Splintered Sunrise

Moral outrage. It’s not one of the first things I always think about in terms of the Decent Left, but I do think it’s an essential part of their group psychology. Hence, I suppose, the appellation. They are the only decent people around, the only moral people, the only people capable of compassion, solidarity or empathy. That’s what they would like to think, anyway.

It’s a bit like Mr Tony Blair’s faith-based approach to governance. For Mr Tony, the fact that he lied about WMD in Iraq is neither here nor there. The fact that the invasion has turned out to be a disaster is neither here nor there. What’s important is that he acted with the best of intentions. It’s all about the purity of motives, you see.

On the other hand, it’s a bit like Peter Tatchell, who’s not actually part of the Decent Left – he draws the line at actually supporting foreign wars – but is pretty close to them. Peter’s strength, as has been pointed out before, is also his weakness. He can’t be aware of an oppressed minority without running a solidarity campaign, and he has enough nervous energy to keep thousands of these campaigns on the go. Most of them are entirely worthy, but many are so obscure that, while you’re happy Peter is doing something, you yourself would take some convincing to do more than sign a petition. But Peter believes that his hobbyhorse of the moment should be everyone else’s top priority. So he’ll launch a campaign for gay Tibetans, and about five minutes later (with jabbing finger in play) start demanding to know why the left isn’t mobilising for the gay Tibetans. Could it perhaps be their deeply ingrained homophobia? Eh? Eh?

Sometimes, as I said recently, it’s just the normal positivist response of getting extremely irate when confronted with scepticism. In philosophy, this has a lot to do with the perception that sceptics are simply destructive in their criticism, which has a lot of truth behind it.

But transpose that into an emotionally driven view of foreign affairs. It tends to lead to the Yes, Minister fallacy of “Something must be done; this is something; therefore we must do it.” But it also leads to a tendency to see one’s antagonists as being corrosive cynics devoid of humanity. This is what Daniel was saying on CiF the other day: if you put hard questions to Decents about what, in practical terms, the American and British armies could do to make things better in Zimbabwe or Darfur or Tibet or Chechnya, they don’t want to have that discussion. They just get red in the face and start shouting about Henry Kissinger and Douglas Hurd. You see, practical politics is a distraction from the important business of being outraged.

The obsessive vilification of Hurd, who left office a whole thirteen years ago, is interesting in itself. You’ll recall the rather embarrassing chapter of What’s Left? wherein Nick Cohen tries to prove that Hurd and Malcolm Rifkind are co-thinkers of Noam Chomsky, a proposition that might make sense in those rarefied circles where people think Marko Attila Hoare is a superhuman genius. But Hurd, whose political thought I am rather familiar with, is very far from being a peacenik, let alone a Chomskyite. Actually, he’s a rather run-of-the-mill Palmerstonian. Douglas doesn’t object to military action when it’s in the British national interest. He doesn’t even object to the projection of military power for humanitarian ends, if a sensible plan can be put forward that is likely to make things better rather than worse. What he is adamant about – and this enraged a lot of people over Bosnia – is that the British government shouldn’t be bounced into precipitate military adventures so as to make celebrities, do-gooders and campaigning journalists feel better.

Chomsky is another revealing target. I suspect most of the antipathy to Chomsky comes from his consistent application of the mote-and-beam principle, his insistence that you don’t win moral brownie points for loudly denouncing official enemies, and that it displays much more courage to take on your own rulers. Not to mention, the British journalist has much more chance of doing something about the abuses of the British government than those of the Chinese or Zimbabwean governments. But I also suspect that tone comes into this. Chomsky’s political writing, deriving in style from his academic writing, is cool, dry, dispassionate, often pedantic and often surprisingly sarcastic. This can be guaranteed to annoy people whose yardstick of morality is how very, very angry they are.

And, you know, there is a case for being cool and dispassionate. I think it says a lot that one of the great trailblazers of Decency has been the Dude, a man who’s always – even in his Trotskyist days – always played fast and loose with the facts, and relied on panache and rhetorical hotdogging to win arguments. This can be entertaining, up to a point (and the Dude passed that point long ago). But I do have a strong streak of empiricism in me, probably from that chemistry background, that doubts that emotion can be a real basis for good politics. Of course you bring values and beliefs to bear – but when anger (synthetic or otherwise) is your measure of virtue… well, you’re almost predestined to get bad policy resulting. And that’s even assuming that you get to the point of hard policy. Many of our Decents seem to prefer sticking at the stage of ostentatious displays of outrage.

The late John Sullivan used to say that it was part of the human condition to want a life bigger, more colourful, more marvellous and more coherent than our own. That, John quipped, was why the Christians invented Jesus and the Trots invented Gerry Healy.

Now I don’t in the normal run of things spend a lot of time thinking about Gerry. He’s been dead almost twenty years, and even when he was alive he was never more than a marginal political figure. But he’s just been brought to mind by a perusal of the latest Private Eye, evidently in one of its “Democratiya with jokes” weeks and combining a ferocious Decency with the Eye’s famous penchant for fighting the battles of yesteryear.

So we come to the Eye’s continuing coverage of the London mayoral election, and this fortnight the line of attack against Ken Livingstone is, er, his relationship with Healy in the 1980s. This provides the opportunity to mention Gerry’s rather outré personal life, but there is more concentration on the “Libyan gold” story and, via the Labour Herald affair, implicating Ken in dealing with Gaddafi, at least by association.

Thing is, this stuff has all been in the public domain since at least 1985. Our Eye scribe might like to consult Nick Cohen, who for reasons that escape me devoted a full 16 pages of What’s Left? to the history of the WRP. (In fact, Nick was certainly aware of Ken’s connection to Healy back in 2004, when he endorsed Ken for mayor.) I’m also taken aback to learn that News Line ceased publication in late 1985. This will, I fear, come as a terrible blow to the affable old codger who sold me a News Line just a few months ago.

