The roaming tiger of the Right

Tabish Khair

Mr Blair is on the way to joining a long list of supposedly left-leaning leaders who have unleashed the tiger of the Right and then aired ghostly complaints when the tiger finished licking their political bones clean.

I first saw it happen to Rajiv Gandhi, who tried to flirt with both Islamic and Hindu religiosity. True, he was following in the footsteps of his mother, Indira Gandhi, who liked being seen in temples and mosques, and not his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, who avoided all connections with established religion as the Prime Minister of India.

Rajiv was not a particularly religious person, I am sure. But he tried to flirt with both sides. He did this with the best intentions, and with an eye to the electorate. But things went out of hand.

The fact is that once you start speaking a certain language, you have to speak it fully. You cannot dabble in the language of religion, and expect to score over religious fundamentalists. By speaking their language, you strengthen their voice. You need to talk to them, but not in their language.

Then I moved to Denmark, and saw it happening to Poul Nyrup Rasmussen and his Social Democrats, who were in power then.

The Social Democrats had long been whispering the language being spoken loudly today by the neo-liberalists and Danish People’s Party. They were just as worried about ‘foreigners’. They were just as prescriptive about immigrants. They were just as concerned about Danishness. The only difference was that they still wanted to be decent about it all.

It is little surprise that Social Democrats lost the maximum support during the recent Prophet Mohammad cartoon controversy in Denmark. The rightist Danish People’s Party gained in a big way, and some leftist parties increased their support to some extent.

After all, if you need to stand on a molehill, why not go directly to the mountain?
Clinton happened in between, a leader who promised more than he enacted. I still hear my Democrat friends weeping about all the good that Bush put an end to. But what good, really?

Apart from a couple of points, Clinton’s administration sat on almost all progressive law-proposals, and passed many of the ones it did only on its way out. Even today if you hear a Democrat and a Republican senator on 95 per cent of the issues that concern us, you will be hard pressed to tell who is who.

And now Blair, in some ways still the humane face of the madness that is gripping Europe and the rich countries. He wants to save us, and the world. So what does he do? He blames our problems, or at least the existence of our fears, on the Human Rights Act. It is an act that makes crime and terror-prevention difficult, argue his supporters.

 Strangely, they were arguing the other way during Denmark’s cartoon controversy. I recall them getting very angry when people like me argued that the cartoons were not necessary for freedom of speech and were an abuse of that freedom, but that one had to tolerate (under strong protest) such abuse for the sake of political democracy.

And today I will say something similar about human rights legislation. Sometimes, a particular human rights law might prevent us from catching a criminal—for me terrorists are simply criminals—but that signifies its abuse.

The slight chance of this abuse has to be accepted for the larger cause of human rights.
But the problem is not human rights or cartoons.

The problem is that the so-called left-of-centre and centre parties no longer dare speak the truth. Sometimes, they claim to fear Bush, but actually— like the Right—they are ruled by a fear of ‘the bush’, or their exaggerated estimate of the hold of this potentially xenophobic fear on their electorate.

That is what makes them stop speaking their own language and adopt a watery version of Rightist slang.

The truth they cannot speak is that we live in a capitalist world in which capital is largely free but labour is not.

The truth they cannot speak is that the income of the richest one per cent of people in the world is equal to that of the poorest 57 per cent; that 115 million children in the developing world have no basic education; that commodity exports in places like Africa continue to be used to pay rich countries for increasing foreign debt.

The language they need to speak is that of international socialism and, at least in its absence, the free flow of labour.

The writer is a novelist and academic based in Denmark.