Nick Cohen is the author of What's Left and You Can't Read This Book.
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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.
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“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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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I’ve a piece in the Jewish Chronicle about how there was a great story in Tunisia that no one reported. As I say, ‘Every morning I read The Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Financial Times and the Independent. I stay with the Today programme until Radio 4 drives me away by insulting my intelligence
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I never thought I would write this but Sarah Palin had a point when she said that she was a victim of a “blood libel”. The Left has gone wild and criticised her for implying she was on the receiving end of murderous anti-Semitism – the blood libel is the allegation that Jews delighted in murdering
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The Lib Dems’ troubles are a result not only of coalition and foolish promises, but of a resurgence of the old left-right division In 1935, George Dangerfield published The Strange Death of Liberal England, one of those rare histories that survive long after the author’s death. The elegance and vigour of his description of Edwardian
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In my Observer column today, I talk about the growing repression in Hungary and my dislike of the terms “far right” and “far left”. Look for divergences between them and all you find are distinctions without differences. Dictatorial movements in Europe are merging; apparent opposites are turning out to be the same. The rather brave
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Over on Coffee House my colleague Dan Hodges notes that a large chunk of the Parliamentary Labour Party has come out against AV, and speculates that their stand will help the “No” campaign. So it may, but he is missing the true danger to the “Yes” campaign, which lies with its friends rather than
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I have had an email from someone called webguy @ michaelmoore.com – who may be the great propagandist himself or perhaps one of his “people” – saying that the US State Department’s claim that the Cuban communists banned Sicko is false. (“Nick, The government cable’s claim that Sicko was banned in Cuba is false. Would
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An elderly and very left wing friend told me a couple of years ago that he was delighted to be visiting Cuba for the first time. “Be careful,” I said, “remember this is a country without political or economic freedom, where the desperate population tries everything from drug selling to prostitution to stay alive. Don’t
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A repulsive feature of contemporary left-wing thinking is its insistence that clerical fascists should dictate our foreign policy. After the 7/7 attacks on London, Robert Fisk lambasted Tony Blair for saying that radical Islamists were trying to destroy “what we hold dear”. He took Osama bin Laden as a source of moral and political guidance,
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It seems like only yesterday that conservative pundits were denouncing MPs for “destroying trust” with their fraudulent expense claims and writing books exposing New Labour deceitful spin with such stirring titles as The Rise of Political Lying. How soft those strident voices have become now that a centre-right rather than a centre-left government is doing
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I would be taking high-mindedness too far if I were to say that the press is missing the real point of the Mike Hancock story. I cannot blame editors for falling to their knees and thanking whatever gods there may be for giving them the tale of how a bearded old man hired a gorgeous
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Imagine that the British National Party controls a church and community centre in the East End of London. Imagine that it receives respectful visits from politicians, and grants from local and national government. Imagine that Prince Charles extends his already unhinged beliefs in pseudo-science and homeopathic quackery to include neo-fascist race theory, and signals his
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Conservative readers still don’t understand why the Coalition is hated in the poor areas of Britain. They would grasp the loathing better if they went back through the arguments they made in opposition, and realised that their leaders have failed to follow through the logic of the ideas they once espoused. The best Tory criticism
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All right-thinking people regard David Abraham, the chief executive of Channel 4, as being morally superior to Dawn Neesom, the editor of the Daily Star. By modern standards, Channel 4 is a great liberal institution. Its dramas, when it can afford to make them, are edgy and transgressive. Its journalists make no effort to hide