Skipping lightly over a dig at al-Jazeera for allegedly being not critical enough of Bob Mugabe, we arrive at a consideration of the Olympics and China, by a writer who evidently thinks the Olympics should be about the promotion of human rights. This leads into an attack on long-time Olympic supremo Juan Antonio Samaranch and his supposed fondness for the Beijing regime. This is explained by the reproduction of a photograph of Samaranch giving a fascist salute in his native Barcelona. The effect is only slightly dulled by the photo dating from 1974, when Franco was still in power. Anyway, were the Falange really that keen on Maoist China? I’m not sure.

It’s also nice to see occasional columnist ‘Ratbiter’, who brings to our attention the doings of that famous PR man of the Thatcher years, Lord Tim Bell. Bell, apparently, has been engaged to burnish the image of the government of Belarus. (Belarus being, as RB helpfully informs us, “Europe’s last dictatorship”, although Serbia might soon join it in that category should the voters not back the EU-approved candidates in the May election.) This comes as a profound shock to me. I had never dreamt that PR men burnished the public images of shady characters. Tut, tut. By the way, RB manages to bring in an attack on an even more contemporary villain than Tim Bell - er, the late VI Lenin. Gadzooks!

I suppose we should at least be grateful that the boys seem to have eased off on their tireless campaign to remove Douglas Hurd from the Foreign Office…

Meanwhile, on the books review pages, I am struck by the following:

There must be something in the water at the Observer, because its journalists seem unable to stop themselves producing copycat versions of each other’s books.

Last year columnist Nick Cohen published his What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way, followed seven months later by Andrew Anthony’s stunningly similar tome, The Fallout: How A Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence.

Given the Eye’s commendable enthusiasm for recycling, isn’t this a little harsh on poor old Clothes For Chaps?

As promised, I’m going to take this opportunity to delineate what I see as some major features of the Decent Left and its group psychology. This follows on from Justin’s excellent analysis – I especially want to expand on his points 4 and 5, pointing to Decency’s historic links with left sectarianism, which not only accounts for the zealotry of the “ex”, but also for their importation of some of the least attractive elements of far left discourse. What follows is in no particular order.

1. Decency can be defined as an attempt to establish in Britain an exact carbon copy of American neoconservatism, only without the specific context that gives the neocons what intellectual weight they have. Alternatively, it can be seen in terms of ageing former leftists who have moved sharply to the right, but have spent so many years denouncing conservatives that they can’t admit to having essentially become conservatives. Therefore they reach for the smelly comfort blanket of senile Shachtmanism.

2. Fundamental to Decency is the Whig version of history, according to which there is such a thing as “The West” (this might be defined broadly as the global North, or more narrowly as the United States plus Airstrip One). “The West” is held to represent progress in a historical-teleological sense. It may not be exactly an ideal society, but it’s the nearest thing the world has to one. The rest of the world (“Ruritania”, in Fukuyama’s terms) is struggling to achieve this ideal. Decency goes beyond this in arguing that countries which don’t seem to be struggling towards the Western ideal should be bombed into following the correct path. The Decents also like to see themselves as the most enlightened people in this most enlightened society, as the only true representatives of modernity and progress (viz Marko’s Egg of Truth). Remember that the next time they hold forth about Leninist vanguardism.

3. The Decents are a foreign-policy tendency. While they may individually hold plenty of views on domestic policy, as a group they are remarkably uninterested in matters domestic except as a weapon against those (the Muslims, the Trots, Ken Livingstone) who have incurred their wrath on foreign-policy grounds. So, even if you don’t personally care much about gay rights, it can be a useful stick to beat the Muslims with. (The SWP have also discovered this of late.) Despite their claims to leftism, they are uninterested in the class struggle except as it impinges on Iranian bus drivers. And they are obviously uninterested in challenging the structures of power, as they keep lobbying those structures to invade foreign countries.

4. As Justin points out, the Decents retain some unlovely rhetorical habits (and modes of thought) from the far left, and these are worth looking at in some detail. They of course specialise in over-the-top denunciations. They have a pronounced liking for Stalinist-style amalgam arguments and guilt by association. It’s worth remarking at this point on their affinity with the Alliance for Workers Liberty, the former political home of some of the most prominent Decents. As anyone who has been to an AWL weekend school can testify, the AWL contains many pleasant and intelligent people. However, their charm is slightly reduced by their habit of calling you an anti-Semite every ten minutes. The Decents recycle this, while throwing in terms like “pro-fascist” and “appeaser” for good measure.

5. One rhetorical trope worth identifying in particular is what I term “Chomsky in your head syndrome”, as although Noam isn’t the sole target by any means he’s the most prominent one. Sometimes this is rooted in dishonesty (I’m looking at you, Oliver), but very often it’s a result of cognitive dissonance. It seems to be taken as read that it’s fair to make up an outrageous position and impute it to Chomsky, even if Chomsky is on record as saying the exact opposite, on the general moral grounds that these outrageous positions are just the sort of thing a reprobate like Chomsky would say. Todd Gitlin has a rather nasty variation on this, which is to ascribe these positions to unnamed “Chomskyites” and thus associate them with Chomsky without the hassle of actually attributing them to Chomsky himself.

6. Justin makes the correct point that, by self-identifying as “the left”, the Decents are positioning themselves as the furthest leftward point of acceptable discourse. There is a parallel to this with their position on criticism of Israel. Prof Geras is often accused of hypocrisy because, while he allows in principle that criticism of Israel is not necessarily anti-Semitic, in practice he tends to assume (or at least insinuates) that it is. It’s not necessary to cast Norm as a hypocrite here. It’s probably more correct that he sees himself as being the dovish extreme, and it’s only criticism more strident than Norm himself would make that enters the realm of Singling Out.

