Nick Cohen is the author of What's Left and You Can't Read This Book.
Ever since Margaret Thatcher U-turned in the dying days of her premiership, there has been a kind of agreement between Left and Right on what the European Union is. Most Conservatives followed the late-vintage Thatcher. They stopped regarding the EU as a free market that British business must be a part of, and started to
It is very easy to make David Cameron and the Scottish National Party look ridiculous. But as every soldier and journalist knows, just because a target is easy doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hit it. The attempt by supposedly respectable politicians to use trickery and outright lies to rebrand Islamic State as a state that has
On the radio this morning, a campaigner from the Child Poverty Action Group had an ’emperor’s new clothes’ moment. Why not, she said, treat the young like the old. If the Tories insisted on having a ‘triple lock’ on pension benefits for the elderly, which guaranteed that the state pension must increase every year by
The most revealing moment in the Labour debate last night came when a questioner asked ‘what qualities do you share with Nicola Sturgeon that could make you as successful as a party leader?’ The unctuous manner in which the question was delivered suggested that being an English Sturgeon was a fine thing to be. No
You might think that Jews, faced with a relentless campaign to ban their culture, would think once, twice, a hundred times, about instituting bans themselves. After they had thought about it, they would decide that, no, absolutely not, prudence as much as principle directs that they of all people must insist that art should be
No line has been repeated more often during the Fifa scandal than the instruction that football should follow the example of the International Olympic Committee. In 1998, the received wisdom goes, artful Mormons offered all kinds of bribes in cash and kind to committee members. An Olympic official revealed their plan to buy the right
It is not only Russian oligarchs and multinational corporations who run to the ‘capitalist courts’ — as we used to call them on the left. Have an argument with Len McCluskey and you find that the leader of Unite is prepared to spend his money, or more likely his members’ hard-earned dues, on hiring the
Imagine you are a Labour MP or a trade union official surveying Britain this week. The following points will strike you: Labour has just lost an election it could have won, in part because Unite helped impose a useless leader on it in Ed Miliband and an equally incoherent programme, which failed to convince millions
‘Let me tell you about the very rich,’ said F. Scott Fitzgerald. ‘They are different from you and me.’ Indeed they are. They can afford to live in London. Just how different became clear when The Spear’s 500 — ‘the essential guide to the top private client advisers’ — landed at the office. (We assume Spear’s
I suppose it is asking too much of a writer called Francine Prose that she write prose anyone would want to read. But on the principle you can only track down terrible ideas by wading through terrible writing you have to endure Prose’s prose. She attempted to deploy her prosaic talent to explain why PEN, an
I spoke at a Guardian debate on free speech before an audience of students at King’s College London last night. I’ve argued with racists and Putinists in my time and – to put it as mildly as I can – these little bastions of academia were up there with them in their contempt for basic
One of the first tasks of a party in our time of fragmented politics is to stop their opponents making alliances. As things stand, the Tories can form a coalition with Ukip (and it tells you all you need to know about David Cameron that he would even consider such a possibility) the Democratic Unionists
One of the many delusions of the Right is the myth of conservative robustness. Conservatives don’t play the victim card, they say. They tell it like it is, and don’t care who knows it. They stand on their own two feet, and take it on the chin. They have guts and backbone too. It’s easy
If the cries of ‘Je suis Charlie’ were sincere, the western world would be convulsed with worry and anger about the Wallström affair. It has all the ingredients for a clash-of-civilisations confrontation. A few weeks ago Margot Wallström, the Swedish foreign minister, denounced the subjugation of women in Saudi Arabia. As the theocratic kingdom prevents
Someone once said (it may have been me) that while the left looks for traitors the right looks for converts. Only in Britain’s centre ground, however, are converts treated as traitors. Maajid Nawaz is one of the most interesting public figures I know. As a young man growing up on the Essex coast, he received
Tell Mama is Britain’s most prominent opponent of anti-Muslim prejudice. It monitors everything from criminal assaults to everyday abuse. The far right loathes it, and the Conservative press sells the grotesque pretence that the group exaggerates prejudice to divert attention from the horror of Islamist violence. But attacks from the right only wound. Tell Mama’s
In a cheeringly Dickensian fashion, the names of our supposed experts on grammar imply they want to bind writers (Lynne Truss); send them awry (Kingsley Amis); besmirch their prose (H.W. Fowler); deafen them with moos (Simon Heffer); or snort at their legitimate constructions (John Humphrys). At first glance, Oliver Kamm appears happy to keep them
Islamic State allows its adherents to be both cultists and psychopaths: an L. Ron Hubbard and a Fred West rolled into one. The reasons why young men want to travel across the world to fight its wars and lend a hand to the murder of its victims ought to be brutally and boringly obvious. Psychopaths
A few days ago Imtiaz, a solar engineer; Aliya, a campaigner for secular education; Sohail, a gay Somali in his twenties; and Sara, a bright student, went to Queen Mary University of London in the East End and made an astonishingly brave stand. Astonishing because they volunteered to step forward to the front line after the
The great historian of the Soviet Union Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics reads: ‘The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.’ I have tested Conquest’s law on every bureaucracy I have covered, and it has always held up:
