The Spectator.co.uk Nick Cohen Blog

The brass neck of Julian Assange

Nick Cohen — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:09:01 +0000

On 1 March, the Old Vic theatre in London is hosting the première of Europe’s Last Dictator — a film documenting torture and state-sponsored murder and kidnap in Aleksandr Lukashenko’s Belarus. I don’t know if it looks at the brilliantly subversive Belarus Free Theatre, which has been at the forefront of the dissident movement, but I have been heartened to see British actors — Ian McKellen, Jude Law, Sienna Miller, Samuel West — responding to appeals for solidarity from their fellow performers in Belarus by taking up the cause of the opposition. Given this admirable record, it is no surprise to learn that Joanna Lumley will be co-hosting the evening at the Old Vic.

It is more of a surprise to learn that standing alongside her will be Julian Assange.

For every example of principled artistic activism one can find, there is a Jemima Khan or Bianca Jagger: preposterous celebs, who insist that Wikileaks is a force for good. Perhaps they are beyond saving, but someone needs to sit down the management of the Old Vic, and explain just how well the ‘freedom fighter’ has fought for freedom

Attack of the Militant Secularists

Nick Cohen — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 15:40:15 +0000

If you want to hear a BBC discussion going hopelessly wrong, listen to the ‘debate’ between the Bishop of Lichfield, Jonathan Gledhill (brother of the better-known Ruth) and Alan Beith on the Today programme this morning. Radio 4 meant it to be about the established church, and set the Anglican bishop against the Methodist Beith. But a freemasonry of the faithful took over, and ‘balance’ went out of the window. Conformist and non-conformist united against their common enemy, ‘militant secularism’. Not just Anglicans and Methodists, Beith assured us, but Sikhs, Jews, Muslims and Hindus were at one in their fear of the secularist menace. ‘It is bad enough having to put up with the platitudinous propaganda of Thought for the Day,’ I thought, ‘but this is too much.’

I won’t labour the obvious point that an established church that uses the force of law to insist on a privileged position, seems slightly more authoritarian, and indeed presumptuous, than those of us who want a level playing field, but look instead at the corruption of language.

Militant secularism or atheism certainly existed in the 20th century. Communists persecuted Christians,

We are all journalists now

Nick Cohen — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:46:41 +0000

As the cops round up journalists, Trevor Kavanagh’s protest in the Sun has aroused amazement and some scorn. ‘Witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on Press freedom’ — ran the headline, and the gist of the complaint among my friends was that it was a self-pitying and self-aggrandising piece of work.

Whatever you think of the Sun or Kavanagh, however, it is worth hearing him out for three reasons.

1. Kavanagh is being brave. We ought to applaud Hugh Grant for standing up to the tabloids even though he knows they will give him a bad press for the rest of his career. (You will have noticed that nearly everyone else in the celeb pack has let Grant and a few others fight their battles for them while they cower in a prudent silence.) Similarly, we ought to applaud Kavanagh for standing up to his employers — something hardly any journalist or politician has done since Mrs Thatcher's day.

His article is a barely coded protest against his proprietors. To save their hides, Rupert and James Murdoch closed the News of the World last year. Now

Whatever happened to Human Rights?

Nick Cohen — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:29:11 +0000

Human rights campaigners need to follow a self-denying ordinance if they are not to become enemies of the values they espouse. Like a civil servant or judge, they must leave their passions at the office door, and oppose the oppressive, whoever they are and whatever the consequences. It is easy for me to say that, but the record of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International tells you that it is hard for them to do so. To their politically committed workers impartiality can feel a thin and bloodless doctrine. It requires them to criticise people they regard as friends and provide inadvertent comfort to enemies.

The effort required in maintaining universal principles is too much for them, and explains why human rights organisations have gone off the rails. If you need convincing, look at the introduction to the Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2012 by Kenneth Roth, its ‘Executive Director’. is grandiose title is warning enough. It suggests that Roth sees himself more as a corporate leader than a liberal campaigner. The Executive Director’s analysis of the Middle East does nothing to dispel that suspicion.

Human Rights Watch’s main

Ed Miliband: Britain’s Greatest Leader of the Opposition

Nick Cohen — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:46:00 +0000

Ed Miliband is a geek, a failure and a loser. All the press says so, so it must be true. Yet the apparent no-hoper retains the ability of the boy who confronted the naked emperor to change the terms of debate.

Ever since Mrs Thatcher, the working assumption of the British elite has been that it must always placate Rupert Murdoch. If that meant the corruption of government — the ruling party giving special treatment to Murdoch’s businesses, Murdoch giving the ruling party propagandistic support in return — so be it. If that meant successive Prime Ministers debasing themselves (and their country) before an overmighty citizen, who was not even a British citizen, then, and by all means, they would do that too. The idea that the rule of law did not cover Murdoch is at the root of the phone hacking debacle — although I regret to say that Lord Justice Leveson has shown no interest to date in investigating the real scandal.

