Nick Cohen is the author of What's Left and You Can't Read This Book.
From all over the UK I am picking up stories of employees – or more often the activists who claim to represent them – cosplaying as revolutionaries. Strikers go for progressive business owners rather than the standard capitalist bogeymen, because they are softer targets. They force them to close and then attempt to take control
The mood of Keir Starmer’s foreign policy advisers was funereal as they contemplated the return of Donald Trump. The weeks since Trump’s inauguration have shown that the government doesn’t know what to do with an American president who is hostile, capricious and, let’s face it, more than a little mad, except humour him as one
The richest man in the world and, as of 20 January, the most powerful man in the world will be uniting to attack the UK. The outstanding question is: what will the British right do about it? I understand why some conservatives may be tempted to go along with their country’s enemies. I can see
Nigel Farage ought to terrify the Tories. He has terrified them many times over the past decades. But until now, he hasn’t had the force of the US president, the richest man in the world, and the global online right behind him. As the struggle to become the dominant voice on the British right intensifies,
A few days ago, in the suburban surroundings of the Phoenix cinema in Finchley, north London, a major film by a great director that positively hums with contemporary relevance received its first, and by the looks of it, only showing in the English-speaking world. Like so many examples of authoritarianism, the censorship is confined to the
Those of us who voted Labour with pleasure on 4 July could never have imagined the new government’s first 100 days. We thought that the grown-ups would take charge after the chaos of the Tory years. Labour would be the adults in the room, as the cliché goes: sensible, professional people like Sir Keir Starmer,
The Conservatives are going down to one of their worst defeats ever. The opposition has come from nowhere to absolutely destroy them. It ought to be one of those rare moments in British history when the centre-left can celebrate crushing a Tory party, that drives us to despair and rage in equal measure. Speaking at
For months US Democrats have been wondering why voters were not supporting Joe Biden. He has been a good president, and enacted many worthy reforms. Donald Trump, by contrast, is clearly a dictator in the making. The idea that American voters have elderly relatives and (love them though they do), know that an 81-year-old cannot take
There is a leftist case against woke ideology. It’s rare to hear it because it flies against many preconceptions and fears. Liberals and leftists are wary for two reasons. Conservatives love to highlight the first: the fear of being cancelled. And just because conservatives love to highlight it, does not mean it is not true. I
Conventional Conservative wisdom once warned about the dangers of appeasement. Rudyard Kipling, the great poet of imperialism, may be the most cancelled figure in British literature, but I imagine even leftists can see how his lines in Danegeld apply to the Tory party’s appeasement of Nigel Farage: ‘And that is called paying the Dane-geld; But we’ve proved
It’s Friday 5 July 2024. The electorate has proved the pollsters right, and Labour has returned to power with a staggering majority to match or even surpass the landslide victories of 1945 and 1997. Will the new Labour MPs have the courage to stand up Sir Keir Starmer and his team when they believe that
Why can’t Jeremy Corbyn be a left-wing Farage? Why can’t he threaten Labour as Ukip and its successor parties threatened and continue to threaten the Tories? There is a gap in the market for a party to the left of Labour, and Corbyn seems just the man to fill it. Those of us who intensely disliked
Blood is central to the myths British people tell themselves. One of the many consequences of the contaminated blood scandal is that it may blow those myths apart. For if this scandal can make us face the reality of how badly we are governed, and indeed how selfishly we govern ourselves, then some good may
One of the aims of progressives in higher education ought to be to use their privileged position to spread knowledge to their fellow citizens. In the all but forgotten world of the original socialist movement, radicals aimed in the words of the Workers Educational Association (founded 1903) to bring ‘education within reach of everyone who needs
Labour people are used to defeat. Before every election they wonder if the Tories will defy expectations. Real votes are not the same as opinion polls, after all, they say. And yet ever since Boris Johnson broke his own lockdown rules, disastrous performances for the Tories in opinion polls have been replicated by disastrous results in
In March 2020, Charlotte Leslie, a former Conservative MP, and widely regarded as a thoughtful, friendly woman, had her life turned upside down. The threat of professional and financial ruin hit her, and stayed with her until a few months ago, solely because she had offended a wealthy man. Leslie was the director of the
Who is this speaking with a sneer on their lips and contempt in their voice before news of the Princess of Wales’s cancer broke? A monarchist or a republican? ‘Kate’s admission that she had doctored the photograph, and her apology for doing so, were the latest self-inflicted wound by the House of Windsor, for which trust and
The Rochdale by-election raises a question that Labour will find hard to duck in government: can a European left-wing party survive without a pro-Islamist foreign policy? They can’t win with one, as Jeremy Corbyn proved twice. But the shocking success of George Galloway last night shows that the arguments of the Corbyn years have not
Fascism begins with political violence on the streets. In 1922, Benito Mussolini ordered his supporters to march on Rome and threaten to overthrow the democratic government. In the early 1930s gangs of Nazis and communists fought for control of Berlin’s streets. In 1999, a mysterious bombing campaign, that killed dozens of people and destroyed apartment
It is a measure of how conspiracy theories have triumphed in the darkest corners of the left that, when the Labour candidate for Rochdale started banging on about Jews, his rivals in the George Galloway campaign thought he was making a smart political move. Azhar Ali had been taped putting forward two anti-Jewish fantasies. In these paranoid circumstances,
