Journalism from London.
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REVIEWS
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“Nick Cohen’s brilliant broadside against censorship in an age of freedom.” Richard Dawkins
"Cohen is right that the struggle for freedom of speech is a political struggle. The internet does not itself liberate, Cohen reminds us. On the contrary. Both the powerful and the weak can use internet technologies. Techno-utopianism is a dangerous distraction, encouraging the illusion that the censors can be defeated by the click of a mouse. Cohen celebrates Milton's Areopagitica (1644) and Mill's On Liberty (1859). His own book stands alongside them." Anthony Julius, Standpoint.
"Nick Cohen’s books are like the best Smiths songs; however depressing the content, the execution is so shimmering, so incandescent with indignation that the overall effect is uplifting." Julie Burchill Prospect
"He has a sense of history and literature, in contrast to the dominant political generation of PPE graduates who have read every page of the Economist since they were at Oxford, but have never opened a novel." Denis MacShane, the Observer.
"At the risk of winning the Order of the Brown Nose, Cohen is perhaps the most insightful, thought-provoking and entertaining political writer in Britain today, and comes from the honest tradition of English liberal thought that threads from John Milton to John Stuart Mill and George Orwell; for that reason he has fallen out with the dishonest liberal tradition, a split that began with the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie on Valentine’s Day, 1989. He has that rare trait of being fair to all parties, refreshing in the tribal atmosphere of political debate, which has no doubt angered sectarians on his side." Ed West, The Telegraph
"Cohen is a friendly and engaging writer, who combines the solitary scholar’s extraordinary range of reference with a bon-vivant wit and warmth. A lover of contemporary fiction, his polemics read like novels. He finishes his book with a list of ways to fight back."Max Dunbar 3am Magazine
"The author has no time for artists, comedians and "loud-mouthed newspaper columnists" who pose as the moral equivalents of dissenters in repressive regimes, as they fearlessly speak truth to power, knowing that power will never go after them. On more delicate matters, meanwhile, they preserve a cowardly or self-interested silence. Cohen is a political animal, but with this free-thinking man of the Left there is no sense of the hedging, elisions or contrarian games so familiar in the field. A nose for censorship, of the silent or bullying variety, means not just carrying a powerful bullshit detector, which he does, but being your own man. And God knows there are few enough of those."
George Walden, London Evening Standard
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"After all, there are thousands and thousands of middle-aged lefties for whom their once-revolutionary “credentials” are all they have left to show for a lifetime of “activism”, and who could not face their friends — or, perhaps, their students — if they found themselves endorsing a war fought by British or American soldiers. (I myself remember repressing a twinge of annoyance at the idea that the assault on civilisation represented by the 9/11 attacks would drive my anti-Kissinger book from the front page where I still believe it belonged.) But Cohen goes further: “I wanted anything associated with Tony Blair to fail, because that would allow me to return to the easy life of attacking him.”
It is this sentence, and its implications, that make his book an exceptional and necessary one. Cohen has no problem with those who are upset about state-sponsored exaggerations of the causes of war, or furious about the bungled occupation of Iraq that has ensued. People who think this is the problem are not his problem. Here’s his problem: the people who would die before they would applaud the squaddies and grunts who removed hideous regimes from Afghanistan and Iraq, yet who happily describe Islamist video-butchers and suicide-murderers as a “resistance”. Those who do this are not “anti-war” at all, but are shadily taking the other side in a conflict where the moral and civilisational stakes are extremely high."
Christopher Hitchens, Sunday Times
"Nick Cohen's roaring polemic of outrage against the moral and political crisis of the liberal tradition. It is already one of the most discussed current affairs books of the new year. At the very least it forces, or ought to force, anyone on the left to think carefully about where their movement has ended up in the modern world. Martin Kettle, The Guardian
"The psychology of the left wing is hauntingly displayed by Nick Cohen" Philip Hensher, The Spectator
Our beliefs are like our families. Some we live with every day. Others are distant relations we rarely see but still think of as part of our clan in a warm, vague way.
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On the odd occasions they thought about it, leftists and more conservatives than readers of the Spectator may expect have seen the green movement as an eccentric aunt: a bit dotty perhaps, but a good sort and one of the family
If you wanted to see why Tony Blair is finished as a force for good in politics, you should have been at the discreet, if extortionately expensive, Haymarket hotel, off Trafalgar Square. Portland Communications, publicists for what it calls “the government of Russia” and everyone else calls “that thieving bastard Putin”, was holding a dinner for journalists and politicians.
