I agree that the current book has some good bits.

I also agree that Nick still has the potential to provoke serious debate on the left.

But his ability to do so is going to be seriously limited while he continues to be openly indifferent to the question of whether his boldest assertions have any basis in fact.

Fuck- actually, you’ve won me over to whatever you believe in. Come back and explain what I would be if I only had a pair, and I’ll follow you.

You see, perhaps because you were so busy engaging in important and weighty matters, you didn’t actually deign to say what you consider acceptable, just to give general meaningless abuse. I want to know more so I can be a roaring success in life such as you obviously are.

He argued that: “since 11 September he [Tony Blair] has been trying to persuade Washington to help the developing world and agree to abide by international law.”

This piece was written in January 2002 (before the torture memos, the invasion of Iraq and Guantanamo Bay). So what did he mean by the US refusal to abide by international law?

The only reference he makes in the article is to the US Government’s “determination to destroy the Kyoto agreement, International Criminal Court and Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty” But there was nothing illegal in any of those actions. The US was simply exercising its rights not to sign two international treaties that it did not agree with – and to withdraw from another one.

This is an absolutely elementary mistake.

He is using the phrase ‘international law’ to mean ‘something I feel strongly about’. Exactly the acusation that he then threw out those who pointed out that the invasion of Iraq was illegal.

He later did the same thing when he cited the Genocide Convention as providing legal authority for military invasions of other countries without UN approval – when of course it does no such thing.

“one of the country’s finest columnists”? He would fail a first year law course.

I don’t think that’s fair to Nick – IIRC, he had an “amusing” interlude in What’s Left? when he was discussing the encouragement the liberalsses and leftisses gave to the terrorisses, in which he imagined a suicide bomber hurling himself into a crowd while shouting It’s illegal!. (The Iraq invasion, that is).

So far as I can tell, that’s one of Nick’s more in-depth attempts to analyse anti-war arguments, as opposed to just regurgitating stuff he’s read at Harry’s Place.

I wonder if he cares either way, just as long as he gets paid.

Jonathan Coe’s novel “What a carve up!” is mainly a portrayal of a rather unpleasant family, the Winshaws. One of the Winshaws is a journalist, Hilary. She writes a newspaper column every Friday called “Plain common sense”, in which she airs her views on any topic that takes her fancy. At one point (probably mid-1980s) she writes a bitter attack on a group that is protesting against Saddam Hussein’s regime. In 1990 she writes a bitter attack on Saddam Hussein. She appears to see no contradicition. She shows no sign of any real engagement with the issues, or with the actual reasoning of people who disagree with her.

There are plenty of journalists like that and unfortunately Nick is one of them. “Marching in support of a fascist dictatorship” is a nice phrase but Nick shows no sign of taking seriously the reasons why more than a million people marched in London on February 15th 2003. He never mentions international law. He shows no sign of understanding that “regime change” could be risky and problematic. Now that “regime change” in Iraq has indeed turned out to be very problematic, and the situation six years later is still “fragile” (according to David Milliband), Nick simply ignores the subject. There is no sign of Nick asking himself the type of hard questions he was suggesting that Robin Cook ask himself.

So, like Conor Foley, I have to wonder whether Nick actually believes what he writes. Has he given more than nano-second of thought to the consequences of starting a war or to whether Saddam or the Serbs really were fascists? When he wrote about “Iraqi bomb atrocities”(in the Standard this week) was he really thinking or was he just on auto-pilot? Is it all just spectacle?

But how can the left address Nick’s points when he is happy to *lie* about what those on the liberal left are doing? I think the recent case of Cohen totally misrepresenting the Fabian Society’s attitude to left-wing Islamic attitudes is a case in point.

Maybe Cohen has some valid criticisms we should listen to. But then again, when he spends so much time screaming about how he’s the only one who knows what it is to be left wing, and the rest of us are cowardly worms – and then goes on to totally misrepresent situations, or possibly outright lie – it’s very hard to have any time for him.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23592670-details/Why+does+Labour+want+a+sex+bistro+in+my+street/article.do?expand=true

it’s just a small example among many Nasty Nick-ism, but one that got on my nerves.

