War of The Words

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I have been able to change my mind. Why is the nihilist left unable to accept events have proved it wrong?

The Guardian,Friday November 16, 2001War breaks out in the press. The battle between the Sun and the Mirror is a wonderful absurdity - the John Pilger anti-American Mirror versus the Sun's gung-ho jingoism: yesterday a Mirror diatribe bracketed together Stalin, Hitler and Bin Laden with the Sun's editor Yelland. Most other newspapers print abusive lists of who got it wrong among their competitors: but we here at the Guardian prefer to keep the argument in-house.

Has anyone changed one iota as a result of the rout of the Taliban? No. Great bowls of rotten words remain uneaten: it is indigestible food. One notable recent exception was the admirable military commentator, John Keegan, who made a memorable confession of getting the Kosovo war wrong: memorable because no one else does it. So while we on the pro-war side shout: "We told you so!" The others reply: "Just you wait and see!" plunging gleefully, wishfully almost, into unimaginable Northern Alliance horrors yet to come. I wrote that even if what comes next is hardly a perfect model of democracy, "nothing can be worse" than the Taliban. George Monbiot replies: "Don't tempt fate."

Much of the left writes as if only the utter humiliation of America and removal of its power will do. (More or less what Bin Laden has in mind.) Until then, everything the US does is de facto evil. If Mullah Omar's blood-curdling threats to destroy it foretell great horrors yet to happen, the anti-war faction will no doubt say it proves the Afghan hornet's nest should never have been poked: we will reply that it proves the madmen must be stopped. Either way, few think terrorism against the west is vanquished: worse is probably to come.

Everyone stands exactly where they did: not one mind has been changed. Fire still pours out of the anti-war party, despite women emerging from burkas, girls back in school, music in the streets. The anti-war demo this weekend has not been called off. The Stop the War Coalition promises the biggest demo yet: "The fall of Kabul has only exposed to ever greater scrutiny the hypocrisy, injustice and dangerous ambiguity underlying this war." Emails still flood in as furious as ever, "slavering government poodle", "naive idiot" and "murdering bitch" are only among the more printable of yesterday's batch. The anti-war left gives no inch, their world view perfectly intact, nihilism disguised as pacifism.

It is true that Oliver Cromwell's "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you are mistaken," was not matched with any confession to ever being wrong himself. This prompts the question, does anyone ever admit to changing their mind? Are we all doomed for eternity to minds set in concrete? Politicians tend to claim they are constant as the morning star, so for example Roy Hattersley, scourge of New Labour, once regarded as the rightwing tip of his party, now claims he stands exactly where he always did: the ground has simply moved beneath his concrete shoes. That is politicians' traditional stance, but why is it a boast? Keynes said that when the facts changed, he changed his mind, a better maxim. But the inclination to deny ever being politically wrong is extraordinarily strong.

U-turn was Mrs Thatcher's dirty word, however often she did it surreptitiously: her downfall only came when she stopped. But the truth is that most political views shift with the times. Most sensible people of my generation have travelled long political journeys. At 14, I marched from Aldermaston as a pacifist. During the Vietnam war I was squashed up against police horses outside the US embassy. Now I might think differently: the war was a calamity, mistaken but not engaged for malign reasons. And those 1960's revolutionary songs were fun, like Che T-shirts and cuba libres. In the 1970s trade union tanks parked on Labour party lawns seemed an inevitable part of the garden furniture. Feminism's new perspective shattered right acrossold leftwing lines, but we were wrong in many predictions of its results - from Mrs Thatcher to ladettes. In the 1980s, even while detesting Thatcherism, I was pulled along in her wake ideologically to value entrepreneurialism and question sullen producer-control over public services. No regrets about breaking with Labour and joining the SDP. Specific errors? Yes, when the majority of the SDP voted to merge with the Liberals, in sectarian anger I failed to realise it was the only possible result. When New Labour emerged I welcomed them as the legitimate son of SDP ideas.

Of course political head and heart have moved with the times, ideas changed probably beyond recognition, if I could only remember exactly what I thought in pot-hazy 1968. More recently I wrote with revulsion at George Bush's election, damning his cavalier disregard for the world - Kyoto, NMD, Israel, his own poor and the world's. Now I hold my breath and wait to see how far he has changed: disarmament talks with Putin are good news, the attitude towards the Middle East looks better: this man has already travelled far. But the Pilgers and Benns, with their younger anti-globalising incarnations, budge not when the world changes around them: it's "no pasaran" to anything outside their prefabricated ideological box.

To be a liberal and a progressive is to look forwards optimistically, to believe things can and must be made better. It is to invest in the power of good government, not to despise and despair of it. But now the left joins the right, oddly in fear of the future, change-averse, denouncing any improvement short of utopia. In New Labour a whole generation of politicians boasted of their personal change of mind: it was a vote- winner. True, they froze during their first term, petrified that a country that voted Tory for so long had not also changed its mind. But it had.

Now we begin to see a thawing second term where public mind-changing is happening in every department. Once, Clare Short had to grovel for mentioning cannabis, now it is effortlessly decriminalised. Asylum laws are changed. Student fees are reconsidered. Railtrack is renationalised. "Best value", forcing contracting-out, is reformed. A euro referendum creeps closer - with more pro-euro speeches next week.

As for Tony Blair's global vision, he describes something that is slowly happening. The G8 countries are now committed to the New Partnership for African Development, to help Africa resolve the lethal conflicts in Congo, Angola, Sudan, Burundi and elsewhere, promising money and support. The WTO this week for the first time tilted towards the poor world's interest: not perfect, but real progress. The UN is strengthened as the US and everyone needs it more than ever. This is the old half-full, half-empty question: perhaps an inborn quirk of character ordains which way a person sees the world. The old left are the nihilists, the liberal left are the optimists.