On leaving the left
Growing tired of the paranoid mode
Before contributing to the oversubscribed genre of pieces on ‘Why I left the left’ – the political equivalent of the ‘Why I quit stand-up comedy’ article – I should emphasize that I’ve not actually gone anywhere else. Alienated from and by the British left in the Corbyn years, I’ve surprised myself, that shambolic interregnum over, as to how much my principles of a robust welfare state, paying a decent wage and following it with a generous pension, have been squarely retained. A moral and personal objection to antisemitism didn’t stop me being a social democrat.
And yet I am less and less interested in ‘the Left’ as an intellectual and cultural bloc. From a younger man who felt he should keep up with the latest column from Naomi Klein or only a few years ago buy his mother a David Graeber book for Christmas, I’ve become someone who thinks Klein is predictable and Graeber misses the wood from the trees. More and more a commitment to the left seems to me a filter, a way of mitigating the reality of the world, like having to mash up potatoes to get a child to eat them – and as a man of nearly 40, I feel able to take my potatoes neat. Twitter hasn’t helped, as it’s revealed a lot of left-wing figures to be both morally strident and just as bad or indeed worse than everyone else.
