Nick Cohen is the author of What's Left and You Can't Read This Book.
I worry that Coffee House sometimes fails to enrage readers sufficiently, so let me run a scenario past you, suggested to me by Rafael Behr, the Observer’s brilliant leader writer. The AV referendum is going to be the oddest vote. Turnout will be low, but how low will depend on where you live. Scotland, Northern
For as long as I can remember Billy Bragg has been arguing for tactical voting. He lives in some splendour in Dorset, and wants to drive the Tories out of the county by any means necessary. In 2005, although he was a Labour supporter, and on many issues was well to Left of Labour, he
Writing in today’s Guardian about the weekend protests, my colleague Jackie Ashley makes a half-true argument. ‘Miliband [cannot] be blamed for the embarrassing juxtaposition of his words at the Hyde Park rally and the actions of a group of anarchists in Oxford Street as they attacked the police. The Labour leader is no more responsible
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMnAmRa4NYw If we are going to avoid a clash of civilisations, we are going to need many more like the Pakistani actress Veena Malik. Watch her take on a mullah, who is trying to accuse her of immoral behaviour. This is no small accusation in Pakistan where Islamist death squads and their collaborators in the
I am writing a book about threats to freedom of speech – real threats that is – and wonder if I should include a chapter on political correctness. I find it a hard question. In many ways, political correctness has improved British manners. That people no longer screech about the niggers and the pakis and
A few weeks ago, the Prime Minister promised a muscular liberalism that would take on the Islamist extremist groups Jack Straw, Ken Livingstone, John Denham and other frightened or simply ugly and unprincipled Labour politicians had funded. “Let’s properly judge these organisations: Do they believe in universal human rights – including for women and people
Writing yesterday my esteemed colleague James Forsyth said that for want of a better alternative Jeremy Hunt was the Tory Party’s coming man. I hate disagree with James, but I would put more money on Colonel Gaddafi making it through the next 12 months than the Conservatives’ “rising star”. Every newspaper group with the exception
The London School of Economics once had a global reputation. The Libyan revolution wiped it away as easily as if it was mist on a window. I cannot find precedent for the collapse in liberal and academic standards Howard Davies, the LSE’s director, presided over. The Cambridge spies met at Cambridge University, as their
I’ve a piece in Standpoint about The Killing, one of the most interesting dramas on television. It’s not British, alas, and provides another reason for the controllers of British television to stop patting themselves on the back and saying “we make the best television in the world”. But nor, like so much of the best
Peter Mandelson’s publishers have sent me extracts from the updated paperback edition of his memoirs, The Third Man, which is out on 3 March. Here are his thoughts on Ed Miliband’s victory over David. ‘It was a photo finish [and] I felt terrible for David. I felt even more worried for the party. This was
I don’t understand you, really I don’t. The immediate cause of my bewilderment was a piece on this site, yesterday by Matthew Hancock MP, attacking Ed Balls. In normal circumstances, I would have offered to hold his coat, but Hancock wrote: ‘Balls takes positions he knows not to be true, like the ridiculous claim that
I once vowed never again to mock celebrities who endorse political campaigns as if they were advertising two-for-the-price-of-one offers in supermarkets. But today’s announcement that the Yes to AV campaign has recruited Helena Bonham Carter and Colin Firth is testing my resolve. It is not that I believe that celebrities should keep away from politics.
The fallout from Labour’s morally and tactically disastrous decision to attack David Cameron’s defence of liberal values continues. Now it is Joan Smith’s turn to take a kick. She is one of the few true feminists left in Britain, and proves it by her willingness to say without equivocation that if white-skinned women in Britain
Here is a dispatch from the north-east by Andrew Hankinson, one of the best feature writers around, who wrote a superb piece on the effects of the crash of 2008 on the young. It sums up one of my worries about Labour’s awful response to David Cameron’s speech on the need to revive liberal values.
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” declared Dr Johnson. Boswell did not like the maxim and explained it away as an example of Johnson’s lazy nature. “Numerous instances to refute this will occur to all who are versed in the history of literature,” he puffed. If they were numerous in the
Writing behind the paywall in today’s Times, Aaron Porter, the president of the National Union of Students, says: “In Manchester on Saturday the National Union of Students organised what was the latest in a series of protests against government plans that are allowing the burden of the deficit reduction to fall on young people. We
LP Hartley could not have been more wrong. The past is not a foreign country to which we can never return. It fills the minds of the living and stops us seeing the present clearly. My Observer colleague Andrew Rawnsley tells our nervous readers this morning that David Cameron and George Osborne have no Plan
After expressing some doubt yesterday that Andy Gray was as wicked or the journalists denouncing him were as virtuous as the media were claiming, I received the following email from a British football correspondent based in Europe. ‘Hi Nick, Just wanted to say spot on with the Spectator blog on Andy Gray and the media.
One of the few pieces of writing that made me emit an admiring whistle last year, was by the Economist’s political correspondent Bagehot. He argued that Britain did not have the far-left and right political parties of Europe because the British media provided an outlet for hatreds their respectable European counterparts ignored. ‘To pick a
At the start of the phone hacking scandal, I was sceptical that News International’s pursuers would get far. There is an omerta on Fleet Street. Reporters do not blab about their employers because they know they will lose their jobs and guess, probably correctly, that no other paper will hire them once they have a
