Euston Manifesto

I'm amazed this didn't spark more response. Representatives of the European left publish a concise set of beliefs and it doesn't result in any debate at all.

I don't know who it was among the Decents who thought "maybe if we start out with a load of motherhood and apple pie generalities and tuck the Iraq bit away on page 6 it won't be as unpopular", but they were wrong.

Euston, you have a problem

The supposed 'new political alignment' will never split the left or set up a viable opposition to it.

[..] John Lloyd announces that the left in Britain must face a parting of the ways on the issue of imperialism or anti-imperialism. The occasion for this sensational development is the publication of the Euston manifesto, about which a good deal has already been said on this site [..].

My own reading of the manifesto is that it is less a call to arms than an instrument of surrender. Three elements inspire this reflection:

First, the non-position taken on the Iraq war. Others see this as either a crippling weakness in the manifesto, or even as a point of ridicule. I take the embarrassed silence on this point as a sign of the political collapse of the liberal shock-and-awe party. If even the cream of pro-war punditry and academia can no longer agree to make the case for the Iraq war then, as I have argued previously, that case is as dead as the proverbial parrot. While the E Team may still make the case for "interventionism" in the abstract, they can no longer unite to defend it in the particular.

Second, 20 people meeting in a central London pub is a split? In the Fourth International, perhaps, as one or two of the signatories may recall. But in the left in Britain as a whole? I don't think so. Of course, the choice of licensed premises [..] may have been a smart move in shaking off Muslims, but it has not in my experience been an insuperable barrier to attendance by prominent trade unionists, for example. None seem to have made it, however, something which cannot entirely be attributed to the unpopular front the Islam-hostile left has recently formed with the union-busting Freedom Association.

Think back to 1999 and the Nato attack on Yugoslavia. That was a split - with any number of institutions, organs and icons of the left on the pro-war side, from the Scottish TUC to Tribune to Michael Foot. Today, the socialist, green, trade union, revolutionary and liberal lefts are actually more united than ever before in the wake of the Iraq war. The shrivelled line up of the E Team today is a measure of how far the imperialist tide has gone out in opinion on the left - and among the public at large for that matter - as a result of Iraq.

Apparently, this is because "our own segment of the left was significantly under-represented in the mainstream media" in the words of Norman Geras and Nick Cohen. This would, presumably, be the Nick Cohen of the Observer, New Statesman and Evening Standard [..] It would seem to me that between Cohen, Lloyd (FT, Evening Standard), Aaronovitch (Times, previously Guardian and Observer), Hitchens (Mirror), pre-apology Hari (Independent), they have hardly been denied the oxygen of publicity. [..]

Yet - and this is my third point - it is those who are more usually confined to the estimable columns of the Morning Star who have prevailed in the argument and, as a result, the E manifesto reads like a letter of resignation from the left, rather than a platform for its renewal. Every paragraph breathes hatred for the anti-war movement and its major components, to the extent that even points that would genuinely secure common consent across the left are followed by peevish attacks against those who have been proved right about the Iraq war. At the same time, there is an explicit opening to liberal and even conservative opinion, linked quite clearly to a rejection of the socialist left.

And this is to be a "new political alignment". Will it stand in elections? Will it have a membership and democratic conferences? Of course not. [..] The E Team will have a certain importance as long as Blair remains in Downing Street because it provides some intellectual ballast for his foreign policy agenda. It is not inconceivable that the E Team could provide the same service to David Cameron, if the latter ever gets to No 10. Some of the pro-war left have already hooked up with Cameron's advisers through the Henry Jackson Society. But they will neither split the left, nor set up a viable "political alignment" in opposition to it.

The reason for this failure, it seems to me, is that so much in the world turns today on the question of imperialism and anti-imperialism. This is not just a matter of the Iraq war [..]. Yet the concept has vanished from the lexicon of the E Team [..].

[T]his myopia leads John Lloyd to condemn, without a trace of irony, the anti-war movement for allegedly forming "alliances with fundamentalist Islamic groups, whose policies on civil and human rights, including equal rights for women and gays, are deeply reactionary" while standing strong for his own pro-war alliance with George Bush, whose policies on civil rights and equality for women and gays are ... er, what exactly? And they are surprised to be dubbed Islamophobic.

How the politics of anti-imperialism develop in a democratic and inclusive form, building on the real, actual unity of socialists, liberals, greens, trade unionists and democrats [..] achieved in the anti-war movement - that is a debate of consequence. But for those who portentously declaim that "America is a great country" while having nothing to say on the "economic forms of equality", the best response is in the vernacular: [..] Whatever.