Andrew Anthony Cape, £14.99, pp. 312, ISBN 9780224080774 £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 1 n political journalism, as in warfare, relish is taken in a parade of defectors. Media neocons will therefore cheer the publication of the very personal tale of one Observer journalist's journey from the dovecote to the hawks' nest, not least on the issue of global terrorism and fundamentalist Islam. The author — once what he calls a left-liberal' — now sees this as the greatest threat facing the West. 'Wake up, and smell the cordite,' he writes. Andrew Anthony is an inspired phrasemaker and the phrase will serve for many armchair crusaders as a six-word summary of a 300-page book.
Which is a pity, because this is a more interesting story than that. Honest (within its lights), deliciously caustic about its author's former ideological stablemates, and sometimes moving in its humanity, we are given one man's testament to the mid-life realisation that he had got his entire world view wrong. With a touch of Nick Hornby and something of John O'Farrell, Andrew Anthony is never sharper, funnier (or more shocking) than in his descriptions of ideological attitude-striking in 1980s Islington and Hackney. There are anecdotes that should make Margaret Hodge and Tessa Jowell blush, and I've never read a better record, first-hand, of the way comprehensive education and the right-on educational philosophies of 1970s schoolteachers let a bright boy from a poor background down. His account of a youthful mission to Nicaragua to help the Sandinistas is the first record I've read of an episode of leftist internationalism almost forgotten today.
Anthony is a vivid and sensitive writer with some good stories to tell; and, though the unrelentingly confessional style does sometimes grate, this, his first book, is clever, engaging and palpably sincere.
But there's something wrong with his argument, and it goes to the heart of the matter. Take the Iraq war and (more loosely) the Blair-Bush approach to global 'terror'. It simply isn't true that from the outset the British Left united in opposition to both, or even knew its own mind. The Observer was rather sympathetic to Coalition aims. Writers like Nick Cohen, Johann Hari and David Aaronovitch all supported the war. Were it not for the involvement of a Republican American administration I suspect more on the Left, and fewer on the Right, would have been cheering on the liberators of Baghdad and dancing on Saddam Hussein's grave.
The British Left has never had a problem in principle with intervention, coercion or prescription. Why would they? To the leftist mind, impressed with the possibilities of collective action channelled into statist structures for the purposes of increasing the sum total of human happiness at gunpoint, the idea of wading into the Middle East to sort things out was always going to have an instinctive appeal. It was doing so alongside the Pentagon that stuck in the throats of those left-wingers who have opposed the war.
Nor has our Left shown any instinctive regard for civil liberties or freedom of expression — not when these things were trampled upon in the Eastern bloc, as indeed Anthony points out. Discipline, streaming and elitism in schools, likewise, were admired when they happened in Russia. What may have given the impression that our Left believed in liberty was their dislike of the established order in Britain. Their apparent opposition to the enforcement of morals and their enthusiasm for a 'multicultural' society have been driven by their rejection of the political class doing the enforcing. The Left were on the other side. It was a question of sides.
'Liberalism' and 'compassion' have been flags of convenience for the Left, just as, sometimes, 'liberty' has been for the Right. The journey Andrew Anthony has made from the Left towards a sympathy with moral conservatism, 'British' cultural assertiveness, and concern about international terrorism, has not taken him as far as he thinks. People like Gordon Brown — and innumerable other converts from old to new Labour — have made it too. The allegiance of the Left and its natural supporters is, in the end, neither to arguments nor ideas, nor even to individuals, but to structures. One structure is very like another.
Reading The Fall-Out I was at first perplexed at how long it took the young Andrew Anthony to see through the incompetence and twisted logic of the leftist mindset. But as I followed his progress across the ideological spectrum and saw him start doing, from the anti-Left, exactly what he used to do from the Left — labelling people, labelling groups, labelling ideas, ferreting out absolutist and bloodcurdling claims made by individuals on the other side and brandishing quotes (the way the Israelis and the Palestinians do) with a triumphant 'you-see-what-kind-ofbastards-we're-dealing-with' — it dawned on me that, furious that he was taken in by the certainties of the Left for the first half of his life, Andrew Anthony may, after half-time, be rushing into the arms of an opposing certainty.
There is a different journey: not from supporting one side in a Manichean universe to supporting the other but from dualism itself to a more tangled, shaded, less coherent world view. It's a harder journey. I wish as lively a writer as Andrew Anthony would attempt it.
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