Freedom of speech

Few books have had a greater effect on me than Robert Hughes’ Culture of Complaint. The clarity of Hughes’ style in his dissection of the discontents of the 1980s was enough to make me love him. In his political writing, histories and art criticism he never descended into theory or jargon, but imitated his heroes, Tom Paine, George Orwell and EP Thompson, and talked to the reader without condescension or obscurantism Critics denounce and admirers celebrate the ‘muscular style’, but I find it more courteous than macho. Hughes tackled hard and often obscure subjects, the rise of modern art, the penal colonies in early Australia, and made a deal with

The Olympics may just 16 days away but will the spectators be able to find chips? The shocking picture above shows the real effect of the Censorship Olympics. Thanks to a lucrative sponsorship deal with McDonalds, all other catering teams are forbidden from serving chips anywhere within the area of London categorized as Olympic Park — unless they come with fish.   The Soviet-style roadlanes are bad enough, but the right to sell a bag of chips to anyone who wants one is fairly fundamental in Britain — and Nick Cohen writes the cover story tomorrow on how many other fundamental rights have been flogged to the IoC and their sponsors.

Imbecilic leftie authoritarians are whining again about being called nasty names by people with less power than them. Exhibit A is the fabulously stupid Islamist Mehdi Hasan, once of the New Statesman and now of the Huffington PostUK, whatever that is. Here’s the emetic opening sentence of his article in today’s Guardian (under the headline ‘We Mustn’t Allow Muslims In Public Life To Be Silenced.’ Yes, he means himself): ‘Have you ever been called an Islamist? How about a jihadist or a terrorist?? Extremist maybe? Welcome to my world.’ The abuse he gets, he whines, is ‘as relentless as it is vicious’. He complains about being called a dangerous Muslim

I had the strangest call today from an outfit called publicservice.co.uk. A rather pleasant woman, albeit with a slightly insistent phone manner, asked me for my views on work creation and the government’s policy on hard to reach &”NEETS” (horrible jargon for young people not education, employment or training). I have my views, but I also have my own ways of making these known to government, so I asked how the information I gave her would be used. Was someone paying her to provide intelligence? In which case, I wondered how much she was proposing to pay me. Oh no, she said, she wasn’t a consultant, she was working for

A week ago, the offices of the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo were burned down. This attack came after it advertised the founder of Islam, Muhammad, as ‘editor-in-chief’ of the new issue. The move was a light-hearted response to the very serious matter of the election of an Islamist party (the Ennahda party) as the leading party in Tunisia (a result which, incidentally, appears not to have greatly bothered most European media). As the staff of Charlie Hebdo contemplated the ruins of their magazine, a much grander and richer magazine, Time, ran one of those pieces which have become familiar whenever there is an Islamist assault against free speech. As

I’m sure that all CoffeeHousers know who the footballer is with the super injunction preventing newspapers from publishing anything about his affair with the Big Brother contestant Imogen Thomas. But if you didn’t, the papers would have made pretty odd reading over the past few days because the press keeps making little in jokes that are only funny if you know the player’s identity. David Cameron this morning announced that he knew the identity of the player.  This highlights one of many ironies of the situation, which is that far more people are now aware of who the errant footballer is than would have been if the news had just