7. The problem of agency Justin identifies is an important one. It’s worth noting that the Decents are not an activist tendency. Some have never been activists. Some haven’t been activists for thirty or forty years. Although they proclaim their allegiance to the Labour Party, which doesn’t require its members to be either leftwing or active, few are even members of Labour. We are talking here about pundits. This leads us to that fascinating grammatical construction, the Decent We. The Decent We is not the same as the Royal We. It’s more like the Football Manager’s I. When Alex Ferguson says “I’ll see if we’ve got that”, he really means “I’ll send a minion to see if we’ve got that”. Likewise, when a Decent says “We must invade Country X”, he really means “The state must invade Country X on my behalf”.

8. Like any good sect, the Decent Left has an apostolic succession, with St Orwell taking pride of place. It also has an elaborate demonology – although there are perpetual Big Demons (Noam Chomsky, George Galloway, er, Douglas Hurd), particular venom is often reserved for those who the Decents used to be in agreement with. Ask Johann Hari.

9. The particularly venomous nature of Decent discourse of course has a lot to do with the bad training many of them received on the far left. It’s also not unrelated to their basis in punditry – if you don’t intend to do anything (vide the Spartacist League), there’s an inbuilt tendency to rhetorical inflation. This also has something to do with the fact that the Decents are a closed milieu and much of their stuff is for internal consumption. Something else that follows from that is what military theorists call incestuous amplification. That’s a fancy way of saying that, as Jim Cannon used to put it, if you stick a small group of like-minded people in a room together they can talk themselves into just about anything.

10. If you’ve ever been in the Socialist Workers Party you will be aware that that outfit has positions on every subject under the sun. Think of the most esoteric subject and I guarantee that, if the party doesn’t already have a position, Renaissance Man Chris Harman can think one up over lunch. Likewise, the Decents, who are supposed to define themselves around Iraq and Afghanistan, have their own analogue of Harman, namely the Scoop Jackson Society, a collection of indentured nerds at Cambridge. The function of the Scoopies is to furnish Decency with ready-made party lines on far-flung corners of the globe like South Ossetia and the Kurile Islands. Why the Decent Left should actually need positions on South Ossetia and the Kurile Islands is beyond me. Likewise, they share with Trotsko-sectarian discourse a fondness for retrospectively taking positions on historical events.

11. The Decents sometimes describe themselves as liberals, but they have fundamental philosophical differences with liberalism. Real liberals are usually, philosophically speaking, Deweyite pragmatists. The Decent Left, on the other hand, share with most of the far left a sort of crazed positivism mixed with a strong streak of magical thinking. The positivism is more interesting in that, when the likes of the Dude or Wheen describe themselves as defenders of the Enlightenment, they aren’t wrong. This is a worldview informed basically by Descartes, Hobbes and Locke, or what Strauss would term first-wave modernity. It matters little that those guys got a philosophical hiding from Rousseau, or that Rousseau himself has long since been superseded.

12. This positivism accounts for Decency’s strident scientism (which does not necessarily imply any knowledge of science). It also helps to explain their preoccupation with French postmodernist thought. After all, postmodernism is simply the latest variant on the age-old problem of philosophical scepticism, and the one thing you should know from philosophical history is that fervent believers in a system tend to get very irate when confronted with scepticism. The delicious irony is that the Dude’s critique of religion is itself reliant on sceptical thought from 300 years ago, now elevated into “The Enlightenment”.

13. There is another important aspect to Decent thought as regards foreign policy. That is do-gooding. The most basic feature of the do-gooder is his disregard for the law of unintended consequences. Don’t get me wrong, they understand causality – that if you do A, then B happens – they just don’t consider the likelihood of C, D and E following, never mind Y.

Allow me to illustrate. You could plausibly argue that a US/UK invasion could knock over Saddam pretty easily. But that doesn’t mean you have to disregard the distinct possibility of Iraq descending into tribal-sectarian civil war. Or, to go back to 1999, it was never in any real doubt that the massed forces of NATO could knock over Serbia. A lot of people thought that, to that end, it would be a dandy idea to arm the KLA. Almost nobody – I believe Misha Glenny was an exception – raised the obvious point. Which was, “Well, that’s Macedonia fucked as a viable state.”

Of course, to the convinced Decent consequences, unintended or otherwise, are of little consequence. What matters is their purity of motives. And that’s why I always say that do-gooders in politics are a menace.

Rud eile: I am extremely gratified to see the hit counter climb above 200,000. A big thanks to all readers.

I’ve been working on a post about the psychopathology of the Decent Left, and intend to have that up before long. In the meantime, I direct readers to this excellent discussion on Aaro Watch, and especially to Justin’s sharp contribution in the comments, which I hope he won’t object to me reproducing here for your reading pleasure. 

1. The “Decent Left” is, essentially, an anti-left movement: criticism of the Left, not only criticism but basically damnation, is its main thrust and purpose. It is a contemporary phenomenon although nothing that it says is basically new, nor is the way in which it says it. It has a great deal in common with the old Atlanticism of the rightwing of the Labour Party, the more aggressive rightwing and anticommunist strands within the Labour movement, and Cold War liberalism.

2. Its proponents, broadly speaking, come from two basic political backgrounds. One is the number of small leftwing groups outside the Labour Party, mostly, in Britain, Trotskyite in nature where they were not the Communist Party: but also the old Right of the Labour Party, especially that part which was most hostile to CND and Bennism and yet did not leave the Labour Party. In either case the Decent Left has attracted a minority of these political trends (which were, of course, hostile to one another).

3. We therefore have those who were always deeply pro-NATO and opposed to the Left and to peace movements, or those who used to be on the opposite side but have renounced those positions. In both cases a certain visceral hatred of the Left is central to their outlook.

