Politics | 8 September 2007

It’s not hoodies. It’s not single mums. It’s not even jittery City whizz kids down to their last ten million. No, it’s lefties we should be furrowing our collective brow about. We shouldn’t worry about the threat they pose to society (even though successful countries can survive anything except civil war and socialism). It’s the fact that they appear to be suffering a crisis of faith.

It is a crisis which disproves the claim that while the Right won the economic arguments, the Left has at least won the social ones. And it helps explain why our Labour Prime Minister demanded ‘British workers for British jobs.’ And why the question should be not, ‘Why is David Cameron lurching to the right?’, but, ‘Why is everybody?’

Evidence that it is a crisis of faith — rather than merely a change of mind — is that lapsed left-wingers, like lapsed Catholics, have a tendency for confessions and exegeses. The latest addition to a nascent genre of literature is the excellently insightful The Fallout: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence (out this week) by Andrew Anthony, star feature writer of the Observer newspaper. In the US, the confessions of lapsed liberals are becoming a significant genre of publishing.

The liberal Left has suffered the double whammy of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, bashing their economic beliefs, followed by the collapse of the twin towers, bashing their cultural ones. It was September 11th — or at least the anti-Western, pro-Islamist apologia for it — which started Anthony’s doubt. But it was a mugging that finally did it for him. Not the metaphorical mugging by reality, but an actual one. He intervened when a schoolgirl was viciously attacked by a gang of other schoolgirls as passers-by just looked on, and was disturbed that everyone excused the attackers’ behaviour, blaming it on poverty and poor education, rather than condemned it.