A Little of His Courage

Mary Riddell writes:

With the death of Nelson Mandela, the British Left has lost its leading icon. Though he is mourned across political divides that he did so much to bridge, the Labour Party feels a particular affiliation with Mandela. There are good reasons for this.

Many of those still active in the party, Peter Hain and Neil Kinnock among them, stood up against apartheid at a time when some Conservatives considered the ANC to be terrorists. No one on the Left is pointing that out today. But once the period of decorum that death demands is over, some Labour supporters may indeed assert their prior claim to be the true disciples of Mandela.

They should beware. In Mandela's old age, long after his victory over apartheid, Labour leaders clung to him as if the saintliness they lauded in him attached also to them. Yet much of what they did either countervened the spirit of Mandela's battle for freedom and justice or actively defied it.

Highly equivocal about the West's invasion of Afghanistan, Mandela was totally opposed to the war on Iraq prosecuted by the US and the UK, whom he accused of undermining the United Nations. It is hard to imagine that Tony Blair's wish to "rebalance" the justice system or the enthusiasm shown by him and later Gordon Brown for detaining suspected terrorists for long periods without trial would have met with Mandela's approval.

Nor did the uncritical adoration extended to Mandela do many favours to the modern South Africa. While he had fought one of the great crusades of this or any other century in ending the evil of apartheid, the country he liberated of racism remains riven by  inequality and social injustice from which the Left too often averted its eyes [you need to read more of what it writes, if you think that; it has been very clear about this from the start].

Virtue, and no one doubts that Mandela embodied that rare quality, is not a contagion but a challenge. Far from being tempted to bask in his reflected glory, the Left should treat his memory as a reminder not of its merits but of its failings. 

If today's Labour leadership is truly to honour the legacy of Nelson Mandela, it should examine its own record on championing the prisoner, the outsider, the poor, the marginalised and the forgotten. Mandela won his victory long ago against forces that one seemed insuperable. If the British Left is to be worthy of the leader it came close to deifying, it must prove it has a little of his courage.