The second volume of Tariq Ali’s memoirs entertains and fascinates Chris Bambery

Reading You Can’t Please All, I was reminded of a saying we have in Scotland that someone is a ‘Man O’Pairts’, as one definition puts it ‘an all-rounder, broad in knowledge and at the same time practical.’ Tariq Ali is certainly that; an agitator, a historian and a theorist; novelist, playwright and film maker; gourmet, cook and a traveller; debater and polemicist and more.

This is the second part of his autobiography, the first being Street Fighting Years, which covered the fascinating story of his politicisation in Pakistan, helped by his Communist Party parents, his arrival at Oxford University, after he was told not to remain in Lahore, his central involvement in the worldwide movement in solidarity with the Vietnamese in their national-liberation war against US imperialism and his founding and leading role in the International Marxist Group, the British section of the Trotskyist Fourth International – to which I belonged from 1972 until 1979.

The chronological distinction between the two books is blurred because in You Can’t Please All, Tariq wanders back to incidents and people he knew from the first period. I have to say I find his reminisces of Pakistan fascinating and am not complaining!

You Can’t Please All starts with the April 1979 police riot in Southall, West London, when riot police went on a brutal rampage in an attempt to terrorise the mainly Punjabi community there. The community was determined to stop a National Front meeting going ahead, but the police were prepared to use whatever means to ensure it did.

A member of the Anti-Nazi League, a young East London teacher, Blair Peach, was killed by a blow with a weighted truncheon from a Special Patrol Group officer. Hundreds of Southall residents and their supporters were brutally arrested and faced farces of trials. If you think any of this is hyperbole, read Tariq’s account of events. He describes being beaten unconscious when police stormed the People’s Rights Centre where protestors were sheltering.

Responding to a new era

It’s a fitting point to begin, because in 1979, for some of us on the left, including Tariq, it was obvious our world was changing. The tide had ebbed on the great insurgency of the working class in Western Europe and North America. Margaret Thatcher was about to be elected and Ronald Reagan soon after.

The issue was how would we respond to this new situation. In December 1981, Tariq left the IMG and applied to join the Labour Party at the behest of Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone. There was a tidal wave of support for the Labour left around Benn, and Tariq wanted to be part of that ferment to help move it in a Marxist direction.

Tariq recounts the various arguments he had, one with Paul Foot when the two men were looking after their children. Paul was adamant Tariq should not join Labour because the beast could not change its spots. This was also going to involve a break with the Fourth International and its best known figure, Ernest Mandel, of whom Tariq was very fond. However, Tariq was more than jaundiced with the perspectives being put forward by that organisation, as he explains here, which was basically onwards and upwards, not recognising the changed conditions, so he made that break.

Included is an exchange of letters over all this with Perry Anderson, then editor of New Left Review, which makes fascinating reading. In the end, the Labour Party, now led by Neil Kinnock, refused him membership, and by then the Bennite tide had ebbed.

How to keep on keeping on? Tariq did two things. The first was to make New Left Review and what is now Verso Books his ideological, and in some ways, organisational home, because it provided a lively cadre; among them Perry Anderson along with Robin Blackburn, the late Peter Gowan, and the longest-serving editor of the magazine, Susan Watkins, Tariq’s partner and the author of the best analyses of the European Union I have read.

It should be pointed out that all, except Anderson, had been in the IMG, which had itself created bright array of Marxist thinkers and activists. Tariq is still rooted in Meard Street, the NLR’s home, and his contribution and that of the Review and Verso are immense.

Culture and activism

The second move was to pursue a career in the arts, but a political one. One example was the long running Channel 4 programme, The Bandung Files, where Tariq worked closely with Darcus Howe and Farrukh Dhondy, while other projects were in the theatre.

What’s interesting is that this took place at a time when many on the left were arguing that Thatcherism was hegemonic; it wasn’t. Even within the establishment, there was opposition to it, and there was a widespread cultural reaction against it.

Five novels he wrote, The Islamic Quintet, looking back at five incidents in history involving Islam and Christendom/Europe, gave me a much deeper understanding, in particular, of Islam’s history in Europe and what bunkum the so called Clash of Civilisations between Judeo-Christian civilisation and Islam is. This was about to become very important.

What he calls ‘A Family Interlude’ sees Tariq giving us a further account of his extraordinary family in India – as it was pre-partition – and in Pakistan. I just lapped it up. I also liked his writings about India, a state we need to know much more about because there is today a very important Anglo-Indian section of the ruling class, tied to the Modi government with all its support for Israel and Islamophobia.

Tariq will forgive, me I hope, if I say that when You Can’t Please All takes off is with 9/11 and the US launch of the war on terror, which continues today, not least in Washington financing and arming Israel’s current genocide in Gaza and its attempts to incite Iran into a regional war with its murderous assault on Lebanon.

Tariq, of course, has an immense knowledge of the Islamic world, not least of Pakistan and Afghanistan where the Americans would invade first. He retained his anti-imperialism, flowing from his rich understanding of Marxism and he had the experience of the movement against war in Indochina.

He was working with old friends, but above all he came to know to a new generation of activists – I should make that plural given the current radicalisation of the mass movement in solidarity with Palestine of which Tariq is very much part.

One of the most inspiring things for me in the book is his ‘Letter to a Young Muslim’, written after he spoke in Glasgow at an anti-war meeting where some young Muslims attacked him as an apostate. It’s worth the price of the book itself. The letter became the basis of his important book, Clash of Fundamentalisms. Tariq loved engaging with young people like that. In fact, he just loves engaging!

The sense of anger over the permanent war we live in is palpable, whether it’s in Iraq, Palestine or wherever else America strikes, backed up by whichever government is in office in Britain. And he justifies that anger with clear analysis.

In the space I have, I cannot do justice to the ground Tariq covers here; from what’s changed in cricket, the evolution of New Left Review and the fascinating characters he has known (and knows!). But there is an easy way to solve that: read the book itself. Its near that time of year some of us in the West exchange gifts. This would be a great gift. Tariq has written an autobiography that matters.