The trouble is that I don’t think the criticisms Nick raises are “serious”, because they’re so widely directed, poorly researched and inaccurately stated that they’re not really possible to respond to.

Now I appreciate that nobody likes criticism and that critics always paint a picture of us that we fail to recognise, but even so it’s hard to get beyond “what on Earth is he on about?” even if you don’t feel they’re being made in bad faith. To be honest it’s hard not to feel, as I think Conor clearly does, that what Nick (and not only Nick) is doing is experiencing a reaction against things he personally said or did in the past, blowing them up into caricature and then projecting them onto an all-purpose “the left”. To be honest there’s not a lot you can do to engage with this.

Of course there are things about “the left” that leftists of all kinds will disagree with, vehemently, though naturally what those particular things are will vary according to what kind of leftists we individually are. “The left” is a very large and very broad category. It engages in polemics with itself and fights among itself (to be honest, rather more than I’d like). But if those discussions are to be had they need to be had in a civilised fashion, not through denunciations, guilt-by-association, demands for condemnations, throwing around the word “fascist” indiscriminately, deliberate failure to distinguish between defending someone and supporting them and all the other characteristics of the War On Our Regretted Leftist Youth in which Nick is a leading, if not altogether upright, protagonist. Nick may think he’s channelling the spirit of George Orwell but I think he’s speaking with the voice of some rather nastier characters than that.

I’m not sure there’s a great deal of point in analysing Cohen’s comments at the Orwell Prize, when he was clearly too drunk to know what he was doing. The only reason I asked Martin in his comments was that I was amazed he wanted to publicise it – I thought he would be as embarassed as the rest of the audience.

In any case from ‘Why it is right to be anti-American’

http://www.newstatesman.com/200201140006

to Cohen’s support of Policy Exchange’s Anthony Browne for much the same things as he once attacked him:

[2003] This line of cant has been developed by Anthony Browne, an occasional contributor to this paper, and a writer for the Times and Spectator, elite journals both. “Blair’s epidemics” of Aids, TB and hepatitis B are being spread by asylum-seekers, he has asserted to great acclaim. You can understand the reasons for the applause. Browne has moved the debate on. Asylum-seekers are not only scroungers and terrorists but plague carriers, like the rats that brought the Black Death.

[2008] Browne has stood up for free speech and against liberal alliances with radical Islam, and exposed the civil servants who were pretending that a rise in HIV was due to poor sex education rather than immigration from African countries where the virus is raging. A former press officer at the Department of Health staff told me that his arguments caused consternation, not least because they were true.

there’s plenty of published material. The latter was especially remarkable given Cohen’s once impressive track record in this area.

“I will probably be in London towards the end of next month so can do it at his convenience. Maybe Martin could chair the meeting!”

I endorse that message.

…British Jews are living through a very dangerous period. They are the only ethnic minority whose slaughter official society will excuse.

How can anyone respond to the speech he made at the Orwell awards other than by saying ‘it is not true’. Similarly, how can one engage in debate with either of the two positions that Nick has advanced on Afghanistan that I quoted from above?

I was working for UNHCR in Kosovo on 9/11 and some of my colleagues went to Afghanistan immediately. If I had read Nick’s first article at the time (we did not have access to British newspapers) I would have fallen off my chair in astonishment. When I read his second piece (shortly before I was due to go back to Afghanistan where several of my friends have been killed before and since) I was equally amazed (and completely outraged).

Nick’s contributions to the debate about humanitarian intervention have been the most uniquely ill-informed and unhelpful that I have read by any mainstream media commentator. To paraphrase Nick himself ‘how many Burmese died because of the stupid political posturing of Kouchner after Cyclone Nargis and how many Darfuris died because Bush and Blair kept hinting they were going to use military force there?’

I have offered to debate these issues face-to-face with Nick on several occasions so let me repeat the offer here. I will probably be in London towards the end of next month so can do it at his convenience. Maybe Martin could chair the meeting!

Hmm.

But until Nick begins to address some of the serious arguments those on the left raise, rather than slinging pointless insults, there is no hope for him.

Better.