Nick Cohen is the author of What's Left and You Can't Read This Book.
To be a racist in Britain, you do not need to cover yourself in tattoos and join a neo-Nazi party. You can wear well-made shirts, open at the neck, appreciate fine wines and vote Left at election time. Odd though it may seem to older readers, the Crown Prosecution Service now regards itself as a
For almost a decade now, what social conservatives say and the evidence in front of our eyes has been diverging with remarkable speed. According to the received wisdom, the permissive revolution of the 1960s led to family breakdown, which in turn led to today’s terrifying crime rates. The small snag with the argument is that
The guards would not let me walk round the Olympic park. ‘We’re in lockdown because of a security alert,’ one explained. The rain fell. The overbearing policing intimidated. ‘London is going to host the Paralympics and the paramilitary Olympics,’ I muttered with unpatriotic grumpiness, as I retreated to the bright lights and piped music of
In my Observer column today I say that a judicial review into the banking scandal would have achieved little unless the judge could have persuaded the politicians to change the law. As if on cue, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls popped up to demonstrate that they have no desire to change banking law in any
The fundamental division in modern politics is between corporatists and believers in free markets. So what, you might say, that has been a fundamental division for quite a while. This time it is different, however. As a general rule, the more right wing a politician or commentator is seen to be, the more likely he
The issues raised by the Twitter Joke case have been gone over so thoroughly that, as is so often in public debate, only the obvious question remains undiscussed and unanswered: whatever happened to the right to free speech? The Human Rights Act guarantees it. Article 10 states: ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of expression.
At the time of the student protests, I laid out in the Observer the demographic facts that push unscrupulous politicians into picking on the young. Their political vulnerability is the best explanation for the regularity with which the coalition assaults their interests, I said. In democracies, politicians worry about those who vote and a majority
Satirists are like pop stars in two respects. They earn extraordinary amounts of money, and the public assumes that they are left wing. You do not need to be a Marxist to suspect that the former will work against the latter. Investments in a hedge fund have a habit of dominating your mind however many
Labour has only ever won a general election from the autumn of 1974 onwards when its leader has been called &”Tony Blair”. Four other leaders tried, but they were not called &”Tony Blair,” and Labour paid the price. I find it hard to credit the left’s failure myself sometimes, and, equally, find it easy to
One of my objections to monarchy is that it is a vulgar institution that encourages verbosity, prurience, sycophancy and banality. I was not therefore surprised that the BBC’s jubilee coverage was vulgar, verbose, prurient, sycophantic and banal. Others were, however, and the papers are full of condemnations of the corporation. You should always remember that
In my Observer column on Sunday I mentioned in passing that in a crisis, elites have to be able to show that they are sharing the plight of the masses. Asking for ‘equality of suffering’ is too much, you will never have that, but there has to be a sense that — to coin a
Our beliefs are like our families. Some we live with every day. Others are distant relations we rarely see but still think of as part of our clan in a warm, vague way. On the odd occasions they thought about it, leftists and more conservatives than readers of the Spectator may expect have seen the
A few days ago, I attended the Oslo Freedom Forum, where dissidents and human rights campaigners gather to exchange ideas. I feared the mood was a little too optimistic, and remembered that the first duty of the journalist was to be the bearer of bad tidings. Here’s what I said:
I fell in with bad company while I was on a story in Oslo last week: American conservative journalists. I am glad to say confirmed the public’s stereotype of reporters by enjoying their drink. (They make it their first task after landing in a new city to find the best bar, an example that should
In Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day, Milne, an idealistic journalist, describes the limitations of newspapers, and then gives the best argument for press freedom I know of. ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ he says to Ruth, the bored wife of a mining tycoon. ‘I know it better than you — the celebration of inanity,
Last year I wrote that the Leveson inquiry would suit Jeremy Hunt rather well. He had appointed Lord Justice Leveson, a judge with little previous experience of media law to sit alongside a remarkably undistinguished panel of assessors. They would inflict more blows on the battered cause of freedom of speech, I thought. But they
This morning’s editorial in Israel’s left-wing Haaretz newspaper noted a double standard that was also a bad joke. Israel’s Interior Minister’s had declared, ‘If Gunter Grass wants to continue to distribute his false and distorted works, I suggest he do so from Iran, where he’ll find an appreciative audience.’ The minister could not detect the
Writing with the optimism of a high-Victorian liberal, John Stuart Mill said that the only legitimate restriction on freedom of speech was to stop the direct incitement to a crime. He picked the example of corn dealers. The 19th century poor hated them. They made inflammatory accusations that the dealers were enriching themselves by keeping
When I spoke to the tax justice campaigner Richard Murphy about Ken Livingstone’s tax avoidance, he said that the practice of individuals pretending that they were companies caused ‘a massive leakage of tax revenue. They have all the tax advantages of a company without the obligation to tell the world what they are doing with
At the weekend, I was honoured to award the Secularist of the Year prize to Peter Tatchell on behalf of the National Secular Society. From the stage, I looked across the restaurant where the celebratory lunch was held and saw only intelligent, polite people (if by that stage of the proceedings, intelligent, polite and slightly