4. In the case of the ex-members of the far Left, there is a great deal of score-settling involved, which may in part reflect distress at the amount of time they feel they wasted in a politics they now consider harmful. As is not uncommon with the politics of the “ex”, their hostility can be utterly unbalanced and disproportionate and they will tend to be unaware of this. Issac Deutscher’s comments are still of relevance here.

5. The ex-far-leftists in particular can be accused of importing a number of bad rhetorical habits from their old politics, including an extremely aggressive polemical style, a fondness for identifying betrayers and apologists, a keenness for denunciation and for requiring their adversaries to disassociate themselves from one another, and a liking for inference in analysing other people’s statements, so that they are made to say what they probably do not. They are unaware of the aggressive, bullying character this gives them. They also have the old red-baiter’s liking for a witch-hunt.

6. Although, as said above, there is nothing entirely new about either the politics of the approach, they are like all political trends, formed by political characteristics particular to their times. These would include the invasion of Iraq and the Afghan and Yugoslavian interventions that preceded it, all of which they not only supported enthusiastically, but took as an opportunity to denounce people who did not. (It does not follow that because one supported any or all of those actions, one is on the Decent Left: what matters is the enthusiasm and the denunciation.) It would also be impossible to understand their emergence without reference to the general worldwide decline in socialist belief over the past generation, or the contemporary problem of radical Islam, which they are in favour of tackling with the same aggression that is their most obvious characteristic. Other political trends, including a certain aggressive pro-market liberalism (e.g. the Progressive Democrats in Ireland) tend to resemble them in their attitude to the Left.

7. In some ways their development can be seen as a problem of agency. In either of their backgrounds, they used to be attached to a labour movement which was considerably more powerful, in a number of ways, than it is today, and whose decline is perhaps the most important background factor in influencing contemporary politics. In a way similar to that observed (fairly or otherwise) by Orwell in locating enthusiasm for Stalinism as a transferred patriotism, they have shifted their allegiance to the Western democratic state in general but to its overseas military interventions in particular. They expect it to perform a world-transformative role in a way analogous to that which they previously expected (or hoped) of the proletariat and they retain the belief that the casualties will ultimately be proven to have been worth it.

8. Their enthusiasms extend to Israel, which they support critically in theory but enthusiastically in practice. They take a psychopathologising view of the opponents and critics of Israel. They also tend to be enthusiasts for the politics and personality of Tony Blair.

9. Their domestic enemies, whom they lump together, include the remaining far-Leftists, leftwingers in general and opponents of military action in Iraq. They see themselves as the left because they wish to define themselves as the furthest point Left in acceptable political discourse. In this desire to exclude the Left from the bounds of acceptable politics – and to see it as essentially violent and pathological in nature – they are not entirely unusual among those closer to the political mainstream.

10. A certain philistinism can be detected in their output, perhaps reflecting a dislike and distrust of intellectuals, who may be suspected of relativism. This, in turn, perhaps reflects their propensity to see the world in black-and-white terms and to take a position that who is not with them is against them.

My dentist doesn’t like me reading Private Eye. Every fortnight without fail, there is not inconsiderable grinding of teeth. Oh yes.

Of late, this has as often as not been attributable to occasional Decent columnist ‘Ratbiter’. And lo, so it is again this fortnight, as our intrepid neocon takes on Ken Livingstone yet again, with a vivid illustration of what the last post was trying to point out.

You can guess what the content is. Basically it’s the same stuff Martin Bright has been touting about, with a little lily-gilding thrown in. Sheikh Qaradawi blah blah blah Socialist Action yada yada yada Jamaat-e-Islami zzzzzz. There’s also a clear insinuation, but probably not clear enough to be actionable, that the mayor’s office is deliberately stoking up anti-Semitism so as to win votes from those dastardly Mooslims. And a bigging up of former Socialist Action member Atma Singh, who seems to have temporarily displaced Ed Husain as ethnic whistleblower of the month.

This is pretty standard boilerplate. What’s more interesting is the proposition that, while a few months ago Ken looked like a dead cert for re-election, he’s now trailing Boris in the polls. The reason for this, we are given to understand, is that lefties have been abandoning Ken in droves because he’s been too chummy towards uppity ethnics with funny religions.

I think not. If we’re talking about the Decent Left, those guys hate the Cheeky Chappie and have done so for ages, in some cases for decades. It seems more plausible to me that Ken’s unpopularity is not unconnected to the general unpopularity of the Labour Party. Let’s say that the Labour candidate was Oona King or even (Lord help us) Denis MacShane. Would they be doing significantly better than Ken? I rather suspect they would be doing even worse, the Lee Jasper saga notwithstanding.

But this leads me on to another question – just how big is the Decent Left? Is this a significant swing constituency? Let’s try a little mathematical exercise.

It may be best to go back to the Euston Manifesto. You remember the Euston Manifesto, one of the defining documents of this century, yes? No? Well, the Reader’s Digest condensed version goes like this: Norman Geras and Nick Cohen go to the pub. Nick bitches and moans about what a shower of bastards the left are. Norm scribbles a manifesto on the back of a beer mat. (Eustonians like to say there was Serious discussion involved, but I’m sticking with the beer mat theory. It’s the best explanation for the combination of windy truisms with weirdly specific stuff on the Middle East and, er, Linux.) Alan (Not The Minister) Johnson then sets up another one of his thousands of websites, and invites punters to sign the document.

It’s an imperfect measure, but the number of people willing to take the trouble to sign an online manifesto is as good as indicator as we have of the number of people who self-identify as the Decent Left, as opposed to the broader number of people who subscribe to one or another of their propositions without buying their entire bill of goods. And the number was, as I recall, around 3000, which would tally with the similar number who signed Alan NTM’s Unite Against Terror statement. One could quibble with this, of course. There were a few tongue-in-cheek signatures, notably from Ern Malley. And a very large proportion of signatories seemed to live on another continent. But let’s allow 3000 as a ballpark figure for convinced Decents.

