Nick Cohen is the author of What's Left and You Can't Read This Book.
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
Can actors at the National Theatre quote Christopher Hitchens’ destruction of Shirley Williams for her failure to defend freedom of speech against suicide murderers on Question Time, while all the time contorting themselves in athletic dance moves? My somewhat surprising answer is ‘yes they can’. The DV8 dance company’s Can We Talk About This?
I’d rather they didn’t. But perhaps a campaign of clerical terror would make the BBC ‘respect’ Christianity. According to the Telegraph, the director general of the BBC said it handles Islam with far more sensitivity than Christianity because: ‘The point is that for a Muslim, a depiction, particularly a comic or demeaning depiction, of the
On 1 March, the Old Vic theatre in London is hosting the première of Europe’s Last Dictator — a film documenting torture and state-sponsored murder and kidnap in Aleksandr Lukashenko’s Belarus. I don’t know if it looks at the brilliantly subversive Belarus Free Theatre, which has been at the forefront of the dissident movement, but
If you want to hear a BBC discussion going hopelessly wrong, listen to the ‘debate’ between the Bishop of Lichfield, Jonathan Gledhill and Alan Beith on the Today programme this morning. Radio 4 meant it to be about the established church, and set the Anglican bishop against the Methodist Beith. But a freemasonry of the
As the cops round up journalists, Trevor Kavanagh’s protest in the Sun has aroused amazement and some scorn. ‘Witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on Press freedom’ — ran the headline, and the gist of the complaint among my friends was that it was a self-pitying and self-aggrandising piece of work. Whatever you think
Human rights campaigners need to follow a self-denying ordinance if they are not to become enemies of the values they espouse. Like a civil servant or judge, they must leave their passions at the office door, and oppose the oppressive, whoever they are and whatever the consequences. It is easy for me to say that,
Ed Miliband is a geek, a failure and a loser. All the press says so, so it must be true. Yet the apparent no-hoper retains the ability of the boy who confronted the naked emperor to change the terms of debate. Ever since Mrs Thatcher, the working assumption of the British elite has been that
My You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom is out this week. As the title says, it’s about freedom of speech, a subject that has come to mean more and more to me as I have watched religious zealots intimidate liberals into silence, and the libel laws and omerta of City
Joan Smith has a piece in the Independent about religious censorship of open debate in Britain, a supposedly free country. It is well written and argued, as Smith’s writing invariably is, but what distinguishes it is that it is the only defence of our liberties in the Sunday papers. Consider the events of the past
The internet can promote freedom and democracy – it’s a shame it also facilitates mob rule and witch-hunts Even those who are wary of the utopianism the net has generated tend to take it for granted that the new communications technologies have saved us from the need to worry about censorship. Sceptics fear that the
Ed Miliband is in the happiest position he has been for months. Both left and right are attacking him for stating the obvious. The unions or at least their leaders hate him for accepting effective public sector pay cuts. Unions are meant to represent their members, but they are making a debased utilitarian calculation in
I have a review of Pity the Billionaire by Thomas Frank, one of the few left-wing writers I believe conservatives can read with pleasure. He is old fashioned, so old-fashioned indeed that most American leftists would not call him left-wing. He has no time for the culture wars, which still stir the passions of so many on
The Economist has a rather good, rather smug and – in the end – entirely self-deluding leader about the predicament of the American right this week. It is good because the Economist sets out with neatness and style what policies a Republican candidates must sign up to if he or she is to make it
He came to talk to me about British Euroscepticism, and I did my best to explain. I said it was far stronger in England than Scotland for nationalist reasons, and that although Labour MPs were, in general, mildly Eurosceptic — Brown would not take us into the Euro, for instance — Euroscepticism was a passion
Another day at the Telegraph and another attack on Laurie Penny, this time for writing a short piece describing how she had received excellent treatment at a New York hospital. While she was on her sickbed, she reflected that in the States, ‘Those who are wealthy enough to afford decent healthcare have their needs met
The Leveson Inquiry has all the makings of an establishment disaster. In saying that, I am not defending the behaviour of the tabloids. I find it contemptible that no story in the ‘hackgate’ scandal can be justified on public interest grounds. Not once did James and Rupert Murdoch hirelings break the law to expose an
Over at the Leveson inquiry a smug Lord Patten – there is no other kind — said the BBC could not possibly be biased because left wingers attack it on some occasions and right wingers attack it on others. The BBC holds the ring, he implied. Uncontaminated by the ideologies of extremists, and possessing indeed
A few months ago a German magazine phoned me to talk about Scotland leaving the UK. The reporter had bought the SNP line that Scottish independence was a practical proposition, and that Scotland could survive and indeed flourish as an independent state in the Eurozone. But, I told her, the Royal Bank of Scotland and
I should declare an interest and say that I have always admired Time Magazine. It has great journalists. It has even commissioned your humble correspondent and allowed him to join its exalted company of writers – and more to the point paid your humble correspondent ready money for the privilege. In normal circumstances I would
