Why has the Left abandoned Peter Tatchell?

let's try this one again, shall we? New Blogger ate it first time round, bastard.

On topic with "World of Decency", the new ish of the Decent house journal Democratiya is out. Still no explanation why it's got a dog Russian title, but a long essay by Peter Tatchell about how the Left really doesn't deserve him any more.

PT is a national treasure, of course, but he really is flirting with self-parody these days. It used to be the case that no Tatchell campaign was complete without a high-profile slapstick stunt, like handcuffing himself to Mugabe or storming the pulpit at Canterbury. These days, no Tatchell campaign is complete without a finger-wagging sermon aimed at an undefined "The Left" for their failure to jump on his bandwagon. Since Peter Tatchell is kind of the campaigning equivalent of a footballer's WAG - he is no more able to resist the cause of an oppressed minority, than Danielle Lloyd is to stay away from a nightclub opening - there are about a million of these campaigns going on at any one time, each with Peter being appalled anew at the lack of "The Left" being involved. I don't think that he necessarily realises that some of these causes are really quite obscure.

I mean, at one point half way down, he has a go at us for not doing anything for gay Rastafarians. Did you know that any such thing existed? I didn't[1]. In any case, what the hell am I meant to do on behalf of gay Rastafarians? Since my view on Hailie Selassie is not so much "Conquering Lion of Judah, I and I and King of Kings" as "middle-ranking African kleptocrat, installed by the Brits after we chucked the Italians out", I am not really all that well placed to contribute to any debate in Rastafarian theology at even a basic level, let alone to reconcile the mainstream of that religion with whatever faction within it has decided that a revision of its position on homosexuality is in order. As far as I can tell, if someone has ended up in the position where they are gay, but nevertheless believe in the Rastafarian religion, then that sounds like bloody bad luck, but I really don't see how I can help. If the gay Rastas are having a bring and buy sale I'll go if the weather's nice, but is the sight of my pasty face on a March For Gay Rastafarianism really going to turn the tide?

If I was being mischievous, I'd suggest that we ought to consider that the common thread running between all these causes that "The Left" have failed to support is Peter Tatchell himself, and that he might want to check his antiperspirant, so to speak. I'm told that he's utterly charming in person, but he has a really annoying style in print, full of monolithic certainty and extreme language. It's bound to get people's backs up and make them think, however unfairly "no, fuck the Ahwazi Arabs, I'm not going to join Tatchell's fucking campaign if that's his attitude". He also seems to be really rather ungrateful - as I remember it, his campaign against homophobic lyrics in reggae music got a lot of support from all corners of the media industry and in local government, but in his Democratiya article it has been rewritten as Peter against the world, with no support from "The Left". This is partly Nick Cohen's "honourable exceptions" doctrine which allows you to make sweeping and false generalisations, and partly the weird habit of defining out of "The Left" anyone who behaves sensibly or normally, implicitly assuming that it is constitutive of "The Left" that they have to be nutters outside the mainstream. Anyway ...

Peter has two substantial arguments, and in both cases, I sort of agree with them, but I think they prove my point, not his.

1. People on "The Left" are reluctant to criticise repressive regimes in the Third World because they are scared of building a movement that might be co-opted at a later date to start a war.

My considered response to this can be summarised in the single word "yup". Have a look at the Darfur campaign for many examples of the Decent Left, including Tatchell himself trying to take a humanitarian campaign and paste their own doctrines about international "intervention" onto it. I for one would certainly be a lot keener to discuss the education of women in Afghanistan if the War Party weren't always trying to add it to the "plus" column of their latest military disaster, and indeed, to stick it onto the Iraq and Iran projects whenever they think nobody's looking. Not necessarily one of the least sins of the Decent Left is that they've corrupted a lot of left discourse, because everyone is frightened of the way that they abuse a lot of left wing analysis (cf, Amnesty International lodging an actual complaint about Blair's abuse of their Iraq dossier). And then they complain that left wing discourse is corrupted, rather like a man farting in a lift and complaining about the smell.

(It should be noted at this point, in fairness, that Peter Tatchell does usually step back from the brink when it comes to supporting actual wars. However, let's use the Nick Cohen standard here. He allows his movement to be led by war-mad nutters. He does not denounce Brian Brivati and Oliver Kamm (or at least, not often enough by the arbitary standard I'm choosing to use here. The logic which places George Galloway in the vanguard of the Liberal Democrat Party is much more appropriate here; Peter Tatchell does provide the raw material of propaganda to the War Party, and here he is appearing in their journal so he can't claim he doesn't know he's doing so.)

2. People on the left don't sufficiently criticise "brown racists, sexists and homophobes"[2] because they are scared of being called racists by the dreaded multiculturalisses.

Again, Peter has a point here, but makes it in a really weird way. For one thing, he is surely wrong to implicitly believe that the multicultural movement (such as it is) for greater tolerance of the lifestyle and beliefs of ethnic minority groups is a different thing from the more general movement toward greater tolerance overall, from which movement he has clearly benefited substantially because it is due to this effort on the part of "The Left" that homophobia has been driven out of polite society.

For another, he is surely aware that being nasty to minority groups, who in general have a hell of a time, is something that you have to do very carefully indeed if you're not going to cross the line into ordinary garden-variety racism. I can't find any reference on the internet to Peter's views about Pim Fortuyn and would be grateful for any pointers since I'm sure that he's said something about him. It's not exactly as if we're in any danger of the List Peter Tatchell becoming a big force in British anti-immigrant politics, but Fortuyn does represent the far end of where it's possible to take this line of reasoning, and those people on the Left who don't feel comfortable in having a go at immigrants for this reason aren't scared of nothing. A quick glance at the notorious "Harry's Place" comments boxes shows how careful you have to be about the kind of mates you tend to pick up if you make a career out of saying that we are in danger of being overwhelmed by aliens whose values are inimical to our own.

The really fundamental mistake here though is the common thread which runs through a lot of Decency - the sheer damnable egotism of demanding that one's own personal priorities must be those of everyone else. It makes a certain kind of sense if you have convinced yourself that you're engaged in the greatest intellectual struggle of our time, but for those of us who remain to be convinced (not least because there is a fucking war on, which does rather tend to consume quite a lot of energy and attention), it's just a little bit irksome to have the Decents stamping their feet and demanding that we all pay attention to them right now. Anyone who has ever had any involvement at all with left-wing politics will know that there is nothing more tiresome than the guy who keeps badgering you with "oy! Why weren't you on that demo?", and that, at base, is what Peter Tatchell's critique boils down to.

[1] I did know there were Jewish Rastafarians though, although not I think in Jamaica.
[2] This phrase copyright Nick Cohen and scheduled for more detailed analysis at a later date.