Nick Cohen is the author of What's Left and You Can't Read This Book.
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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
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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
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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,
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For the record, I did not accuse Rahman of being a ‘bully,’ as he tells Spectator readers. I accused the Mayor of Tower Hamlets of being ‘sly’ and ‘unappetising’. His letter to the Spectator bears me out, I think. As does his ludicrous allegation that Rob Marchant and other Labour Party activists were threatening to
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Another day, another story of the forces of order hounding an innocent citizen for making innocuous remarks on Twitter. This week’s target was Rob Marchant, a centrist Labour supporter, who was chatting online with a few comrades. They all opposed Lutfur Rahman, the sly and to my mind thoroughly unappetising mayor of Tower Hamlets. Labour
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If David Cameron had any sense, he would stand up in the Commons and say “I am withdrawing the Royal Charter. The law officers have assured me that Lord Justice Leveson, though a fine judge in many respects, did not understand the Human Rights Act. He failed to see that the courts would almost certainly
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If David Cameron had any sense, he would stand up in the Commons and say “I am withdrawing the Royal Charter. The law officers have assured me that Lord Justice Leveson, though a fine judge in many respects, did not understand the Human Rights Act. He failed to see that the courts would almost
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Since the early 1990s, hundreds of millions of words have been produced about the Web. Enthusiasts have told us that it is the greatest communications revolution since Guttenberg invented movable type, and they are probably right. Utopian fantasists have imagined that cyberspace would be beyond the reach of governments – those ‘weary giants of flesh
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Before the crash of 2007, as aid agencies were asking the governments of what we once called ‘the rich world’ to wipe out poor countries’ debts, Christopher Hitchens received a begging letter from his publishers. Verso, if you have never come across it, boasts that it is ‘the largest independent, radical publishing house in the
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In a long piece in the last issue of the Sunday Times (£) Isabel Oakeshott, its political editor, wrote of her relationship with Vicky Pryce. She sobbed and sighed. She was full of sympathy. You can almost hear the tears pitter-patter on her keyboard as she describes how Pryce had become a ‘broken woman’. The reader
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A scandal broke in the Socialist Workers Party a few weeks ago after a woman member claimed a Trotskyist tribune of the working class had taken time off from promoting world revolution to rape her. The SWP did not behave as any decent person would and advise the woman to contact the police. In its
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Part 1 “Russian Justice” A judge at Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court stopped the trial of Sergei Magnitsky (above) yesterday – but not because the defendant was dead. Magnitsky’s demise was of no concern to the judge. It did not bother him in the slightest. The court merely postponed proceedings until 4 March when the world
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Last year I wrote an unpatriotic column for the Observer. I said that while American literary and journalistic frauds tended to be simple men, who lied and plagiarised to boast their reputations and earnings, British frauds were as a rule darker and nastier. The first piece of evidence was Johann Hari – whose exposure caused
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I went to the Toynbee Hall, the meeting place for the radical East End, this week to listen to a debate many radicals would rather not hear. British Asian feminists and their supporters had gathered to launch the Centre for Secular Space an organisation whose work I would say is close to essential. It is
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My guard goes up when people in power say that they believe in investigative journalism. Everybody says they do, of course. Then everyone says they have a sense of humour, most especially when they don’t. Just as I doubt the merriment of someone who needs to announce, ‘I enjoy a joke as much as the
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A friend of mine who has worked in the City all his life, and is by no means a leftist, can still explode with rage at the nom-doms and corporations, who expect to stay in Britain without paying tax. When their representatives say they will leave if the government taxes them, he replies “Fine. If you
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In the Jewish joke a matchmaker calls on a poor tailor living in a Tsarist shtetl in the middle of nowhere. He tells the old guy that he wants to arrange the marriage of his middle daughter to the heir to the Rothschild fortune, no less. The tailor isn’t impressed. He cannot marry off his
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I gave a talk to the Hornsey and Wood Green Labour Party last night. If you don’t know the area, the constituency covers Highgate, Muswell Hill and Crouch End: leafy north London villages, where the metropolitan middle class go, if not to die, then at least to produce babies. There are pockets of high unemployment
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In this morning’s Observer I write about the collapse of the old notions of honour and fair play in sport, banking, politics, journalism, the law and much else. As I acknowledge right away, hard evidence is hard to find. Football’s rules change: what was a manly tackle in the 1960s is a foul today. Yesterday’s
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Whenever I give lectures on my book on censorship – Whaddya mean you haven’t read it? Buy it here at a recession-beating price – I discuss the great issues of the wealthy to silence critics, the conflict between religion and freedom of thought and the determination of dictators to persecute dissenters. These themes have animated
