Leaving aside the exact reasons for your departure from the New Statesman's pages (that you regard this trifling matter as a "howler" surely confirms the pomposity that Wilby referred to), I am still at a loss to explain why you think Wilby was so obviously wrong in suggesting you claimed to be left-wing.

Nine days ago you began another pompous foray, the widely disregarded "Maida Vale Manifesto", with: "We the undersigned have always thought of ourselves as being on the Left." You've claimed in various posts to have realised after 9/11, or "after Iraq" (whatever that means), that the left didn't believe in "tackling oppression", and consequently that they were "the enemy".

Yet, as I have pointed out, you were monotonously espousing right-wing views even before 9/11, in a period when, as far as can be determined from your hazy statements on the matter, you were still allegedly on the left. You responded to claims of trend surfing by citing a brave stand for "competition, markets and profit", "abolition of the NHS" and "academic selection", apparently well before 1994. In other words, if your claim to have been "on the Left" holds for any period in the last fifteen years or so, you were also at that time an unrepentant Thatcherite.

The dissonance remains, therefore, and you haven't explained it. That puts you in a poor position when arguing the toss with Wilby, and certainly not in one where you can fling out words like "howler" with any credibility. I take the lack of clarification of when exactly you departed the left to be confirmation of this.

Stuart:

You seem to believe that "left wing" means being in exact accordance with your views. I'm not that familiar with the fine details of English Labour policy, but in Australia & New Zealand the Labour parties during the 1980's were pushing exactly the kind of agenda you seem to think of as not left wing - privatisation, deregulation, removal of tariffs & subsidies, wage restraint, floating exchange rates, selective schools, and so forth. The Australian Labor Party did expand the public sector health care system to the point where it is now unsustainable, but that policy also had its critics within the party. The subsequent conservative government increased taxes as % of GDP. Don't forget that what was at times mainsteam leftist dogma - free trade, nationalism, deregulaton, white supremacism, eugenics, strict secularism, support for Israel, championing technological progress - has at various other times also been leftist heresy. Anti-Communism was a divisive issue for Labour parties during the Cold War. George Orwell had much fun documenting the 180 degree backflips that leftists went through in his era as they tried to keep up with Soviet policy, and not much has changed since, except that it's now islamic supremacists and the western chattering classes who specify the dogma of the day for their flock. That said, I never imagined leftists could stoop so low, or become so desperate for noble savages, as to embrace islamic imperialism. But they did. Had I given due consideration to the flip-flopping history of leftist dogma, I shouldn't have been so surprised.

“You seem to believe that "left wing" means being in exact accordance with your views.”

Not at all. All I ask is that if somebody makes a claim to have been “on the Left” they be able to point to advocacy of policies on balance recognisable as left-wing. I don’t demand “exact accordance” with any set of views: it’s quite plain that disagreements exist on the left.

I fail to see the relevance of what antipodean “Labour” parties were doing in the eighties. The British Labour party has for nine years been pursuing right-wing policies, but that doesn’t somehow change them into left-wing ones on account of Labour’s previous or alleged extant commitment to left-wing principles. Pollard’s favoured prescriptions are, and as far as I can tell have been for a long time, even more right-wing. I can’t recall seeing any advocacy of left-wing policies in his last five years’ output; and he informs us that even before 1994 he was pushing Thatcherism in the Labour Party.

I agree, the term “left-wing” cannot be pinned down to any one set of policies, and left-wing orthodoxy, insofar as it exists, has changed (the same applies for “right-wing”). That said, I’d be interested to hear where white supremacy and eugenics feature in the leftist tradition. I also don’t think you can reasonably connect what I take to be characteristics of classical liberalism (free trade, deregulation) to “left-wing”.

But I’m not the one basing a so-called “manifesto” on the idea that “left” is a useful label: Pollard is. And if he’s going to do that, he must expect to be judged by what “left” means to most people today: that is, not dismantling the NHS, not academic election, not instigating a flat tax, and not eulogizing “competition, markets and profit”. If the only get out available is “well, ‘left’ can mean lots of things”, then his view of “the Left, in any recognisable form” as “the enemy” is meaningless.

