Fourth Estate
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This edition published by Harper Perennial 2007
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2007
Copyright © Nick Cohen 2007
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be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN 9780007229703
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN 9780007370030
Version 2015-06-12
IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES, my mother searched the supermarkets for politically reputable citrus fruit. She couldn’t buy Seville oranges without indirectly subsidizing General Francisco Franco, Spain’s fascist dictator. Algarve oranges were no good either because the slightly less gruesome but equally right-wing dictatorship of António Salazar ruled Portugal. She boycotted the piles of Outspan from South Africa as a protest against apartheid, and although neither America nor Israel was a dictatorship, she wouldn’t have Florida or Jaffa oranges in the house because she had no time for the then American President, Richard Nixon, or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
My sisters and I did not know it, but when Franco fell ill in 1975, we were in a race to the death. Either he died of Parkinson’s disease or we died of scurvy. Luckily for us and the peoples of Spain, the dictator went first, although he took an unconscionably long time about it.
Thirty years later, I picked up my mother from my sister Natalie’s house. Her children were watching a Disney film; The Jungle Book, I think.
‘It’s funny, Mum,’ I said as we drove home, ‘but I don’t remember seeing any Disney when I was their age.’
‘You’ve only just noticed? We didn’t let you watch rubbish from Hollywood corporations.’
‘Ah.’
‘We didn’t buy you the Beano either.’
‘For God’s sake, Mum, what on earth was wrong with the Beano?’
‘It was printed by D. C. Thomson, non-union firm.’
‘Right,’ I said.
I was about to mock her but remembered that I had not allowed my son to watch television, even though he was nearly three at the time. I will let him read the Beano when he is older – I spoil him, I know – but if its cartoonists were to down their crayons and demand fraternal support, I would probably make him join the picket line and boycott it as well.
I come from a land where you can sell out by buying a comic. I come from the Left.
I’m not complaining, I had a very happy childhood. Conservatives would call my parents ‘politically correct’, but there was nothing sour or pinched about their home, and there is a lot to be said for growing up in a political household in which everyday decisions about what to buy and what to reject have a moral quality.
At the time, I thought it was normal and assumed that all civilized people lived the same way. I still remember the sense of dislocation I felt at 13 when my English teacher told me he voted Conservative. As his announcement coincided with the shock of puberty, I was unlikely to forget it. I must have understood at some level that real Conservatives lived in Britain – there was a Conservative government at the time, so logic dictated that there had to be Conservative voters. But it was incredible to learn that my teacher was one of them when he gave every appearance of being a thoughtful and kind man. To be good you had to be on the Left.