A light touch for a heavy subject

Waiting for the Etonians By Nick Cohen. Photo / Supplied

When the wheels started falling off the world's financial wagon, the glee in the leftwing press was undisguised, particularly in London, host both to some of the more unrestrained excesses of capitalism and to a liberal media. But in this collection of pieces, Nick Cohen writes more in sorrow than in mirth, examining in particular how a Labour government could swallow, without any sign of indigestion, feasting with a piratical financial world.

As usual with British writers there is the assumption that the British scene is unique - a Labour government assiduously pursuing rightwing economics. Those in New Zealand who remember the Roger Douglas years know that the Blair administration was not unprecedented in this respect. But the Blair team seems to have consciously decided to sup with the devil.

As Cohen puts it: "All right, the political left said, we will accept extremes of wealth we once denounced as obscene. We will embrace your speculators and not drive them overseas with tough regulation ... We will concede all this, if in return you will give us the tax revenues ..."

"For all its virtuous intentions the political left was living off the proceeds of loose financial morals." Cohen is worth reading for his preface alone, with its acute analysis of one of the "great market manias that punctuate the history of capitalism".

Although specifically concerned with, as the subtitle says, "reports from the sickbed of liberal England" the phenomena Cohen discusses have a familiar ring here. "Only yesterday level-headed young couples took mortgages of four or five times their joint incomes to buy hutch-like apartments in streets which estate agents described as 'up-and-coming'." However, his scope is more than economic. The prostitution and collapse of liberal values encompass the whole range of modern life and for many the shrivelled remains consist only of a reflex anti-westernism.

This leaves a morality in which the left intelligentsia not only reaches an accommodation with economic assumptions which were once anathema but has no shame in endorsing the most reactionary positions of religious fanaticism. "Any killer of Americans is better than none ... in this mental universe no movement that challenges the existing order can be unambiguously condemned."

In his pursuit of what is less a crisis of capitalism and more the capitulation of liberalism, Cohen leaves few aspects of society unexamined. There are times when the stretch is a little too great to include his material in the overall thesis but that matters little in such an exhilarating read. This is a reminder of how good journalism can be, serious without being solemn and although the subjects may be depressing he is frequently very funny, not least with his incredulity at the intellectual contortions which some of his prey manage.

Writing of the work of Julian Baggini who went to live with the working class of Rotherham, he says, "he refuses to adopt the declamatory style of the polemicist and his writing is refreshingly self-deprecatory".

The same could be said of Cohen and although his anger at what he believes to be betrayals is never far beneath the surface, his lightness of touch makes his case far more compelling.


Waiting for the Etonians
By Nick Cohen (Fourth Estate $34.99)

* John Gardner is an Auckland reviewer.