Nick Cohen is the author of What's Left and You Can't Read This Book.
I was shocked this morning to log on to Twitter and learn that Norman Geras had died. I can think of few political writers, who have influenced me more comprehensively. Whenever I faced a difficult moral question, I would at some point think ‘ah, what is Norm saying about this,’ go to his blog and
Britain’s journalists ought to be asking themselves an unfamiliar question: what is the point of my life? If they have any knowledge of history, they ought to know that they are the custodians of a tradition of press freedom, which began with John Milton and the “Independents” who opposed both Charles I and the Presbyterian
As displays of duplicity go, Mehdi Hasan’s performance on the BBC discussion show Question Time seemed hard to beat. Hasan delighted leftists by hounding the Daily Mail. Who really “hated Britain”? he asked. Not Ed Miliband’s father, as the Mail had claimed, but the “immigrant-bashing, women-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting Daily Mail.” How the audience clapped
Last week I wrote in the Observer about Qatar’s treatment of the hundreds of thousands of migrant labourers, who will build the stadiums and hotels for the 2022 World Cup. They were dying at a rate of one day. They had to cope with inhuman conditions and labour laws that treated them as serfs by giving
That wrenching sound you can hear is the noise of the Tory columnists slamming their gears into reverse. Until yesterday, they had assured their readers that Ed Miliband was a useless, limp-wristed bleeding heart without the machismo to hack it as prime minister. He was weak. He was hopeless. He was toast. But that was
The Chippenham Labour Party has decided that its candidate to contest the 2015 general election will be one Andy Newman. As the anti-totalitarian blogs Howie’s Corner and Harry’s Place have already argued he is almost certain to be the worst politician to stand for a mainstream party. An innocent observer, who believes the British Left’s
In the Spectator last week, I described how Richard Dawkins had become a space-filler for empty-headed pundits with no idea what else to write about in these slow summer days. The standard form was to upbraid him for being an Islamophobe because of a series of remarks he had tweeted about Islam in general and the
It’s August, and you are a journalist stuck in the office without an idea in your head. What to write? What to do? Your empty mind brings you nothing but torment, until a thought strikes you, ‘I know, I’ll do Richard Dawkins.’ Dawkins is the sluggish pundit’s dream. It does not matter which paper you
Always remember mornings like these, the next time police officers and politicians demand more powers to protect us from terrorism. They always sound so reasonable and so concerned for our welfare when they do. For who wants to be blown apart? But the state said its new powers to intercept communications would be used against terrorists.
Mr Justice Tugendhat delivered a ferocious verdict last week. Undercover reporters from the Sunday Times claimed they had found Peter Cruddas, co-Treasurer of the Conservative Party, offering influence in return for wodges of cash. With damning language, the judge found against the paper, leaving it with costs and damages of around £700,000. I don’t want
The most sweeping censorship is always the most objectionable. In principle, however, there is nothing wrong with David Cameron’s sweeping proposal that the customers of internet service providers must prove that they are 18 or over before they can watch online pornography. The rule for liberal democracies is (or ought to be) that consenting adults
If you run, you look like a coward. It may be that you have good reason to be cowardly. It may be that anyone else in your position would run as far and fast as you do. There is nothing wrong with taking the cowardly course, unless like Edward Snowden, you claim to be engaged
Compare a democracy to a dictatorship and world-weary chuckles follow. The last thing a citizen can do in true tyrannies is call them tyrannies. He or she has to pretend that the glorious socialist motherland or virtuous Islamic republic is not only as free as democracies but has a level of freedom that those who
Have you heard? Do you know? Are you, as they say, ‘in the loop’? When the Mail on Sunday said a ‘sensational affair’ between ‘high profile figures’ close to Cameron had ‘rocked’ No. 10, did you have the faintest idea what it was talking about? I did, but then I’m a journalist. Friends in the
They’re running Julie Bailey out of town. The poison pen letters, foul-mouthed phone calls, slashed tyres, shit through the letterbox, boycott of her cafe and attacks on her mother’s grave have become too much. Stafford’s upstanding citizens, or a good number of them, want her gone. So she is leaving her home and business, and
A State of Fear, Joseph Clyde’s new thriller*, stands out for many reasons. Thrillers only work if they are thrilling, and Clyde’s description of the search for the terrorist who planted a dirty bomb in central London keeps the reader fascinated. The best thrillers are more than just page-turners, however, and Clyde presents a convincing
When I heard that Niall Ferguson had said that JM Keynes advocated reckless economic policies because he was gay and childless, and hence had no concern for the future, I wrote: ‘If true, this represents Ferguson’s degeneration from historian to shock jock’. The reports were true, but I was wrong. There has been no degeneration.
I don’t normally campaign. I’m not a joiner or a natural committee man. But the state of free speech in England pushed me into despair, and three years ago I started to do what little I could for the campaign for libel reform. Britain was not a country where the natives could debate their grievances
Late on Friday my editor at the Observer called and asked me to dash off a few words on what was wrong with the Mail and some Conservative MPs demanding that the BBC ban ‘Ding, dong the witch is dead’, a Munchkin chorus, from The Wizard of Oz. I was stuck on a train to
Here is something those who rely on political commentators will not have expected to see. The latest poll from TNS BMRB has the Tories down to just a quarter of the vote: CON 25% (-2), LAB 40% (+3), LD 10% (nc), UKIP 14% (-3). The Opinium/Observer online poll had LAB 38, CON 28, UKIP 17,
