22 April 2006

Travesties


I am preparing to move house, so things will continue to be quiet on this blog for the coming weeks. I have deliberately ignored the Euston Manifesto, as I see it as pretty much of a ridiculous waste of time. However the following statement by Martin Kettle in the Guardian today is a canny observation:
A small bunch of people have got together and written a political manifesto which a number of other people disagree with. Exercises of this kind litter the history of the left - and few of them have left much trace on the rest of the world. They bring to mind a line in Tom Stoppard's play Travesties about a meeting in Zurich in 1917 of an organisation called Social Democrats for Civil War in Europe. "Total attendance: four. Ulyanov, Mrs Ulyanov, Zinoviev, and a police spy."
There is the undoubted whiff of a vole hanging about the Euston Manifesto. It seems to have attracted as much support in the neo-conservative "left" as in the neo-con right. One wonders which of the manifesters are the useful idiots and which are the state agents. I wonder if we will have to wait fifty years to find out, as we did with George Orwell (who I assess to have been a bit of both). One of the commenters on the Martin Kettle article describes the Manifesters as:
This group of disillusioned (or never quite were) lefties.
Quite.

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