For all His Lordship’s cowardice, let no one forget that there would not have been an inquiry or a proper police investigation if Ed Miliband had

An Advertisement for Myself

Nick Cohen — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 17:26:40 +0000

My You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom is out this week. As the title says, it's about freedom of speech, a subject that has come to mean more and more to me as I have watched religious zealots intimidate liberals into silence, and the libel laws and omerta of City hierarchies stop investigations into a catastrophic financial system when they might have made a difference.

Writing in this week’s magazine, Alain de Botton talks about how authors can loathe critics, a feeling prompted in his case by a savage attack from Terry Eagleton. He ought to be less concerned. Given the professor’s ability to combine support for religious reaction with the support for the worst elements of the authoritarian Marxist tradition, a bad notice from that quarter is not an unmitigated disaster.

I have some had some raves from the Evening Standard and Ed West at the Telegraph. Meanwhile I could live to be 100 and never read anything as flattering as the intro to Julie Burchill’s review in Prospect:

‘Nick Cohen’s books are like the best Smiths

How freedom goes

Nick Cohen — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 20:31:11 +0000

Joan Smith has a piece in the Independent about religious censorship of open debate in Britain, a supposedly free country. It is well written and argued, as Smith’s writing invariably is, but what distinguishes it is that it is the only defence of our liberties in the Sunday papers.

Consider the events of the past few days:

i) At Queen Mary, University of London students went to hear Anne Marie Waters speak on behalf of the One Law For All — a campaign to stop Sharia law afflicting British women. An angry young man entered the lecture theatre. He filmed the audience on his mobile, and told them he knew where they lived and would track them down if a single negative word was said about Muhammad. The organisers informed the police and the meeting cancelled.

ii) Secularists at University College, London, came under attack for publishing a cartoon on its Facebook page of ‘Jesus and Mo’ having a drink together. The Muslim group that wants to ban the image got a sympathetic hearing in the media, despite arguing openly for censorship. Extremist websites, meanwhile, reacted

See? Simple. Next!

Nick Cohen — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:23:04 +0000

Ed Miliband is in the happiest position he has been for months. Both left and right are attacking him for stating the obvious. The unions or at least their leaders hate him for accepting effective public sector pay cuts. Unions are meant to represent their members, but they are making a debased utilitarian calculation in this instance. Pay cuts hurt all members a little, but job cuts hurt a few members a lot. The temptation for a union leader is to put the small interest of the many in maintaining their income above the urgent interest of the few in holding on to their jobs. It is an understandable seduction to fall for, but not an honourable one.

Nor is it likely to increase public support. The public will only rally to the public sector when it is defending services, not pay and pensions – and that means the unions must put jobs first. For it is one thing to go to a hospital and find that the staff are disgruntled because the government has cut their living standards, quite another to go to hospital and find that there are not enough

A left-wing writer conservatives should enjoy

Nick Cohen — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:29:37 +0000

I have a review of Pity the Billionaire by Thomas Frank, one of the few left-wing writers I believe conservatives can read with pleasure. He is old fashioned, so old-fashioned indeed that most American leftists would not call him left-wing. He has no time for the culture wars, which still stir the passions of so many on the right and left (and not only in the US). Instead he has concentrated on why ordinary working and middle class Americans do so badly when Wall Street is thriving and have to bail it out when it fails. Since 2008 events have justified him with a vengeance.

He is also a dazzling writer: honest, sardonic, scornful and literate – worth one thousand Michael Moores. Here he is writing with justifiable astonishment about the Tea Party’s reaction to the greatest banking crisis since 1929.

'To rage so violently against financial supervision is, admittedly, a peculiar way of responding to a severe downturn brought on by a largely unsupervised financial sector. It is not how Americans reacted in the past. Up until now, the social patterns of hard times were thought to

The Good, the Smug and the Blind

Nick Cohen — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 09:53:36 +0000

The Economist has a rather good, rather smug and – in the end – entirely self-deluding leader about the predicament of the American right this week.

It is good because the Economist sets out with neatness and style what policies a Republican candidates must sign up to if he or she is to make it through the primaries. The aspiring president must believe not just some but all of the following:

That abortion should be illegal in all cases.

That gay marriage must be banned even in states that want it.

That the 12m illegal immigrants, even those who have lived in America for decades, must all be sent home.

That the 46m people who lack health insurance have only themselves to blame.

That global warming is a conspiracy.

That any form of gun control is unconstitutional.

That any form of tax increase must be vetoed, even if the increase is only the cancelling of an expensive and market-distorting perk.

That Israel can do no wrong and the 'so-called Palestinians', to use Mr Gingrich’s term, can do no right.

That