Jonathan Todd

I’ve just got home from a Spectator event that debated the motion “the Left is dead“. Although the motion was defeated, I didn’t sense myself to be surrounded by legions of fellow Labour Party members. Still, I take instruction wherever I can find it and I found it at the debate, as I find it in the pages of the Spectator. I may not agree with the magazine’s editorial line but its analysis is often incisive and perceptive. Fraser Nelson, for example, strikes me as more on the money on the BNP than most.  

The main piece of instruction that I picked up at the debate is that the speakers in favour of the motion (Michael Heseltine, Minette Marrin and Stephan Shakespeare) were only able to declare the left dead by mistaking the left with something it never was. Both Marrin and Shakespeare argued (wrongly) that an ideologically driven desire to control is a central left-ist motivation and that such control will be impossible in the digital era. Thus, they declared the left dead.

Their logic negates the savaging that Jan Moir’s career has just received at the hands of the Twitterati. In the pre-Twitter era Moir may have got away with peddling her vile spite. In the Twitter era she set herself on a collision course with an ascendant cultural egalitarianism. So, Marrin and Shakespeare are right that the internet is an agent of empowerment that throws off attempts to control and shackle, but the force that this agent unleashed in the direction of Moir simply speaks to the potency of the force that they declare dead: the left.

As Jonathan Freedland, who argued against the motion, pointed out cultural and social norms on race, gender, the environment and sexuality have come to be constructed around values and views that would have been considered left-ist, if not extreme left-ist, a generation ago. Homophobia just isn’t going to be served on the Twitterati menu. There was no vanguard coercing the Twitterati into championing a left-ist ideology, as Marrin and Shakespeare presume that there must be to sustain any left-ist ideology. They chose to adopt one and in so choosing they demonstrate both the strength of the left’s victory on social and cultural norms over the past generation and the potential of the internet to secure more victories for the left in the next generation.

In the past week alone, for example, I have used the internet to pick up great ideas on combating the BNP from Mary Riddell and David Aaronovitch. The defeat of Moir gives me confidence that if these ideas are taken forward, then the left will need no vanguard to defeat the BNP.