Struart: So you agree that left-wing orthodoxy tends to flip between contradictory yet emphatically held views, but
you berate Stephen for not advocating policies recognised as left wing, even though these policies were pursued by left wing parties elsewhere in the world? I'm not sure I follow. I agree that public sector health seems to be a fairly permanent leftist fixation, but I can't see anything contradictory in a well-meaning leftist wanting to privatise the health sector to prevent people dying on waiting lists and superwealthy GP's from rorting the billing system at taxpayers' expense. Likewise, if markets, profit, free trade and competition benefit the working man, as they undoubtedly have done more than any other economic system yet invented, I'm not clear why any leftist who sincerely cares about the well-being of wage earners would object to them. The trouble is that leftist parties and institutions largely lost interest in the well-being of working people some time in the 1970's when the workers became too well off to care about revolution or the other silly utopian fantasies and lust for power of spoilt, disaffected middle class wannabe messiahs. Blue collar workers were a disappearing breed, and besides tended to have a pretty low opinion of such people, and were therefore hardly the stuff of a constituency. The aspiring messiahs then had to look for their noble savage constituency via identity politics among low IQ ethnic minorities, women, scroungers, sexual minorities, nature mystics, public sector parasites, asylum swindlers, third world despots & their apologists, and now, reductio ad absurdum, islamic supremacists. This, the noble-savage-patronising totalitarian left, is the left that Pollard regards as dangerous.

For leftist racism and eugenics, google is your friend. Who said: "Workers of the world unite for a white South Africa"? Who said "three generations of imbeciles are enough" in regard to forced sterilisation of retards? Who pushed the White Australia policy? Good summary here. Do click the links, as the quotes from Karl "I do not trust any Russian" Marx & Friedrich Engels (leftist enough for you?) are priceless.

Classic liberalism was the leftist ideology of its 19th century British heyday, which is why the term "liberal" is today strangely associated with the authoritarian left in the USA. In sharp contrast to the 19th cebtury Tories, the classic liberals were opposed to corn protectionism which favoured the landed gentry, and were responsible for repealing the economic oligopolistic privileges enjoyed by the guilds.

No, I don't agree that “left-wing orthodoxy tends to flip between contradictory yet emphatically held views”. I said “left-wing orthodoxy, insofar as it exists, has changed”. I also pointed out that “right-wing orthodoxy”, as far as that exists, has also undergone shifts – something that you seem less keen to acknowledge.

Philosophically, it isn't possible to define any term precisely, but this isn't a useful point for our discussion, because we implicitly rely on commonly accepted meanings even if they can't be pinned down exactly. “Left-wing” is not a perfectly defined concept, but in common usage in this era in this country it implies a number of things, apparently none of which Pollard accepts.

The British socialist tradition, for instance, does not hold that “competition, markets and profit” are paramount in helping “the working man”. Nor does it believe abolishing the NHS is the best means to provide him with healthcare. It also advocates a progressive taxation scheme – the exact opposite of Pollard's regressive flat tax. Regardless of Blair's shift away from Labour's left-wing principles, they still exist, and are still advocated in other quarters, some of them in his own party. Given this context – and I can't see any other more appropriate one – Pollard's claim to have been “on the Left” is simply absurd: he is more right-wing than Blair, who is in turn more right-wing than his party. Apparently every policy stand that Pollard's made in the last five years has been Thatcherite, and the only data he's offered on the earlier years shows this is not a new phenomenon.

Of course anyone, of any political persuasion, will tell you their views will lead to the betterment of everyone. The difference is the means by which they say this will be achieved. The term “left” loses all meaning if you bend it towards any party alleging to be helping “wage earners”. I would remind you that it is Stephen Pollard who made the big play about the label “left”. If he's to make stern pronouncements about departing the left, he must assume that this term will be interpreted in this country's current political context.

As for the rest, it isn't hugely relevant to the matter at hand. I am aware that the Democratic Party used to draw most of its support from the racist south. The pre-Civil Rights era history of the Democratic Party, however, is not a brush with which you can tar the worldwide left of today. The link between the pre-1960s Democratic party and the British left now is close to non-existent. (I note, incidentally, that you quote Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., even though he was on the Union side of the Civil War.) Nor is what the South African Communist Party did in the 1920s uniquely discrediting to the left today, not least given what right-wing South African governments were doing right into the 1980s.

The blog to which you pointed me seeks to argue for some continuing strain of racism among left-wingers by picking out examples from historical eras when racism was rife. It's hardly difficult to excavate damaging quotes from Republican Party figureheads, or Winston Churchill, or any number of other people generally regarded as right-wing. Of the top of my head, we have Churchill's 1919 advocacy of using “poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes”. Unless you accept that such attitudes discredit the right, I'm hardly going to accept that Marx's attitude to towards Russians discredits the left.

Finally – and I hope it is finally – I do not, as I've already said, accept that there is much connection between nineteenth century liberals and the twentieth century British left-wing tradition. The British Labour Party did not spring from the Liberal party; it sprang from trade unionism. Until you provide something better than hand-waving about Liberalism being the “leftist ideology” of an earlier era, I can't admit classical liberalism as being relevant. As above, if we start tracing back we can find highly discreditable “rightist” antecedents in British reactionaries opposed to universal suffrage, in favour of slavery, and so on.