Nick Cohen in the New Statesman takes a look at Stop the War’s betrayal of the Iraqi labour movement and the wider failures of the liberal left in the UK to give support to those struggling towards democracy in Iraq.
It is a sorry tale which regular readers of this blog will be familar with, so forgive me if I spoil the ending by going straight to it:
Three conclusions can be drawn from the long struggle to get the British left to accept the obvious:
1) The people who can be relied on to make a stand in hard times won’t be found in the broadsheet opinion pages or on Radio 4 chat shows, but in the boring and perennially unfashionable labour movement.
2) The democratic left should never again allow itself to be led by the supporters of totalitarianism.
3) No one who considers himself a democrat, liberal or socialist can continue to associate with the Stop the War Coalition.
The full article is here and is well worth reading.
(You get to read one article per day for free on the New Statesman site but you have to pay for the rest if you can’t wait to read Pilger’s latest or an article on the similarities between Tony Blair and Stalin.)
