Tariq Ali

Something about joining the crowds on George Street as they pour towards the main Book Festival entrance in Charlotte Square recalls the short walk up the old Wembley Way, from the tube station to the former home of English football. This seems fitting, as the fans are out in force to hear from Tariq Ali, the David Beckham of the old New Left.

Reviled by some but loved by many, Ali—like the talismanic former-England captain, but on the left wing, naturally—has a reputation for persevering where others have long since given up. He is clearly still angry about the Blair years and, consequently, this one-hour talk takes a good forty minutes to come round to its stated subject, South America.

 

Ali begins with a brief rundown of what he sees as a key turning point in contemporary British politics, the Glasgow East by-election. New Labour's humiliation in the west of Scotland sounded the death knell for a movement that was, for him, "nothing more than a continuation of Thatcherism," and Ali's gleeful admission that he had "stayed up for Mason" is greeted with a loud cheer from an audience who are clearly, by this point, very much on-side.

 

This leads on to a frank appraisal of the potential for an independent Scotland, an idea for which Ali is clearly enthusiastic. "But you have to decide what will go into this new space," he asserts, "if you're not going to do anything different, then what's the point?"

 

Next we turn to world affairs—as important as ever in this "epoch of necessary lies and dangerous truths"—and in particular a subject upon which the author and activist has always been among the left's most vocal: American foreign policy. Ali warns that, with Chinese capitalism now "the workshop of the world" (he is, as ever, delightfully quotable) the shift in focus towards Afghanistan is of major concern, and has only one motive: the establishment of NATO bases in a country that, nestled in between Iran, Pakistan and China, sits so squarely atop so many of the world's major geopolitical fault lines.

 

So far so edifying. But this is familiar territory, both for Ali and for his large, evidently well informed audience. Thankfully, before long, moderator Ruth Wishart gently points out that his five-minute warning had passed unnoticed some fifteen minutes previously.

 

With extra time looming, our host moves belatedly on to the order of the day, the "signs of hope" emerging across Latin America that the Washington Consensus is not as unanimous as it might appear. In the aftermath of the Argentinian collapse, he argues, there has been vast improvement. Citing Castro and Chavez, Ecuador's Rafael Correia and Bolivia's imperilled Evo Morales, Ali briefly explains the popular origins of this new leftward trend, from landless peasants' movements to the successful civil occupation carried out by the citizens of Cochabamba in protest at the privatization of their water supply.

 

But almost as soon as the subject is breached, the final whistle goes. There is time for only a brief Q&A showdown, during which Ali proceeds to miss the proverbial sitter by saying, of Hugo Chavez's referendum on an unconstitutional extension of his presidency, only that "it was a mistake." It's a frustrating end to the proceedings, to say the least.

 

Those keen to find out more rush to get their hands on a signed copy of Ali's latest, Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, and it comes as no surprise to find out that the directions to the signing tent are beautiful in their simplicity. It's left, and left again.