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British skepticism has its entertainers – Dara O’Briain, Tim Minchin, Robin Ince and Dave Gorman – who are not just comics, but persuasive proponents of Enlightenment values. It has a star in Brian Cox and a hero in Simon Singh. Now it has a political programme, The Geek Manifesto by Mark Henderson, a former science editor of the Times.
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A s we prepare to celebrate 60 glorious years of a woman who has done little worth noting, ghoulish questions nag at the back of the mind. When, for instance, will the Queen die? Elections remove presidents in democratic republics. When your country is governed by the hereditary principle, however, only abdication or death can dispense with the sovereign. As Elizabeth II is 86, and has shown no desire to abdicate, we must wonder when the grim reaper, who scythes down royal and commoner alike, will bring us a change.
The first question raises a second. Will the leaders of the British state allow the succession to pass to Charles Windsor, a man whose ill-formed and incontinent mind renders him unfit for the role of constitutional
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I fell in with bad company while I was on a story in Oslo last week: American conservative journalists. I am glad to say confirmed the public’s stereotype of reporters by enjoying their drink. (They make it their first task after landing in a new city to find the best bar, an example that should inspire us all.) But they bore no resemblance to the European stereotype of the ignorant, right-wing yank. They were cosmopolitans who were at ease in Europe. They were well read. Although they would hate the label, they were also crusading journalists, who had made the cause of the dissident opposition to Putin and Lukashenko their own. They had no time for social conservatives, who wanted to police private morals — but, I told them, they had ended up in the same political camp with know-nothings who thought that dinosaurs roamed the Garden of Eden and conspiracy theorists who thought that Barack Obama was a secret member of the Mau-Mau.
How could they stand to spend a minute in such company?
The viciousness of the American left drove intelligent men and women rightwards, they replied.
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For a moment at the Oslo Freedom Forum, it was possible to believe that Pyotr Verzilov was the coolest guy on the planet. Breathless and unshaven, the young performance artist arrived in Norway from the street protests in Moscow. With the élan of an exultant radical, he explained the personal and political reasons for taking on Putin’s kleptocracy.
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When all else fails, greed and fear explain otherwise inexplicable behaviour. Understand their power and you will grasp why the apparently tough-minded David Cameron and Alex Salmond still defend Rupert Murdoch. The ordinary rules of politics say they should abandon him without a moment’s regret. Base survival instincts ought to tell them that the scandals around News Corporation are a disease that may never be cured.
A by no means exhaustive list of the horrors ahead begins with Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks appearing at the Leveson inquiry this week. The non-Murdoch press will not shirk our duty to recall the fabulous social whirl that was once the “Chipping Norton Set”. We will remind you of how Brooks, Elisabeth Murdoch and Matthew Freud slapped and scratched the backs of David and Samantha Cameron at country homes, while Jeremy Clarkson flitted in and out of their parties – gambolling through the Cotswolds like a portly court fool.
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The New Few, or A Very British Oligarchy: Power and Inequality in Britain Now
By Ferdinand Mount (Simon & Schuster 305pp £18.99)
If you want to imagine the Prime Minister at seventy, gaze on the features of his cousin at several removes, Sir William Robert Ferdinand ‘Ferdie’ Mount, 3rd Baronet, of Wasing, and one-time adviser to Margaret Thatcher. As so often, distant relatives look more like each other than close kin. To a disconcerting degree, Cameron and Mount share the same moonish face, the same soft skin and contented look. Not the smallest of the good lessons The New Few teaches is that appearances deceive.
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Self-censorship is, in many ways, Cohen’s real thesis, which makes me wonder if his title wouldn’t have been better as You Don’t Want to Read This Book. His chapters on the credit market implosion and the Hobson’s choice faced by institutional whistleblowers are among the finest in this book because they examine both antiquated and self-defeating
statutes as much as ingrained human psychology. Conservatives can appreciate Cohen’s description of contemporary corporate culture as a kind of velvet dictatorship where thunderous egos reign in the boardroom and underlings are too terrified to say that the boss is talking utter nonsense, lest they should first lose their jobs, then be reputationally boxed out of their inustries altogether. Whatever kind of enterprise this is, it is not “free.”
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Nick Cohen