Nick Cohen is the author of What's Left and You Can't Read This Book.
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Lord Denning was perhaps the most beloved judge of the 20th century. He even inspired a Lord Denning Appreciation Society. But I and many others found something sinister behind his charming Hampshire accent. We noticed that his professed concern for the victims of injustice never extended to the victims of police fit-ups. In 1980, he
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What freedoms we have in Britain have not come as a rule from revolutions and thunderous declarations of the rights of man. More often than not, our liberties have come because bloody-minded and obstinate men and women have squared their shoulders and decided to fight an arbitrary decision, when others would have surrendered. Paul Chambers
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I have worried about Hugh Grant’s understanding of power ever since he started bringing up baby. I first saw him reach for the innocent child at one of the party conferences, where he was on stage arguing for statutory control of the press. He had his stock reply ready when someone asked whether he wasn’t
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Earlier this year I noted a piece by Michael Moynihan in Foreign Policy. He looked at how the authors of the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet guide books were producing apologias for tyranny. I argued that the kind words for Assad’s Syria, Gaddafi’s Libya and the Khomeinist Iran, were a result of the capitalist leftism
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In the last few years lawyers have begun to gush about the ‘Sumption effect’. They were not thinking of Jonathan Sumption QC’s fine legal mind — which was of such a quality that the Supreme Court elevated him straight from the Bar to a seat on the highest court in the land. Nor were they
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This is a video of a speech to Oxford Brookes University on freedom and its enemies based on my book on censorship You Can’t Read This Book.
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The case of Adrian Smith, the Christian the Trafford Housing Trust demoted for politely expressing his opposition to gay marriage on Facebook, is one of the most disgraceful I have come across. Much will be written about the contempt for freedom of speech and conscience Mr Smith’s po-faced and prod-nosed employers showed. Mr Justice Briggs
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If you want to understand the mood of modern Britain, James Hawes’s novels of middle class fury are not a bad place to start. Hawes’s heroes are middle-aged men, whose dreams have collapsed. They want the nice, “normal” middle-class homes and secure jobs their parents received as a matter of course. But Britain is not
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‘Passion for freedom‘ is now holding its fourth exhibition at the Unit 24 Gallery just behind Tate Modern. The show is a visible and occasionally dazzling manifestation of an often submerged movement in western liberalism that regards the liberal-left mainstream with something close to disgust. They – we – find the indulgence of radical Islam
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A love for freedom of the press inspired Milton, Voltaire, Jefferson, Madison, Mill and Orwell. Ringing declarations of the right of citizens to read and write what they choose have run through constitutions and charters of liberties. Modern Britain being the way it is, however, the lofty rhetoric of the past has sunk to debates
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At the Spectator debate on the economic consequences of Mr Osborne last night, Andrew Neil repeated JK Galbraith’s line that ‘economic forecasters exist to make astrologers look good.’ The impressive Conservative MP Jesse Norman countered with ‘an economist is a man who knows 17 ways to make love to women – but no women’. Lord
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In my Observer column today, I talk about the scourging of Britain’s failed elite. To give readers an idea of how many institutions are in the dock, I quote an extract from Piers Morgan’s diaries from the summer of 2004. Because I have more space, I can give you the full ghastly detail here – what
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I hope that the entire editorial staffs of the Times, Sunday Times, Sun, Mail, Mail on Sunday, Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph (oh and the Express newspapers if they are still around) along with Alastair Campbell, the Parliamentary Conservative Party and Rupert Murdoch are going to be gracious enough to praise the BBC today. How many
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Corn dealers were the bankers of the early 19th century. In the popular imagination, they were monsters who threatened the poor with starvation by inflating their prices to satiate their greed. The abused gentlemen, naturally, hated the opprobrium, while the authorities wondered whether agitators would spark food riots or revolution. When he considered what limits
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Another day and another unasked for letter asking me to live online. This time it is from my bank, NatWest – and yes, yes, thank you I know that by not moving my account to a reputable bank I am endorsing the pocket-lining incompetents who helped bring Britain to its knees, but as gleeful financiers
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A few years ago, I wrote a review of Eric Hobsbawm’s last collection of essays and noted ‘Hobsbawm is now 94, and although I have no wish to usher the old boy from the room, I can see his obituaries now. Conservative and liberal writers will say that his loyalty to totalitarianism disfigured his writing,
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Mitt Romney has been caught saying what he really thinks – or in modern journalistic jargon has committed a ‘gaffe’. Serious American commentators believe that his election challenge is all but over after he declared, that 47 per cent of the electorate will vote for Obama no matter what because they were ‘dependent upon government’.
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Until the launch party for Salman Rushdie’s autobiography, the best story I’d heard about the forced marriage of literary London and the Special Branch came from the night of the 1992 general election. Melvyn Bragg was hosting a party to watch the results. The guests were overwhelmingly left-leaning writers and intellectuals, and had gathered to
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Ever since the millennium, I have wondered how long the utopian faith in the emancipatory potential of the web will last. Of course, we know the new technologies give the citizen new powers to communicate and connect. We hear this praised so loudly and so often, how could we not know? But what benefits the
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There is an over genteel style in English argument which acts like a sedative. Just when you think that a proper debate is getting going, one of the participants will say, ‘I am not sure that we’re really disagreeing.’ I am afraid I must use this tired line, if only for a moment. Matthew Teller
