With A View To Becoming

The former Nick Cohen is having a good old whinge about Munira Mirza and the Revolutionary Communist Party as was, which dissolved when Mirza was 19 years old. Is she even still in touch with the circle around Spiked?

If you want to read a more intellectual expression of whatever it is that the small bands of statue-protectors might think that they were guarding, then you could do a lot worse than to read Spiked. High Tory, it is not. By any normal measure, the conservatives are on the other side of this culture war, such as it is. I am a daily reader, by the way. Spiked is one of the great stopped clocks of anglophone comment, and it is always a good read.

Over many, many years, Cohen has gone to enormous lengths with a view to becoming, around this point in history, the "I'm still a real leftie" figure at the heart of a very right-wing Government indeed. But he has been gazumped.

Gazumped by someone 17 years younger. Gazumped by a woman. Gazumped by a darkie. Gazumped by someone who had started out far beyond his own practically Establishment roots in the old Communist Party of Great Britain, which used to be on Any Questions? and whatnot. Gazumped by someone whose faction had had the wit to oppose the Iraq War. 

Forget about this bitter old man. There is a world elsewhere. And it is a world with plenty going on in it. Although there is room for plenty more in that world. Mirza's new commission is quite unnecessary, but it is going to meet, and it is going to report. Be on the bus, or be under it. Be at the table, or be on the menu.