In his brilliant book What’s Left?, Nick Cohen told the peculiar and depressing story of how in the early part of the 21st Century the orthodox liberal left had contorted itself into support for positions it would previously have held to be abhorrently inimical to secular democracy. It was the story of a crisis in Western liberal thought, of how relativism, obscurantism and knee-jerk anti-Americanism had supplanted belief in universal human liberties, and how, incredibly, by turning its back on these hard fought for liberties the orthodox liberal left was openly giving succour and support to groups who never believed in them in the first place.

The follow up, Waiting For The Etonians, is an equally excoriating and bleakly funny collection of Cohen’s recent pieces from The Observer, The New Statesmen and others, set against the backdrop of the dying embers of the longest left leaning government in British political history.  As such it is a development of the themes in What’s Left? rather than a new book in its own right, but it is still for the most part a riveting read.

Cohen is chiefly an enemy of liberal groupthink, an independent thinker who sees himself as one of the remaining true believers of Enlightenment secular humanism. It is a view that says it is the majority of 21st Century liberals, not him,  who have betrayed liberalism and shifted away from a core belief in universal human liberties. I think he has a point.

For sure, on occasion Cohen has a whiff of the pious convert about him and sometimes his developed positions seem to emanate from a fixed perspective such as he despises elsewhere. But not often. For the most part Waiting For The Etonians contains independent and clear-eyed thinking, the like of which you do not often encounter in Britain’s fourth estate.

It would be pushing it to say Nick Cohen is the George Orwell of his day, but like Orwell, Cohen is utterly unafraid of making himself unpopular with his former confreres and adopting positions that run against the grain of what he is meant to be thinking according to the orthodoxy of his peer group. Along with Andrew Anthony, Francis Wheen, David Aaronovitch and others Nick Cohen is part of a dissenting group that gives hope for the future development of liberal thought that might one day again define itself by what it stands for, in preference to what it currently stands against.

At the very least Cohen has reinvigorated the grand tradition of the political pamphlet. Whether you read Waiting For The Etonians to challenge or to affirm your own views, there is much to admire here, because f for the most part, Waiting For The Etonians is thought provoking, clear sighted and highly readable. Recommended.

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