Splintered Sunrise

Just a brief stopgap post today, and I assure you a longer piece will be along shortly as time and energy permit. I just wanted to say I was deeply saddened to hear about the death of Kurt Vonnegut, whose novels I used to devour on a regular basis. He was a standing example of what was good about American culture, and American socialists aren’t so thick on the ground that the loss of an articulate radical is easily missed.

I expect there will now be something of a run on sales of Slaughterhouse Five, and rightly so. But do yourself a favour and dig a little deeper. Check out Mother Night or Cat’s Cradle. Maybe even Bluebeard. But certainly don’t miss Mother Night.

Rud eile: From What Next?, this sterling defence of James Connolly by Rayner Lysaght may be of interest to regular readers.

On returning from my short break, it is a matter of extreme pleasure to your humble scribe to get a nice plug from the estimable Mick Fealty over on Slugger. This has meant my site traffic going through the roof over the last day or so, so I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome new readers. I hope you enjoy the commentary here and decide to stick around.

The obvious story to go with is the restoration of the Executive, but this is going to run and run, and the major theme of this blog – the GUBU nature of Northern politics – will I’m sure get ample fuel from the new devolved dispensation. So I’m going to fulfil a long-standing promise to regular readers, and begin looking at Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? Nick’s book being the disjointed ramble it is, and owing to the fact that it’s difficult to read more than three pages at a go, this will be a serialised review.

The most obvious place to start is on Nick’s sources. A good deal of Nick’s authority comes from his reputation as an investigative journalist, which leads the casual reader to assume that Nick is basing his polemic on reliable information. Of course, a journo is only as good as his sources – as the late Paul Foot used to say, while the journalist may get the byline he is pretty much reliant on his network of informants. Nick, as someone identified with the left, tended to get a lot of his stories from lefty informants. For example, his exposés on education owed not a little to information provided by SWP teachers. Apart from Nick’s gifts as a stylist, this is one of the major reasons for the bite that his early demolitions of Blairism possessed.

A major aspect of Nick’s evolution since 2002 is that he no longer talks to the sort of people who fed him his stories. He has relied ever more heavily on a relatively small circle of friends and colleagues who all think alike, who are preoccupied with foreign policy (always Nick’s weak point) and who, whatever their feelings about the man himself, have done rather well under the Blair regime. It is no surprise, then, that What’s Left? relies to an unconscionable extent on the writings of Nick’s pals, as well as on cutting and pasting from congenial blogs and websites.

Nick is pretty open about this in his rogues’ gallery of acknowledgements, but this is something you notice throughout the book. One of the least attractive features of the Decent Left is their incestuous tendency to cite each other as authorities, and this gives What’s Left? something of the quality of a Normblog post stretched out to enormous length. This wouldn’t be quite so bad if Nick was relying on genuinely distinguished authorities, but…

Nick’s writing on the Balkans derives almost entirely from Marko Attila Hoare, the Nigel Irritable of the Decent Left and a swivel-eyed Serbophobe. The sections on postmodernism (which Nick clearly doesn’t understand) and Chomsky (ditto) are lifted almost verbatim from the relevant chapters of Francis Wheen’s Mumbo-Jumbo. Nick’s authority on Trotskyism is veteran icepick-wielder Paul Anderson. Nick’s big mate Oliver Kampf not only contributes the stuff on George Lansbury but also, as a full-spectrum idiot, seems to have chipped in with dubious factoids on virtually every subject Nick covers.

A critique of Nick will therefore enable, nay require, an examination of his dodgy sources, which he has regurgitated and embellished with scant regard for any independent research or checking of facts. Nick has a breathless style that may carry you along with his logical leaps, if you assume that the premises those leaps are based on are fairly sound. But they aren’t.

Update 5.4.07: Eagle-eyed readers will note that the image on this post has been changed. The original image was the result of my enthusiasm for a rather puerile punchline running away with me. I have reconsidered on receiving representations from readers who felt my humour was in poor taste, could be construed as misogynistic, and anyway I should have known better than to try and get away with boob jokes on a socialist blog.

Well, I have held my nose and procured Nick’s little book. From first impressions, it’s even worse than I feared. This is sad in a way, because a lot of Nick’s latter-day comrades are people I would expect no better from. Nick, on the other hand, has quite an illustrious history and used to be downright brilliant on domestic politics – Cruel Britannia was probably the best analysis of Blair’s Britain, and Pretty Straight Guys was a good read too, although the incongruous chapter on Iraq, which gave all the signs of having been added at the last moment, pointed the way to his current position. Foreign policy was always Nick’s weak point, so it was probably inevitable that his downfall would come from that quarter.

