Nick Cohen is the author of What's Left and You Can't Read This Book.
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In 2008, Maggie Darling, wife of the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, invited journalists to a briefing at 11 Downing Street on the collapse of the global financial system. An appropriately Chekhovian scene awaited us when we reached the first-floor drawing room. Outside the wind was blowing a gale, lashing leaves and branches onto the
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The enormous cost of British libel law is a threat to national security. For the sake of enriching London barristers, Keir Starmer is preserving an unreformed and rapaciously expensive legal system that is wide open to abuse by oligarchs and dictatorships. And he knows it. When he was a young barrister in the 1990s,Starmer represented
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When an Islamist attack on a synagogue in my home city of Manchester left two dead, I responded by writing about the failure of some parts of the pro-Palestine movement to distance themselves from Jew hate. I switched on my phone and found that my X feed had gone haywire It was a leftish argument,
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If they were from any other minority, no one on the left would have the slightest trouble denouncing the deaths of 53-year-old Adrian Daulby and 66-year-old Melvin Cravitz as the result of a lethal racist attack. A terrorist with the resonant name of Jihad Al-Shamie – talk about nominative determinism – went for them because they
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There is a unique, and bitter, flavour to the corruption of the men of the 1990s. Peter Mandelson – who was yesterday sacked as UK ambassador to Washington – Tony Blair, and the former German and US leaders Gerhard Schroeder and Bill Clinton came from the left, and offered a hard but plausible message to their
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From all over the UK I am picking up stories of employees – or more often the activists who claim to represent them – cosplaying as revolutionaries. Strikers go for progressive business owners rather than the standard capitalist bogeymen, because they are softer targets. They force them to close and then attempt to take control
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The mood of Keir Starmer’s foreign policy advisers was funereal as they contemplated the return of Donald Trump. The weeks since Trump’s inauguration have shown that the government doesn’t know what to do with an American president who is hostile, capricious and, let’s face it, more than a little mad, except humour him as one
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The richest man in the world and, as of 20 January, the most powerful man in the world will be uniting to attack the UK. The outstanding question is: what will the British right do about it? I understand why some conservatives may be tempted to go along with their country’s enemies. I can see
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Nigel Farage ought to terrify the Tories. He has terrified them many times over the past decades. But until now, he hasn’t had the force of the US president, the richest man in the world, and the global online right behind him. As the struggle to become the dominant voice on the British right intensifies,
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A few days ago, in the suburban surroundings of the Phoenix cinema in Finchley, north London, a major film by a great director that positively hums with contemporary relevance received its first, and by the looks of it, only showing in the English-speaking world. Like so many examples of authoritarianism, the censorship is confined to the
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Those of us who voted Labour with pleasure on 4 July could never have imagined the new government’s first 100 days. We thought that the grown-ups would take charge after the chaos of the Tory years. Labour would be the adults in the room, as the cliché goes: sensible, professional people like Sir Keir Starmer,
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The Conservatives are going down to one of their worst defeats ever. The opposition has come from nowhere to absolutely destroy them. It ought to be one of those rare moments in British history when the centre-left can celebrate crushing a Tory party, that drives us to despair and rage in equal measure. Speaking at
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For months US Democrats have been wondering why voters were not supporting Joe Biden. He has been a good president, and enacted many worthy reforms. Donald Trump, by contrast, is clearly a dictator in the making. The idea that American voters have elderly relatives and (love them though they do), know that an 81-year-old cannot take
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There is a leftist case against woke ideology. It’s rare to hear it because it flies against many preconceptions and fears. Liberals and leftists are wary for two reasons. Conservatives love to highlight the first: the fear of being cancelled. And just because conservatives love to highlight it, does not mean it is not true. I
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Conventional Conservative wisdom once warned about the dangers of appeasement. Rudyard Kipling, the great poet of imperialism, may be the most cancelled figure in British literature, but I imagine even leftists can see how his lines in Danegeld apply to the Tory party’s appeasement of Nigel Farage: ‘And that is called paying the Dane-geld; But we’ve proved
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It’s Friday 5 July 2024. The electorate has proved the pollsters right, and Labour has returned to power with a staggering majority to match or even surpass the landslide victories of 1945 and 1997. Will the new Labour MPs have the courage to stand up Sir Keir Starmer and his team when they believe that
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Why can’t Jeremy Corbyn be a left-wing Farage? Why can’t he threaten Labour as Ukip and its successor parties threatened and continue to threaten the Tories? There is a gap in the market for a party to the left of Labour, and Corbyn seems just the man to fill it. Those of us who intensely disliked
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Blood is central to the myths British people tell themselves. One of the many consequences of the contaminated blood scandal is that it may blow those myths apart. For if this scandal can make us face the reality of how badly we are governed, and indeed how selfishly we govern ourselves, then some good may
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One of the aims of progressives in higher education ought to be to use their privileged position to spread knowledge to their fellow citizens. In the all but forgotten world of the original socialist movement, radicals aimed in the words of the Workers Educational Association (founded 1903) to bring ‘education within reach of everyone who needs
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Labour people are used to defeat. Before every election they wonder if the Tories will defy expectations. Real votes are not the same as opinion polls, after all, they say. And yet ever since Boris Johnson broke his own lockdown rules, disastrous performances for the Tories in opinion polls have been replicated by disastrous results in
