Kirk Leech
posted 23 February 2007

As part of the ICA series, The New Left: Then and Now, this meeting was set to debate the legacy of the 1960s New Left, particularly on the issue of Western intervention and war. The panel set Mick Hume, editor-at-large of spiked and columnist on The Times alongside Nick Cohen, columnist on the Observer and author of What's Left?, Martin Kettle, writer and former chief political leader writer for the Guardian and Hilary Wainwright, editor of Red Pepper and author of Arguments for a New Left.

Despite differences over the Iraq campaign, bar Mick Hume the other speakers agreed more than they disagreed on the key issue at stake, the West's ultimate right to intervene around the world. Cohen laid out his now well-known support for Western intervention. The litany of interventions that he supported stretches from Britain’s re-occupation of the Malvinas (the Falklands), the 25th anniversary of which falls this year, on to Afghanistan, and as we know, and as he keeps reminding everyone, Iraq.

Cohen rattled through his justifications for supporting these wars; in essence it has always been the same. Whomever Britain fights, from the military regime in Argentina to Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime in Iraq, all are essentially 'Fascist'. As Michael Fitzpatrick indicated in his demolition of Cohen's book on spiked, this blind and illiterate acceptance of Britain’s own justifications for militarism would be laughable if it were not so serious.

Kettle and Wainwright, old muckers from Oxford University and fellow-travellers of the Communist Party, tried to distance themselves from Cohen’s more extravagant militarism, but couldn’t accept Hume’s point that intervention always makes matters worse both for those on the receiving end of Western militarism, and for the political culture in the metropolitan countries. Kettle argued that it had never been a tenet of the Left to be against Western intervention in principle. Wainwright, in answering a question from the floor refused to rule out supporting interventions justified as means of saving the planet from environmental destruction.

Against this, Hume did not try to claim the mantle of the 'Left', explaining that he found himself in the difficult position of seeing himself on the Left, but not of it - a Left today that picks and choose the interventions it supports – Iraq no, Bosnia and Darfur yes, and one imbued with environmentalism and anti-Americanism. This argument did not sit particularly well with the audience, the majority of whom seemed to be the descendants of Communist Party members, and who, when they spoke, began by laying out their relationship to the Communist Party and Stalinism. All that was missing was the therapist's couch.

The last word should go to Hume, then. In a less than welcoming audience he made the argument well for a new progressive politics that rejects both Western militarism and the passivity of the ‘not in my name’ anti-Americanism. He also cracked the best joke of the night. He reminded those in the audience trying to make an argument for a revival of the New Left that many radicals in the 1960s left Europe and headed to the Middle East and Afghanistan to ‘find themselves’. The difference is that today they take the RAF with them.