Nick Cohen is the author of What's Left and You Can't Read This Book.
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,
On Boxing Day pro-Palestine demonstrators met customers at the Zara sale in the Westfield shopping centre, in Stratford, east London. They were not there to wish them the compliments of the season. ‘Bombs are dropping while you’re shopping’, they chanted, as police stood by to make sure the protests did not turn violent. ‘Zara is enabling
Down the road from where I live in Islington, the Jewish community put up a menorah in a park on the main shopping street. Islington Green seemed an appropriate spot to mark Hanukkah. It’s the home to the London borough’s memorial to the dead of the second world war who gave their lives to prevent the
The great fault of the global left is not that it supports Hamas. For how could western left-wing movements or left-inclining charities or academic bodies truly support Hamas if they were serious about their politics? No one outside the most reactionary quarters of Islam shares Hamas’s aim of forcing the people of the world to accept ‘the
Once in every generation the Labour party gets tired of losing elections and prepares for power by neutralising potential sources of opposition. Today’s Labour’s offensive is advancing on all fronts. Rachel Reeves nurses glasses of warm white wine through dozens of receptions for finance and business leaders. Keir Starmer withdraws the whip from Jeremy Corbyn
The well-lived life and foul murder of Vivian Silver encapsulate the hopelessness of Israel-Hamas war and the bad faith that drives the world’s reactions to it. You could see the bad faith on display in the hours after her death. It inspired a gruesome social media pile-on. Maybe it was just a mistake by an
It’s a little too easy to dismiss the huge Labour rebellion on the Israel-Hamas war last night as ‘virtue signalling’. No one can deny that politicians were striking poses. A party, not in government, tearing itself apart about a conflict that does not involve the UK, over policy recommendations which all the combatants will ignore,
There is no better example of modern pseudo-sophistication than the dismissal of the argument in the Labour party about a ceasefire in Gaza as self-indulgence. No debate in the UK will influence the Israeli government or Hamas, commentators say, and then sit back as if expecting to hear applause. Of course, it won’t. But the
It’s not often that Brits can say that the US is behind the UK. But in understanding the dynamic between the successors to the old socialist left and radical Islam, US thinkers have years of catching up to do. It is not as if American commentators are wrong or uninteresting, it is just that, unlike their
Visibly desperate Conservatives are counting on their opposition to the left’s cultural revolution to save them, if not from defeat, then at least from annihilation. The party’s deputy chair Lee Anderson forecasts that a ‘mix of culture wars and trans debate’ would be ‘at the heart’ of the party’s coming election campaign. You only need to listen
You might think the massacre of Jewish civilians will stop anti-Jewish hatred in Britain. Or, if that is too much to ask, you might think that the atrocities would at least merit a decent period of silence before normal service resumed. Not a bit of it. This morning, Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust
There are two dishonest conversations about wokeness, or identity politics if you prefer the less contentious term. The first from conservatives is wearily familiar. For some on the right, ‘woke’ is now a synonym for ‘anything I can’t abide’. Overuse has made the insult meaningless. On the left, the dishonesty lies in the denial that a new ideology
Remove the preconceptions that stop you seeing clearly, and it is hard to tell the difference between how the arts are treated in the UK versus a dictatorship. In Russia and China, the authoritarian state is the oppressive force. In the West, the state won’t arrest you for breaking taboos, and for that we must
The US government has warned British security officials that the ‘five eyes’ intelligence-sharing agreement may be at risk if the UK imperils the Good Friday Agreement by pulling out of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). I understand that this point has been made recently, and fairly clearly, in talks between the UK and
The hopeful life and wretched death of Claudia Gavrilovna Popova during a previous age of extremes should speak to us now. Popova lived in Siberia in the years before the Russian revolution. She was a liberal who opposed the Tsarist empire – then, as now, was the world’s great fortress of reactionary power. Popova was a wealthy landowner in Krasnoyarsk on the Yenisei River, who thought any enemy of the regime couldn’t be wholly bad. She gave
Labour has announced whether its sitting MPs will step down or fight again at the next election in nearly every single constituency. By a weird coincidence, it stays silent about the one constituency Labour party members and the wider public are most interested in: Jeremy Corbyn’s Islington North. Sir Keir Starmer withdrew the whip from
Labour’s leaders do not rate Rishi Sunak. I don’t mean by this that they think his policies range from the wrongheaded to the disastrous – we can take these opposition criticisms as a given. I mean that as professional politicians they look at the Prime Minister and see a rank amateur. ‘He’s rubbish,’ a member of
At the end of the second world war, George Orwell went to an event organised by PEN, a campaign dedicated to defending freedom of expression. He walked into a scene we encounter everywhere in 2022. The meeting was meant to celebrate the tercentenary of John Milton’s Areopagitica, one of the earliest and still one of the
Last night, Labour politicians wondered how to respond to the challenges the Chancellor was sending their way. Do you accept the Conservatives’ real-term spending cuts and tax rises? How would you revive the economy? The best answer came from a shadow minister who told me ‘We should just say “imagine how good this country could
The moorings that tie the rulers to the ruled are breaking in the UK. You can hear them snapping during the Prime Minister’s silences. On Sunday morning, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg asked Liz Truss a question any democratic leader should be able to answer. Truss and her Chancellor’s folly had sent yields on ten-year guilts
