Why the Left won't learn when the Right is right

Telegraph

05-05-2025

It can be melancholy to be right about something when others are wrong. It makes you unpopular at the time and often unbearably smug when you are later vindicated.
The problem is acute in politics when the Right is right. The Left tends to be more censorious than the Right and therefore thinks that anything emanating from the Right must be morally wrong. (The Right more often regards the Left as impractically idealistic rather than evil.) Once the Left labels a view 'Right-wing', it permits itself to disregard that view.
A classic case was the refusal of Western governments to consider the Wuhan 'lab leak' theory as the origin of Covid-19, simply because Donald Trump was its noisiest advocate.
A much earlier one was the refusal to admit that Britain could not for long remain within the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) of the European Monetary System – the forerunner of the euro. We joined in October 1990. In the summer of 1992, the prime minister, John Major, declared that departure would produce 'fool's gold'. We fell out, all the same, that September.
The trans issue is also a case in point. The Right (which did not, until recently, include most of the Conservative leadership on this subject) took its stand on reality: your sex is a biological fact that cannot be altered by wishing it so.
So long as it was predominantly crusty old conservatives who said this, public policy debate was able to evade this key issue of fact. Then feminists, often Left-wing, bravely took up the matter. As campaigners for recognition of women's rights and identity, they were angry at trans women who, as they saw it, parodied their sex by adopting it. Only then did the dam of public debate belatedly break.
There has been a similar, regrettable delay about net zero. Again, the Right – though pitifully few at the top of the Conservative Party – took its stand on reality. It did not deny that climate change was an issue. Rather, it argued that the policies being proposed to arrest it were ineffective, unnecessarily expensive and dangerously insecure. Following a timetable which could not be met, it added, would also cause great damage.
These warnings are being progressively vindicated, as the public becomes much more aware of the issue because of the vast, net zero-driven rise in energy costs for households and businesses. As we get acquainted with the price of electric vehicles (even when subsidised), the inadequacy of heat-pumps, the precariousness of power supply, and the disappearance of jobs dependent on fossil fuels, we grow alarmed.
But for the Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, to admit these problems would seem tantamount to becoming 'Right-wing'. Given his ambitions, he would almost rather die.
Even Sir Keir Starmer, who is marginally more cautious on this topic, sees climate-crisis language as essential to his political identity, distinguishing him from semi-fascist 'climate-deniers'. Only a few brave souls on the Left, like Gary Smith of the GMB union, challenge the orthodoxy.
Yet, as a matter of plain fact, this Labour Government will not hit its net zero targets and will have to modify them. The cost of delay in recognising that the Right is right can be stupendous. The Climate Change Act became law 17 years ago: the public admission that the policies are failing is only just beginning.
What is the next example of this syndrome? I would say our acceptance of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights, especially in relation to immigration. Every government that evades this issue, and therefore fails to control immigration, will be punished by voters. The Right was saying this as early as the 20th century.
Metaphorical parachute
When the Second World War was ending in April 1945, my uncle, an injured prisoner of war, was liberated. Shortly before VE Day, he was flown to Britain in an American Dakota.
With his first sight of England, he recognised his family house, near the Sussex coast, distinctively visible because of its fields and old garden walls. 'That's my home down there,' he said to the American Red Cross sergeant. 'Gee bud,' came the reply, 'do you want a parachute?'
Eighty years on, it is sad to think that, thanks to Donald Trump, the American offer of a metaphorical parachute, and the allied friendship that goes with it, may be withdrawn.
If it is, a third great European war, which then goes global, seems likelier than ever before.
The return of Stalingrad
Thinking of which, I note that, this week, Vladimir Putin signed a decree renaming the airport of Volgograd, 'Stalingrad International Airport'.
He has added that veterans of his current 'special military operation' in Ukraine would like the city itself to be renamed Stalingrad. He says he favours the idea but purports to be consulting local opinion.
The name change is a repeat of history. In 1925, Volgograd became Stalingrad for the first time, in honour of the Soviet Union's then fairly new all-powerful dictator. Under this name, and with Stalin now in charge of his country's resistance to Nazi invasion, Stalingrad became world-famous in 1942-3 for the titanic battle fought there between the German and Soviet armies. The Soviets, though at terrible cost, were the eventual victors.
In 1961, with Stalin eight years dead and his personality cult cancelled, Khrushchev's Soviet government restored Volgograd to its original name. In 2025, the rehabilitation of Communism's biggest ever murderer proceeds, with the rehabilitator no slouch at murder himself.