Nick Cohen and Johann Hari...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

...are having a feud!

Hari wrote this review of Cohen's book What's Left?, which produced the following response from Cohen, which produced the following response to that... this looks like it might run and run.

It's also spilled over into what lefty blogosphere there is, but, sadly, an especially fun discussion/row was taken down after Hari threatend to sue.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

P.S: Al, have you read the book?

Bits. And I've agreed with most of those bits.

Will probably buy it (and then read the whole thing) fairly soon; I've not done so yet (despite attacks on middle class trendy-lefties being music to my ears) because I can't quite stop thinking of Cohen as being the hard-left oddball he was a few years ago.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Also, I have a query regarding remarks about "middle class trendy-lefties" like those you make sometimes:

Only sometimes?

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No.

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The second one, more or less.

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No, I certainly don't think that.

I should add that what I hate above all is the tendency of many of these self-declared "leftists" to happily defend, and even glorify, dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. In my view that's more of a betrayal of what the Left is/should be about than voting Tory.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I wouldn't say he does. Besides, some of Labour's greatest have came from middle class backgrounds. Michael Foot's father was a solicitor, he went to an independent school and was president of the Oxford Union.

Foot's father (Isaac) was also a Liberal M.P. Attlee and Gaitskell came from similer backgrounds, while Stafford Cripps and the Benn's were richer still.
Even Harold Wilson wasn't working class; his background was almost stereotypical West Riding lower middle class (and later on he lived for years in Hampstead Garden Suburb).