Comments? On here?

Is he essentially correct or are you now officially one of us?

You strike me as a political trend surfer. As the polls improve I expect you to become a fervent Cameroonie ultra.

Keep taking the pills™.

So what did you mean by the word "now" in your ludicrous "manifesto" three days ago?

"The Left, in any recognisable form, is now the enemy."

Have they been for five years? What has 9/11 got to do with, say, supporting dismantling the NHS because it's "broken" and "can't be fixed"? Oh wait, you said that in May 2001, so it must rather be something to do with your Blairite love of "choice", a love evidently predating your "awakening" from leftist somnolence.

Let me rephrase your "if it's a crime..." speech without the circumlocutions:

"If believing in neo-imperialist invasions, supporting the Israeli security 'barrier', promoting neo-liberal trade nostrums, advocating a flat tax, and dismantling the state health and education systems means being on the Right, that's where I sit. Proudly. And have done for at least five years."

God knows why you think anyone'll take seriously, after all that, your schizophrenic claim to be departing the left only "now", or to have done recently.

Certainly he's a political trend surfer, just not one with the nous, or the courtesy to his readers, to maintain consistency even from day to day. He also has not the remotest clue what "left" means, even though he feels able to write proclamations on the subject.

"If believing in defending Western civilisation, overcoming oppression, promoting properity and giving the poor the power to excercise the same choice as the wealthy over health and education means being on the Right, that's where I sit. Proudly."

Mr. Pollard sir, this makes you, in the absolutely most accurate and truest and original sense of the term, a neoconservative. Which is no shame or mark of opprobrium-- I'm on the Right, not exactly a neoconservative but I admire many of them and much of their thought. But it is a shame how the term's been abused by people who don't know what it means.

Thanks for the update, Stephen. Now I further understand your predicament.

You joined the Labour Party in 1986 as a kind of entryist Thatcherite, but somehow became convinced that this affiliation, in spite of your loathing of the NHS and non-selective education and every other left-wing policy, made you "on the Left". You continued in this delusion as you advocated "competition, markets and profit".

Then, when September 11th happened, or possibly when you saw the opposition to the Iraq invasion (you seem unclear on the exact timing), you suddenly "woke up" and realised you weren't on the left after all because they were "the enemy" -- something that had never occurred to you when "spat on" for advocating the abolition of the NHS.

Your "manifesto", then, is an admission that it took twenty years to realise that being left-wing entailed supporting left-wing policies. Well done.

Is "properity" a contraction of "property and prosperity"? If so, I'm all for it!

I think you're being a little kind to Peter Wilby in describing his article as 'fair'. In saying that comparing Blair to Nixon is almost as bad as comparing him to Stalin he's drawing a line of false equivalence between the two which is clearly totally absurd. Nixon may not have been the sort of man from whom one would have bought a second hand car, but Stalin was a psychopathic mass-murderer directly responsible for the deaths of 35 million people. There's no equivalence between the two.

StuartA

How apt that in a comment to a piece that describes a flagrant abuse of psychiatric authority in the media ( a psychiatrist, which purported to prove that Blair was a psychopath ("technically, he is diagnosed as a psychopath").") we have a classic example of misuse of the word "schizophrenic."

Unless you are the psychiatrist who blithely made one of the most difficult, pejorative and generally problematic diagnoses possible, based on media coverage of a man he/she had never met.

That's pretty feeble, "j mc q".

Firstly, I didn't describe Pollard as schizophrenic: I referred to a "schizophrenic claim" of his.

Secondly, and more importantly, I was quite patently using the word in its figurative sense. To quote the American Heritage Dictionary (available online):

"Of, relating to, or characterized by the coexistence of disparate or antagonistic elements."

All you've achieved is confirmation that Pollard's fans exhibit the same witless pomposity that he himself displays.

Meanwhile, we remain unenlightened on his bizarre claim to have recently departed the left, in spite of consistently advocating right-wing policies for the last five years.

StuartA,

Was my original post especially an attack on you? Didn't think so.
Perhaps wondering if you were the psychiatrist who wrote the article could be interpreted as such. I never said that you described Pollard as schizophrenic. It was a rhetorical device, a hook for what I thought was the more obvious point that I'm more peeved at the New Statesman writer's abuse of his/her authority as a psychiatrist, which strikes me as true "witless pomposity."

The schizophrenic thing was an aside - while it may strike many as a pedantic point, one of the many problems people with schizophrenia face is the idea that they are "split personalities", inherently unstable and, well, "dangerous." While I'm sure that it was far from your intention to use the word in way stigmatising of people with the condition, you did use "schizophrenic" as a pejorative term to describe someone you clearly despise. When I see schizophrenia/schizophrenic used loosely (and, I am entirely confident, with no malice whatsoever) for a variety of reasons it does irritate me.