Now, the size of “the left” or “the liberal left” or whatever you’re having yourself is much harder to estimate. But let’s note that the Guardian and Independent have a combined daily sale of around 600,000. That gives you something like a ballpark figure. Putting the one figure against the other gives you some perspective, not least on the whinge in the Manifesto about how the Decent Left couldn’t get space in the media. This was always hard to take from the shy and retiring Nick Cohen, or the equally bashful Francis Wheen, not to mention a certain hedge fund manager with a blog who unaccountably gets invited onto Newsnight to discuss Latin American politics, but really – these guys are underrepresented in public discourse? Shyeah.

If we squint a little and look at things from a different angle, that of left sectology, we could also say that the Decent Left is of a roughly comparable size to the Socialist Workers Party. There are of course differences. The SWP, for all its many stupidities, has a distressing tendency to go out and do stuff. The comrades are willing to go out and get their hands dirty agitating for worthwhile causes. More to the point, whether or not you think Lindsey German’s candidacy is a good idea, they have actually got a mayoral candidate and seem willing to go out and campaign for her. This seems a little more constructive than writing columns urging Gordon Brown to deselect Ken and draft in a candidate more to Decency’s taste. Especially since few of the Decents are actually members of the Labour Party.

So you want an alternative? Why not go out and build one? Let’s see a Nick Cohen candidacy – I wouldn’t vote for him, but it would liven things up more than a little, and put the Decent agenda to the broad masses for their consideration. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

Well, I hope the axolotl is zoologically correct…

Just a brief rumination on the quandary faced by the Decent Left with regards to the London mayoral election. This poses a little bit of a problem. Many of the Decents have a fairly tenuous connection with “the left”, and their claim to be a left tendency as such depends a lot on a residual affiliation to the Labour Party. Few Decents, at least few of those I know, are actual members of the Labour Party, so we’re talking about a platonic affiliation for the most part.

On the other hand, the Labour candidate is Ken Livingstone, and the Decents really really hate Ken. There are plenty of good reasons not to be keen on Ken, but Decency tends to hold his good points against him. So what we’ve seen in terms of debate has been a sort of weird parallel to the SWP’s discourse. If you take Socialist Worker at face value, which I wouldn’t recommend, you would think the mayoral race was Ken versus Lindzee, with Boris as an also-ran. Decent discourse has been odder still. The discussion on HP Sauce has seemed to suggest that there’s only one party running. Boris barely rates a mention. What we have instead is a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about whether Ken is supportable.

Now, this is quite simple. If 90% of your discourse is along the lines of “Why Ken is shit”, and the (to my mind) much greater menace of Boris only merits a footnote, you lay yourself open to the charge of being objectively pro-Boris. If that’s true for the columnist in Socialist Worker, it’s multiply true for the columnist in the Evening Standard, a paper that’s campaigning for Boris to the extent of running his press releases as front-page splashes.

Some people have realised this. I am cheered to hear that Aaro is backing Ken, albeit with severe reservations. But then, Aaro isn’t so much an ideological Decent as a New Labour hack. This explains Aaro’s generally much better quality – he has a superior grasp on reality, notably being quite good on the Muslims.

Does nothing about Ken recommend itself to Decency? Could, for instance, his bellicose anti-Serbian stances of the 1990s win him a little credit? It seems not - not even the Balkan-centric wing of Decency has spoken out for our newt-loving comrade. (There are good reasons for this, which are rooted in obscure far-left internecine feuds too boring for even me to go into. Suffice to say that the two most frothingly Serbophobic far-left grouplets, the AWL and whatever Cliff Slaughter’s outfit is called these days, have their own long-term beefs with Ken. Although I note that the AWL, the Decent Left’s favourite Trot group, is holding its nose and backing Ken. [Correction: Dave informs me below that the Soggy Oggies are in fact supporting Lindzee. Which is as funny as a monkey's arse.])

You get a lot of this from Nick. Nick swears blind he isn’t backing Boris, and I’ll take his word for that. But Nick, for some considerable time now, has been expatiating on the subject of “Why Ken is unfit to be the Labour candidate.” It’s been quite entertaining, not least because Nick hasn’t exactly shown much of a populist touch.

First we had the idea that Ken was unfit for office because of his chummy relationship with Hugo Chávez. I suspect that most Londoners don’t know who Chávi is. I further suspect that those who do, especially those of a Labour-voting persuasion, may not think of him as a monstrous figure threatening the Free World. To the extent that he gets up Yo George’s nose, they might even like the guy.

Then we had the charge that Ken was too cosy with the Jamaat-e-Islami. I confess that the Jamaat are not my cup of tea. But I suggest that most Londoners outside the Bangladeshi community don’t have a clue who the Jamaat are. To the extent that you popularise this, you risk slipping into “scary brown people” territory. Incidentally, I suspect Nick of having had a little input into a particularly virulent “Ratbiter” column in Private Eye last year which ran along these lines, going so far as to use the word “appeasement”. Impossible to tell, of course, but it’s thematically identical.

More recently, Nick has been holding forth on the fact that Ken attended Gerry Healy’s funeral almost twenty years ago. And the broad masses cry, “Gerry who?”

But El Gordo has failed to come to the rescue and dump Ken, so you’re stuck with him as Labour candidate, whether you like it or not.

But despair ye not! Our old friend Oliver Kampf recently put forward a constructive suggestion. This was that Oona King (remember her?) should stand as an independent. This would not only provide an alternative to Ken, but also vindicate the sainted Oona after her defeat by the Forces of Darkness, aka Gorgeous George. Ollie, who doesn’t have a vote in London, continues:

I know from much anecdotal evidence that Oona was a dedicated constituency MP. One of the misfortunes of her former constituents in Bethnal Green and Bow is that, having replaced her with the absurd George Galloway, they are now in effect unrepresented at Westminster.

