23 Days Later

A search of Nick's site for 'Daniel Finkelstein' yeilds two posts. The Times's comment editor and blogger has reviewed What's Left twice. Once in the Times on February 14 and in the Jewish Chronicle (reproduced on the Engage website) on March 9. Nick summarized the first review thus:

But he goes on to say that I need to understand that Tories have often been far better at pursuing progressive policies than the Left.

That's a pretty fair summary of Finkelstein. Typical paragraph:

At one point in What’s Left?, Nick Cohen attacks Tony Blair for calling the 20th century a "Conservative century". He says that life was transformed in that 100 years, beyond the dreams of radicals. He can't see that both he and the Prime Minister are right at the same time. It was a Tory century because the Conservative Party was politically supreme. And the country was transformed, sometimes by the Left but often with the Tory party as the agent of change (bringing, for instance, a vigorous, more classless free enterprise economy). And in foreign policy sometimes the Left held out for human rights against the Tory pessimists but, marginally more often, Conservative optimists stood firm for freedom while much of the Left tolerated Communist crimes.

Daniel Finkelstein last week put his mind to Iranian Professor Hasan Bolkhari, and his anti-Semitic teachings and writings.

But I had one other, I suspect rather more rare, response.
Where is the Left, I wondered.

No you bloody didn't is my response.

If we want to win the battle for the Left, we have to persuade them that there are worse things than American capitalism. Anyone fancy writing a letter to The Guardian?

Whatever Daniel Finkelstein's merits as a comment editor and deconstructor of looney academics, he doesn't have a side in the 'battle for the Left' - unless, despite his certainties a mere 23 days before, he switched political sides in the last three weeks.

Somehow, I doubt that.