Last week, I gave the wrong link for the review. I’m therefore reposting, with the correct link
There’s a review by Stan Crooke of Nick Cohen’s “What’s Left” on the Alliance for Workers Liberty website.
It is a critical interview, which certainly isn’t supportive of many Nick Cohen’s key claims.
What makes this review notable is that it is, I think, the only one I’ve read that actually engages with the arguments that Nick makes:
There is surely something quite ludicrous about thinking that someone has to resort to events of 30 or 70 years ago in order to do a “smear job” on the SWC. What “smears” the SWC, as Cohen correctly states, are the politics of the SWP, George Galloway, and the Muslim Association of Britain.
“What’s Left?” is not about the Iraq War. To pretend that it is serves as a kind of comfort blanket: clinging to that illusion allows the holder to dismiss the book’s contents on the basis of its author’s support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Cohen’s book is an attack on the left, or at least sections of the left. Some of those criticisms are valid, and some are not. And the overall conclusions he draws are certainly not valid. But challenging his criticisms means, first and foremost, engaging with them – not pretending that they don’t exist
Nice when people actually bother to read the book they’re reviewing, isn’t it?