Hmm. Even assuming that Ollie could find Bethnal Green on a map, never mind the possibility that he has interviewed a representative cross-section of its electorate, he has obviously been talking to different people than I have. But no matter.

This is such a bizarre idea it’s hard to know where to start. Firstly, is Oona willing to be drafted? Her media career may take priority at the moment. And, even if she still harbours political ambitions, she may reckon that running as an independent against a Labour mayor may not be the brightest of ideas.

More to the point, who would vote for her? Apart from media luvvies and the Decent Left, neither of which are enormous constituencies, who would she appeal to? And what platform would she run on?

Actually, there’s an idea. If she would let Ollie write her platform, maybe it would be worthwhile for the entertainment value alone…

Rud eile: I am happy to report that I survived St Drunkard’s Day without touching a drop. However, I did hear that there was an appeal from the Derry traders for the punters up there to drink in moderation. Give those guys a medal for boundless optimism!

Morticia: What’s closer in this world than a boy and his mother?

Pugsley: A boy and his octopus?

Nick Cohen these days has a barn door quality about him, which is sad for those of us who remember when he was one of the sharpest critics of the pretentions of Blairism. Even so, I continue to be astonished by his heroic ability to miss the point.

Or, in this case, to meander away from the point. Nick is dealing with the American election, and specifically the appeal of Irish-American candidate Barack O’Bama. Barack leaves the Brits cold, so Nick tells us. At least those Brits Nick has been talking to. Or possibly just Nick. Now, Nick has a potentially good point in dealing with O’Bama’s media coverage and what that says about race and class, but then he meanders away off into a parallel universe.

This has already been done by Chris Bertram over at Crooked Timber, and followed up at Aaro Watch, but an article that crams so many non sequiturs into such a short space is worth a look. Nick has a go at “conservative anti-Americanism”, but thankfully doesn’t expand on that. His thoughts on the subject will be familiar to those of us who have read the chapter of What’s Left? where Nick demonstrates that, er, Douglas Hurd and Noam Chomsky are co-thinkers.

Anyway, Nick tells us that support for Hillary Clinton among some British politicians is an index of anti-Americanism. He also reckons that enthusiasm for O’Bama in Europe is an index of anti-Americanism. Maybe it’s just me, but I get the sense that Nick is suggesting the only way to avoid the trap of anti-Americanism is to support McCain’s Chips. If so, why doesn’t he say so?

Actually, there seems to be some coalescing of the Decent Left around McCain. I expect that to continue as the election approaches. I confidently predict that Oliver Kampf will come out for McCain if he hasn’t already, thus maintaining his unbroken record of supporting the most rightwing candidate in every foreign election he’s blogged about. Another man to watch is our friend Marko, who may find he has an affinity for McCain’s tough stance against the threat to the Free World posed by, er, South Ossetia. And Alan (Not The Minister) Johnson, as a devoted aficionado of the late Max Shachtman, might fancy a go at recreating one of Max’s more arresting initiatives, Socialists For Nixon.

But really, if you’re a pro-war liberal, the US election should provide an embarrassment of riches. Okay, O’Bama may have blotted his copybook over Iraq, but he does have some other points going for him. He’s very keen indeed on the war in Afghanistan. And, when it came to appointing his foreign policy gurus, the first people he turned to were the professional Russophobe Zbigniew Brzezinski and the (now sadly departed) professional Serbophobe Samantha Power, both of whom should have reassured muscular liberals.

As for Hillary, she has Mr Bill’s record of humanitarian bombing in the Balkans to fall back on, and she’s been flagging up her support for “free Kosova”. She has a record of extreme bellicosity on the Middle East. She’s been very close indeed to the Israel lobby. But for some reason, the Decents seem not to like her very much. Maybe they’re taking their lead from the Dude, or maybe it’s just all those Republican blogs they read.

So, there you have it. If you’re not anti-American, the only option is to row in behind the most bellicose presidential candidate in recent memory. Hmm. Really, why don’t the Decent Left stop pretending to be the authentic representatives of progressive thought, and just admit they’ve moved to the right?

As for Nick, who I like a good deal and whose incisive writing I miss, maybe he should ponder whether he really wants to be the second coming of Norman Podhoretz.

Rud eile: This excellent discussion on Cedar Lounge may be of interest.

Not for the first time, I am not inconsiderably annoyed at Private Eye. One of the things that keeps me buying the Eye on a fortnightly basis is the consistently excellent Eye TV column, which generally is as good a telly review as appears anywhere in the press. But, turning to the latest Eye, I notice it isn’t there. It has been replaced by a lengthy piece by the mag’s occasional correspondent “Ratbiter”.

If you’ve been exposed to one or two Ratbiter columns, you can guess what comes next. Yes, it’s another dig at those dastardly Mooslims. To be precise, a dispute between Newsnight and the Tory think-tank Policy Exchange. The rights and wrongs of this I don’t know in any detail, but there are one or two points worth making.

Firstly, I can’t help noticing the casual reference to the Muslim Public Affairs Committee as “a far-right Muslim outfit that helped fund the Nazi apologist David Irving”. Nice to see this old chestnut being brought up again with normal Eye standards of accuracy, as well as the assertion that the Muslim researchers who wrote the Policy Exchange report fear being “Rushdie-ised” if MPAC find out who they are. Now, I have my differences with MPAC, but if you were looking for a progressive Muslim lobby group, an organisation that is trying to find a place for Muslims in British society while challenging the conservative power structures in Muslim communities, those are the guys you’d be looking for. However, it seems MPAC’s Indecent line on foreign policy and issues related to the War on Terror is enough to relegate it to the “uppity brown people” – sorry, “Islamofascist” – category.

