Nick Cohen

Nick Cohen

Nick Cohen is the author of What's Left and You Can't Read This Book.

The Brexiteers will always blame everything but Brexit

The worst men always find themselves in others. If they are instinctive liars, they accuse their opponents of lying. If they mistreat women, they assume all other men do the same. If they are sleazy, over-promoted know-nothings, they see their angry faces in every stranger they meet. On this reading, Liam Fox’s barroom tirades are

Vlad the corrupter and the crisis on the left

Julian Assange still has not found the courage to face the women who accuse him of sexual abuse. Rather than try to clear his name, he has sat in the basement of the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge for four years – a confinement long enough to drive most of us out of our minds. If

Why you shouldn’t vote for Jeremy Corbyn

What follows is an appeal to Jeremy Corbyn supporters to think again. It’s from Chris, a Labour party member, who does not want to give his full name for fear of abuse. He has compiled a vast, but by no means exhaustive list of the moral and political failings of the Labour leader. He told

Will Putin target Latvia next?

The Baltic states do not feel like a front line. I did not see a police officer in more than a week in Latvia, let alone a soldier. Somewhere out there were three NATO battalions, deployed to deter Putin from crossing the border. But if it wasn’t for the seediness that lingers like a bad

Must Corbyn win?

Thoughtful writing about the Corbyn phenomenon is not just impossible to find, it is impossible to imagine. Admirers live in a land of make believe as closed to the rest of the world as North Korea. They barely know how to explain themselves to outsiders because they cannot imagine any honourable reason for outsiders disagreeing

Enemies of history

At the start of the 21st century, no one felt the need to reach for studies of ‘third-period’ communism to understand British and American politics. By 2016, I would say that they have become essential. Admittedly, connoisseurs of the communist movement’s crimes have always thought that 1928 was a vintage year. The Soviet Union had

The moral case against Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters are making much of Owen Smith’s work as a corporate lobbyist for Big Pharma before he entered politics. Whether he behaved unethically is irrelevant. To anyone who knows the culture of the left, his old job description alone can be enough to damn him. Reciting ‘corporate lobbyist’ in many  left-wing quarters produces the

The frivolity of the Left

I can tell you why hundreds of thousands think that ‘Jeremy’ – as they insist on calling him – must prevail. I can take you through it all: the oligarchs on one side and the food banks on the other; the Iraq war and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction; the bailing out

The martyrdom of St Andrea

He may have died in the seventeenth century but in his Mysterie of Rhetoric Unvail’d  of 1657 John Smith showed he understood how sneaks such as Andrea Leadsom operate.  Defining the rhetorical device of ‘apophasis’, Smith described it as A kind of irony, whereby we deny that we say or doe that which we especially

Brexit was propelled by prejudice. Why deny it?

There are two theories about racial prejudice. Most people talk as if there is a fixed block of people ‘the racists’: always white and extreme right wing, and usually covered in tattoos. They are ugly to be sure, but they are just a few irreconcilables in the otherwise merrily diverse land of multi-faith, multi-cultural Britain.

Fascism is alive in Britain – on both the left and the right

At the time of writing, no one knows the result of Britain’s European Union referendum. But everyone has learned in the hardest manner imaginable that Britain has a fascist movement. A real fascist movement, that is. Not what students with incontinent tongues call ‘fascism’, which turns out to be the beliefs of anyone who disagrees

Brexit’s bitter harvest

Nick Cohen and Fraser Nelson discuss The Spectator’s decision to back Brexit: We British flatter ourselves that common sense is a national personality trait. Giddy Europeans may follow the abstract notions of dangerous leaders, but we could not be more different. We are a practical, moderate breed — if we do say so ourselves —

Homophobia is now met with the same silence given to anti-Semitism

Rolling news does not give its participants the option of shutting their mouths and biting their tongues, even when shutting and biting are the best available options. Silence is the producer’s greatest fear. The supposedly contrarian presenter has to keep talking. The supposedly tough-minded pundit has to show she is nobody’s fool. Better that than

Brexit: the triumph of the right

The only arguments that matter in politics today are the arguments on the right. The only futures that are possible to imagine are those offered by the different strands of right-wing thought. The right’s arguments are not good to my mind. Nor are the futures it offers desirable. It is just that the right’s opponents

Nick Cohen

Brexit: The triumph of the right.

The only arguments that matter in politics today are the arguments on the right.  The only futures that are possible to imagine are those offered by the different strands of right-wing thought. The right’s arguments are not good to my mind. Nor are the futures it offers desirable. It is just that the right’s opponents

The lies of meritocratic Britain

In England after the Norman Conquest the worst insults you could throw were class insults. So long has feudal prejudice survived that we unconsciously echo the Anglo-Norman aristocracy when we use ‘villainous’ (from villien) and ‘churlish’ (from ‘churl’). The churl of the 1300s might have reflected that, however miserable his life, it was not his

Brexit: the-stab-in-the-back myth is coming

I don’t know if ‘Leave’ supporters will win. With the young abstaining and the old voting in a low-turnout referendum, it is just about possible that they could. But it is already dismally clear how they will react if they lose: they won’t accept the result. Nigel Farage was proud to admit that he would