Viewpoint by Jonathan Power*
LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) - It goes back to the French revolution of 1789. At the Revolutionary Convention the most radical of the insurgents decided to seat themselves on the left side. “Why not on the other side, the right side, the place of rectitude, where law and the higher rights resided, when man’s best hand could be raised in righteous honour?” wrote Melvin Lasky in what was then Britain’s most influential intellectual monthly, Encounter. “Anyway they went left, and man’s political passions have never been the same since.”
When Oskar Lafontaine, the German finance minister, broke with Chancellor Gerhard Schroder in March 1999, the early days of the last Social Democratic government, he explained it was “because my heart beats on the left.” The right could never say that, even the liberal-inclined, ex-prime minister of the UK, David Cameron. When Humpty-Dumpty insisted on his own “master-meanings” he reassured Alice, “When I make a word do a lot of work like that, I always pay it extra.”