But the smear on MPAC isn’t the point of the article, it’s just there to add spice. I’m almost surprised not to see a Ratbiter denunciation of Ken Livingstone for “appeasement”, or a puff for the fraudulent “Sufi Muslim Council”. The issue is whether the Beeb is scared to take on radical Muslims. If you’ve seen John Ware’s Panorama reports, it might seem like a redundant question, but here we go:

It doesn’t take much to get Conservatives going about the BBC and the darkest conspiracy theories are doing the rounds. They imagine that liberal broadcasters have an hysterical desire to prove their own commitment to multiculturalism by besmirching the names of anyone who worries about radical Islam and ignoring anything they say.

Not just Tories, mind you. You get a little of this on the Daily Mail letters page, but many Tories are quite hard-headed on this sort of thing. On the other hand, the preceding is pretty much an article of faith for the Decent Left. This is where Nick Cohen and Harry’s Place occupy the same ground as Jon Gaunt and Richard Littlejohn, although Gaunty and Shellsuit tend to be a little more balanced and subtle in their approach.

And what was the explosive content of the Policy Exchange report? Er, after a year of painstaking undercover research they discovered that some Muslim bookshops are selling the works of one of the last century’s most prominent Muslim thinkers, the late Sayyid Qutb. I look forward to the next Policy Exchange report, exclusively revealing that some Catholic bookshops sell the writings of that well-known opponent of liberal values, Benedict XVI.

This sort of complaint has been doing the rounds rather a lot lately, not least because it’s a godsend for lazy journos. Go into a Muslim bookshop, see if they have Qutb’s Milestones on sale, and shriek in horror if they do. And there’s also a very broad idealist streak involved. So Ratbiter describes Qutb as “the intellectual father of al-Qaeda”, which is a bit like describing Nietzsche as the intellectual father of Nazism – it might win you some cheap applause at the Oxford Union, but it really doesn’t take you very far. I thought that Zbigniew Brzezinski had a bit more to do with the founding of AQ, but I suppose that just marks me out as a crude empiricist.

What Qutb does do, if you’re a young Muslim alienated from the surrounding society, is provide an intellectual framework for you to understand your alienation. Note that this only works if you’re already an alienated Muslim, and that a Qutbist intellectual framework is not remotely necessary for the alienated Muslim to adopt jihadi ideas. It simply isn’t the case that innocent young people are being corrupted by reading Milestones. I mean to say, I’ve read Milestones and haven’t felt the urge to become a suicide bomber. On the other hand, if you can stomach it, 7/7 bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan’s video provides a few clues to his motivation. You will notice that Sidique Khan conspicuously fails to say that he did what he did because he read Qutb. On the other hand, he does talk rather a lot about Iraq.

I stress that understanding the motivations of someone like Mohammad Sidique Khan does not for a moment justify his diabolical actions. A reason is not an excuse. But you can see how this is uncomfortable for those who support the war. It can’t be admitted that an aggressive colonialism in the Middle East might have something to do with terrorism at home. So what we get is GW Bush’s “they hate our freedoms”, Mr Tony Blair banging on about “warped interpretations” of Islam, and people working themselves into a lather because some Muslim bookshops stock Qutb or Mawdudi. Frankly, this reminds me of nothing so much as those evangelical Christians who used to say your soul would belong to the Devil if you listened to heavy metal records. And it’s about as convincing.

There’s something I always find a little frustrating about Eamonn McCann. Articulate as he may be, he does have a tendency to play up to his audience. I’ve always suspected on that basis that he had a strong streak of the ham actor in him. If you see him at a meeting sponsored by the SWP, or on a strike platform, he’s always dead militant, often entering what Jeff Dudgeon calls his “I have a scream” mode. But when he’s on the likes of BBCNI’s Let’s Talk, he gets terribly wishy-washy, goes into “on the one hand, on the other hand” quite a lot… this is why everybody think Eamonn is their friend. You saw this at water charges meetings, where Bob McCartney would loudly proclaim his agreement with Eamo.

It was therefore nice to see Eamo showing a bit of spark on last night’s Hearts and Minds. The discussion was on the legacy of Che Guevara, which is the sort of nostalgia trip Eamo loves, and his antagonist, mirabile dictu, was Oliver Kampf. Kamm, of course, was billed as an author (of a book nobody’s read) and Times columnist (he’s actually a blogger who, due to some unaccountable weakness on Danny Finkelstein’s part, gets the occasional op-ed piece in the Thunderer) and, although Kamm knows less about the Cuban Revolution than I know about the mating habits of the millipede, dancing on Che’s grave was right up his street. If he could do it to poor old Monty Johnstone on his blog, how could he resist doing it to the iconic Che on telly?

On watching this, I am reminded of why Kamm doesn’t get more TV work. There is that curious diction, modelled I assume on his uncle the Man in the White Suit, but while Martin is fairly fluent, and actually writes quite well, Kamm gives the impression that English isn’t his first language. This impression is reinforced by his written English, which is more stilted even than my Gaelic. (Probably less so, since my Gaelic leans towards the “drink, feck, arse” end of the spectrum.) In any case, he didn’t say anything interesting. What you got was “Che was a Stalinist thug”, and with inordinate prolixity. Plus, Kampf seemed to feel that Che’s role in the summary execution of prisoners pretty much damned the entire Cuban Revolution.

Eamonn was rather good on that, pointing out that Umkhonto weSizwe had also been involved in some rather dodgy things but that didn’t invalidate the struggle against apartheid. Nice point, given that Kamm’s baffling insistence that he, a Tory-voting hedge fund manager, is a “man of the left” depends on him paying obeisance to certain metrosexual shibboleths, of which the South African struggle, now safely in the past, is one. But I was again frustrated at Eamonn’s politeness. He really should have gone to town on the smug little fuckwit. Kamm is in no position to moralise about the treatment of prisoners at the Bay of Pigs when you consider his fulsome support for whatever the Yanks are doing in Iraq. In general, and Eamo should have made this point, Kamm’s real problem with Che is that he didn’t kill nearly enough people. Or, to put it another way, that he was against the Empire rather than for it.

