Sir: It could be that the situation on the left
is even worse than Richard West (16 May) makes it out to be. My own conclusion, after trying to make the Biafran case intelligible to my erstwhile left wing friends, is that the left is just as racialist as the right and does not give a cuss about Biafra for exactly the same reason. Black man is killing black man, so what does it matter?
There are other factors. One is that the leaders of the organised groups of the left seem to have no genuine interest in anything except their own advantage—and every campaign is seen accordingly. What they want is recruits, readers for their papers and publicity for their names and labels. Their method is that of membership poaching, mutual character assas- sination (they hate each other much more than they hate their supposed enemies) and the arid defence of the various dogmas that sustain their separate identities.
The left interred itself last month in a two- day ceremony, a National Convention in St Pancras Town Hall, where the proceedings were dominated by a dull and sordid struggle between the Communist party and its main present rival, the group called International Socialism. When I raised the subject of Biafra 1 was jeered.
Over the years many leading socialists in this country identified themselves with the cause of African nationalism and that of 'One Nigeria' in particular. Today they are living in the past. They are emotionally incapable of grasping the meaning of the traumatic experience of 1966 and its sequel.
The left tends to depend ultimately on the Communist party with its daily paper, its full- time district organisers and its established position in the trade unions. This means that if the cP sticks, the whole left sticks too. And the CP, although it might make occasional critical noises about Soviet policy, will not take part in an active campaign against the policy of the Soviet government—and we all know where the Russians stand in the Nigeria/ Biafra war.
The left was for years as slow over Vietnam as today it is over Biafra. It took no sig- nificant interest until the second escalation of the war (in 1965) registered massive and overt American intervention.
Do we have to wait until white troops are committed to war in Africa before the left wakes up? My own view is that the left (or at least its old leaders) will never wake up. They have nothing to say. The left is as dead as the right. The truth about Biafra, as about our domestic situation, requires us to remake our political identities from first principles.
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