Nick Cohen is the author of What's Left and You Can't Read This Book.
If you are lucky enough to get a ticket for Julius Caesar at London’s Bridge theatre, prepare to join the mob. Actors turn into stewards and herd most of the audience around the stage as if they are crowds at a political rally. A live band blasts out rock songs and urges us to chant
In 1989, the year Soviet communism collapsed, John O’Sullivan, Margaret Thatcher’s former speechwriter, gave the world O’Sullivan’s First Law of Politics. ‘All organisations that are not actually right wing,’ he pronounced, ‘will over time become left wing.’ No one who watched Amnesty International’s descent from austere principle to cultural relativism can deny he spoke with
Suppose you were a white supremacist who wanted to keep Muslim children down. Or suppose you were a Machiavellian middle-class parent, who wanted to handicap the competition your child would face when the race for university places began. In either case, you would be delighted by what is happening at St Stephen’s primary school in Newham.
Suppose you were a white supremacist who wanted to keep Muslim children down. Or suppose you were a Machiavellian middle-class parent, who wanted to handicap the competition your child would face when the race for university places began. In either case, you would be delighted by what is happening at St Stephen’s primary school in Newham.
How to signal your virtue is one of the most perplexing problems in modern etiquette. It has to be done, obviously. No one can get on in life, or at least on Twitter, without making clear to friends and strangers that they are for good things and against bad things. So pressing has the need
Gerard Coyne’s campaign team will reform in Birmingham this week, as the whisper spreads that control of Unite, Britain’s biggest union, and a sizeable share of influence in the Labour party, is up for grabs. By rights, Coyne should no longer have a ‘team’ or a career. Last year’s election for the general secretary of
The uproar about fake news hides as much as it reveals. It is not just that propaganda has a history as long as the history of politics. The psychological turn modern thinking has taken with its emphasis on groupthink and confirmation bias lulls us into believing modern societies are up against citizens caught in a
Brexit is getting a far easier ride than it deserves. I accept that its promoters live in a world of paranoid irresponsibility. They lament their unjust suffering, and blame everyone but themselves for its many failings. But consider how Britain has bent over backwards to enable their project. We don’t have an opposition willing to oppose
From the beginning, there’s been a whiff of the police state about the treatment of Damian Green. Free societies do not allow detectives to burst into an MP’s office because he or she has been embarrassing the government. That bad smell has risen to the level of a stench. The now ex-police officers, who claimed
As faith wanes in democracy, arguments against it have more power than arguments for the status quo. People still quote Churchill’s line about democracy being the worst system of government apart from all the others as if it settles the matter. For what it is worth, I think it is true. But as memories of
Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters announce themselves to be the leftist of the left: a band of brothers, who have saved the Labour Party from neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism. Yet they happily align with the most right-wing imperialist power in the neighbourhood. All around Corbyn, questions about Russian influence in the US election and the Brexit
The collapse of the old order in the West provoked a collapse in confidence in ‘professional politicians’. It was a boo phrase as reliable as ‘heretic’ in the medieval church. A speaker wishing to endear himself or herself to the audience only had to say that the country was sick to the back teeth of
The 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg is as good week as any to examine the power of sectarianism. Here in Britain we do not need to look far. Northern Ireland ought to be in crisis because a hard Brexit will wreck its
Russia does much worse than suppressing dissident opinion and manufacturing fake news. Putin has aided and abetted the vast crimes against humanity in Syria. The terror sent refugees flooding into the EU, and their presence helped produce Brexit and the rise of a pan-European far right: a double victory for the Kremlin, when you look
You can see divisions hardening in Britain, like rigor mortis spreading through a corpse. Joints are stiffening everywhere you look. If you doubt me, turn your eyes to the right and notice how politicians and commentators speak as if they are reading from a script, which allows no debate or argument about detail. No Brexiter
Belatedly, the disastrous rollout of Universal Credit has become a media ‘talking point’. I could do with less praise for Iain Duncan Smith in the debate. He is the man the Tories decided was unfit to lead them, but still fit to manage and, as we are seeing, wreck the lives of the poorest people
Admirers of violence and lies must go carefully. As true cowards they must leave themselves an escape hatch in case they are forced to retreat. They never quite commit to the suppression of rights, the rigged elections, the secret policemen and the torture chambers. Instead they tell us we are not hearing the full story,
Enough has been written about a Conservative government that knows its electoral success depends on Britain remaining a property-owning democracy, yet offers nothing beyond token gestures to stop the young being priced out of home ownership. Enough, too, has been said about graduates being overcharged, pensioners soaking up the largesse of the tax and benefit
Enough has been written about a Conservative government that knows its electoral success depends on Britain remaining a property-owning democracy, yet offers nothing beyond token gestures to stop the young being priced out of home ownership. Enough, too, has been said about graduates being overcharged, pensioners soaking up the largesse of the tax and benefit
Stephen Bush of the New Statesman asked a good question the other day. Why do people who hate what Boris Johnson and Liam Fox are doing to Britain go easy on David Davis? He’s right to be perplexed. It turns out all those trade deals the leave campaign promised can’t be done for years. Liam Fox