So Eamonn acquitted himself pretty well and put up a reasonable defence of Che. But he was far too nicey-nicey about it, and I dread to think what kind of performance he would have put up had he been up against someone more substantial than the ludicrous Kamm. Eamonn is an affable bloke, but there are times when you can safely dispense with the affability and call a mendacious warmongering prick by his right name.

I’ve been putting this off, but it will be put off no longer. Disappointingly, the current Democratiya does not contain Marko Attila Hoare explaining how the Serbs sank the Titanic and kidnapped Lord Lucan, nor Oliver Kamm droning on about his older brother’s penis the charlatan Chomsky and how he prevents our Ollie from being rightly recognised as the world’s most important intellectual. In the absence of the obvious targets, however, there are still a few zingers.

There is a letter about the repression of trade unionists in Iran. A worthy cause, but it’s notable that about the only time Democratiya shows any interest in the labour movement anywhere in the world is when you can bash Ahmadinejad.

Todd Gitlin writes a not entirely coherent piece on anti-Americanism, which somehow winds up with a denunciation of “Chomskyites” for opposing intervention in Bosnia, which apparently they saw as “an assault on decent socialists”. Not surprisingly, Gitlin does not quote Chomsky himself on Bosnia, because he couldn’t find anything approximating that.

One David Adler writes on Amitav Ghosh. Ghosh has of course written many interesting things about many subjects, but what interests Adler is Ghosh’s opposition to political Islam, which he can then use as a stick to beat Arundhati Roy, who is brought into the argument at a dubious tangent.

There is an extract from Barry Rubin’s new book on Syria. I don’t know if Rubin has been faithfully excerpted, but he seems to be arguing that Washington is straining every sinew to create a Palestinian state, and has been for two decades, only to be thwarted at every turn by the Assad regime. Why do I not find that convincing?

Irfan Khawaja writes on international law and war. His conclusion is that, for the good of all, international law should be ripped up. No, I tell a lie. International law should only apply to the Third World – the Empire should have a special dispensation to do whatever it pleases.

Gerard Alexander asks, Why aren’t we hearing all the good news from Iraqi Kurdistan?

Mark Gardner, press supremo for the Community Security Trust, writes on anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Not surprisingly for someone working at the CST, he believes British society is awash with anti-Semitism, as exemplified by hostility to the Israeli state. The best summary of this is in the old joke that the Engageniks are worried about anti-Semitism because it might lead to criticism of Israel. Gardner also sees something sinister in the SWP’s description of Israel as the US’s attack dog in the Middle East, and asks why the SWP protests the dog and not the master. Perhaps he’s missed all their anti-war activity. [Update 2.10.07: Mark is keen to point out (see comments below) that he is referring specifically to boycotts, and not to protests more generally. I still think the question is a loaded rhetorical one, and I don't believe the SWP to be an anti-Semitic organisation, although I do think they could save themselves a lot of grief on this issue by being more subtle.]

Dave Rich, Gardner’s sidekick at the CST press office, reviews Ed Husain’s The Islamist. Bearing in mind that Husain hasn’t been involved in Islamist politics for a dozen years, and has spent most of that time outside Britain, we might wonder what Husain can tell us about present-day political Islam in Britain, even assuming that he’s being honest and accurate. Nonetheless, Rich (they couldn’t have got a tame Muslim to review this?) loves it, not least because Husain provides lots of ammo for anyone looking to smite the enemies of the Jews call for the banning of Hizb-ut-Tahrir and the marginalisation of the MCB. This is really a slightly more sophisticated rehash of the Ratbiter column in Private Eye. All we need is a plug for the neocon farmhands of the fraudulent “Sufi Muslim Council” as representing “decent Muslims”.

Dan Erdman has a swipe at the American palaeoconservatives, a group who I rather prefer to the Decent Left. Dan writes, “The website antiwar.com is another popular outlet. The site’s title and amateurish design have led more than one confused commentator to mistake it for a left-wing site - an effect which may not be wholly unintentional - but the brains behind the operation belong to an old-right libertarian by the name of Justin Raimondo.” Nothing gets past Dan – I would never have guessed it myself, if Raimondo didn’t write a weekly column for antiwar.com. Michael Crick had better look to his laurels.

Evan Daniel calls for the Yanks to box smarter in their drive to overthrow the Cuban regime, considering that the embargo and Congressional funding for the ultra-right yo-yos in Miami may not be a good idea.

Tristan Stubbs writes on the slave trade, contrasting civilised Britain with barbaric Sudan. That’s for the benefit of anyone who thought Sudan wasn’t a repressive hellhole. Never mind, Tristan, wait till the next issue and Todd Gitlin will be claiming the “Chomskyites” support the Sudanese regime.

Jean Bethke Elshtain posthumously enlists Sidney Hook in support of the invasion of Iraq. Well, perhaps Hook in his dotage might have done so.

There is also a short review of Primo Levi, which doesn’t really fit with the rest of the journal but I assume is there for connoisseurs of Judaica. It’s not bad.

Finally, Alan (Not The Minister) Johnson conducts a rambling interview with Anne-Marie Slaughter about ethical foreign policy. The essential points are: America – yo! Genocidal dictators – boo! International law – maybe, as long as the Big Moral Empire still gets to be the enforcer of values. Armed intervention – can we get back to talking about high-flown values?

And that’s the house journal of Decency for this quarter. We read it, so you don’t have to.

More from Aaro Watch on the Scoopies’ turn at the Labour conference.

Update 30.9.07: Barry Rubin points out to me that of course Washington was opposed to the idea of a Palestinian state before 1993, and the failure of the Oslo process had other causes than the Damascus regime. I look forward to reading his book, which no doubt will have more nuances than I picked up from the extract.