So, what are we to make of What’s Left? Well, as I say, there are people from whom nothing better could have been expected. Kamm’s book was utter bilge, but then we all knew what Kamm was like. To find Nick, sometime one of my favourite journalists, writing something like What’s Left? is deeply depressing, and it gives me no pleasure to say that he has been digging ever more frenziedly since publication, probably encouraged by good notices. It seems to me that Nick is completely losing his grip, and one thing we don’t need is a lefty Britney Spears (or, perhaps more accurately, David Icke) on our hands.

The best way to approach this book is in chunks. Nick’s previous books were after all collections of his journalism, and What’s Left? carries this on by being a series of disjointed little essays – and the essays are bad enough singly without Nick’s desperate attempts to make them fit an overarching thesis. So, when Norn Iron commitments allow, I will be blogging a review of Nick in instalments. Since the good folks over at Aaro Watch are finding the book too depressing to cover in much depth, the Sunrise will step into the breach.

Reviewing What’s Left? will also give us an opportunity to look at the phenomenon of the Decent Left as a whole. Since most of the book, those bits not recycled by Nick from his old columns or springing out of his fertile imagination, is lifted from his mates’ books and articles, and sympathetic blogs and websites, some examination of Nick’s sources will be in order. Just look at the rogues’ gallery in the acknowledgments at the back for a veritable Who’s Who of Decentism.

So, readers may expect to be regaled with occasional looks at Nick. Feedback will as always be welcome; and, unlike Nick’s composition of his dire screed, the reviewing process will involve some homework and concern for factuality.

PS. This rather intemperate review by my old friend Ian Birchall in Socialist Worker may be of interest. Not that I am likely to be more temperate, but Ian does have the advantage of concision.

I’ve been reading I Think the Nurses Are Stealing My Clothes, a compilation of the best comedy work of the late and sorely missed Linda Smith. Edited by Linda’s long-term partner Warren Lakin and old friend Ian Parsons, it collects highlights of her stand-up routines going back to the mid-80s, together with her most memorable radio and TV appearances, interspersed with tributes from her friends. It really is a wonderful book to dip into.

I never met Linda Smith, but I suspect like a lot of people, after hearing her on the radio a few times you felt you knew her. She had a terrific likeability and accessibility that caused audiences to warm to her immediately, as well as a great comic voice that fairly leaps off the page here. And, although she came up with the generation of 1980s political comedy, she had her own distinctive style that actually reminds me a lot of another comic genius, Dave Allen. This is probably best explained by contrast – today an awful lot of comedy, even in the mainstream media, seems to be based on the idea that effing and blinding is funny in itself, or that you can get an infinite amount of laughs out of knob jokes. Like Dave Allen, Linda wasn’t averse to the odd bit of swearing or smut, but those become minor parts of your act when you actually have something to say.

And this was the thing about Linda – she did have something to say, and she said it in a way that was uniquely Linda. Although she was definitely a woman of the far left, and her political edge is much to the fore in this book (her wonderfully vicious bitch-slapping of Neil Kinnock is here, and if there’s any justice David Blunkett will never live down her “He’s Satan’s bearded folk singer. How can someone who looks so much like a jolly fisherman be such a miserable bastard?”) but she wasn’t a ranter. Her observational humour was as likely to take in English literature or Test Match Special as politics. And even when she stuck the boot in, she would do it in such a nice, disarming way that you couldn’t really take offence. This is probably why the Radio 4 audience took her to their hearts as they did.

I think there are a couple of reasons why Linda stood out as a political comedian. In the first place, she was a genuine working-class intellectual, coming from Erith (which the maps say is in Kent but at ground level looks like Magnitogorsk) and living for years in unglamorous Sheffield. This background gave her observations an edge that was denied to those comedians who were middle-class kids slumming it; it also meant she didn’t romanticise the English working class. She struck a fine balance between idealism and cynicism.

She also, like most leftwing comedians, was sensible enough not to join a leftwing group. She was therefore free of those left vices – dogmatism, a concern with orthodoxy, political correctness, internecine feuds with other left groups and backstabbing within the group – that, apart from being just plain unpleasant, would be deadly to any comic sense. Imagine if you will a comedian who was a fervent member of the Militant Tendency. Hard, isn’t it? Mark Steel I suppose is the exception who proves the rule, managing to combine membership of the SWP with being a very funny man. But even Mark tends to shy away from mining the rich seam of comedy in his own organisation.

But I think the key point in Linda’s success, and why she is so fondly remembered, is the personality that shone through her work. The tributes in this book invariably focus on her tremendous warmth and kindness – unlike an awful lot of socialists, she not only hadn’t forgot why she was a socialist, but she practised what she preached and embodied those characteristics that I think a better society would encourage in the population at large. Combine those human qualities with a fantastic ability to communicate, and it’s easy to see why Linda was a beacon for any of us who have ever had to say, “I’m a socialist, but I’m not weird, honest.”