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.
Carry on reading
May 3, 2012
The Haves and the Have-Some-Mores
April 24, 2012
Élysée 2012: le score de Marine Le Pen vu de Londres
Par Franck Guillory – 23/04/2012
Un point de vue de Londres, celui de l’éditorialiste britannique Nick Cohen. Les Français ont voté. Le 22 Avril ne remplacera pas le 21 Avril dans l’imaginaire politique national et ce sont bien les deux favoris, Nicolas Sarkozy et François Hollande, qui s’affronteront en « finale », le dimanche 6 mai prochain. Pourtant, vu de l’étranger, l’évènement de ce premier dimanche électoral en France semble bien être le score record atteint par la candidate du Front National, Marine Le Pen.
Poursuivre la lecture
April 19, 2012
What must be said remains unspeakable
By Nick Dyrenfurth
Brisbane Times
The Grass scandal is hardly some isolated phenomenon. Rather it points to a far deeper intellectual and moral malaise on the political left, although as British journalist Nick Cohen pointed out in a penetrating recent essay for Standpoint magazine, what has been described as the new anti-Semitism from the far left and militant Islamic groups was in fact ”extraordinarily consistent” during the previous century.
April 18, 2012
Scared to tell the truth: why censorship won’t work
Jennifer Oriel
The Australian
April 18
EVERY force has an equal and opposing reaction. Nick Cohen is to censorship what sound is to silence. British journalist, political commentator and five-time author, Cohen is a welcome town crier in a global village grown scared of speaking truth to Western wealth and Islamic fundamentalism.
Cohen’s You Can’t Read This Book is, as the title suggests, a provocation to confront paradox. It is mandatory for anyone who believes free speech and civility are mutually exclusive. Cohen exposes with anti-social lucidity that religious urgings to tolerance are often built on injustice, liberal intellectuals have sacrificed freedom to the fear of fatwas, and journalists and academics have lost sight of their first duty: to tell the truth.
Cohen is clear that the dual purpose of universities and the media is “to allow free debate without fear or favour”. He is critical of Australia’s recent Finkelstein inquiry into the media on the grounds that it reverses the liberal belief that “the citizen should regulate the state, not the other way round”.
Rec Coverage 28 Day pass
At the core of Cohen’s thesis on freedom is abhorrence with the contemporary drift from John Stuart Mill’s restriction on free speech based on the principle of no harm, to the crime of offence that is used to prosecute writers under hate speech and anti-vilification legislation.
Finkelstein added to the mix recommendations that would allow proposed new media regulators to monitor and censor journalists on the charge of bias. But, as Cohen elucidates, “truth trumps everything and it is not always fair or balanced. You should not balance the statement ’2+2=4′ with ‘but critics of mathematics say that it makes 5′.”
It is the refusal to cloak truth with fashionable illusions that separates journalism from public relations, propaganda and spin. Yet the Finkelstein inquiry recommendations propose interpreting truth via a media regulatory body while claiming to champion free inquiry and expression. It’s a line of illogic that would have been laughed out of Athens if Plato and Socrates had laid their hands on it.
Cohen is plain about how to train journalists to genuinely champion truth. It’s a six-step plan. He advises young journalists to go out and report; meet people who do not share their view of the world; confront their own ideological prejudices; never write something just because someone else is writing it; wake up in the middle of the night worrying about their prose style; and be ferociously, even neurotically, self-critical.
And the rewards?
“After 10 years of torture, maybe 20, they might be able to hack it.”
Cohen suspects that modern universities do not encourage students to confront their ideological prejudices and is deeply concerned about it. His earlier book What’s Left? chronicles the mishandling of free thinkers and the revision of history by academe and the media. The book was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize but had Cohen blacklisted in Left-liberal quarters.
Recent political commentary accuses Cohen of sectarian Semitic impulses, but he is at pains not to excuse himself from critique. He is often asked about whether he would ban Holocaust denial because his last name is Cohen. No, he responds, because the solution to racism, homophobia and misogyny is to fight bad ideas with better ideas. And to do that you need freedom to pursue, deduce and express truth without fear of blasphemy laws and other censorial legislation.
It is this belief in rigorous, open debate that has Cohen genuinely puzzling why “academics who depend on freedom of thought are among the first to deny its benefits to others”. He would not be assuaged by the fact the Finkelstein inquiry was staffed by academics and lawyers. Nor that it was preceded by a new regulatory body for Australian universities, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, which was established on the agreement that it would not regulate academic activity — an agreement for which universities lobbied hard.
There is no doubt that censorship is a serious political strategy and, since the Enlightenment, newspapers have fought it as a matter of public duty. The fact public intellectuals such as Cohen cannot propose free speech tempered by moderate libel, defamation and privacy laws without being accused of offence reflects an illiberal contemporary global culture.
But the routine imprisonment and murder of free thinkers in China and the Middle East should inspire Westerners to defend en masse the value of free speech in domestic and foreign policy. It does not. And that remains an injustice whose forward march will be stopped only by the pursuit and publication of truth: the principle of intellectual life writ large on freedom.
Jennifer Oriel is a Melbourne-based writer.
April 16, 2012
Claire Fox, censorship and China
In my Observer column this weekend I wrote about how the London Book Fair and the British Council were kowtowing to Beijing by inviting only state approved Chinese authors to take part in their “China focus” events at Earl’s Court this week. I described the run-up to the censored fair, and pointed out that suspicious minds had known that the fix was on for a while.
One of Britain’s leading authorities on China told me that an editor instructed him to not make unflattering remarks about the Communist party in a piece to accompany the fair. Others described a seminar at the British Council in September on how the British should think about freedom of speech in China. It was chaired by Claire Fox, of the Institute of Ideas, the successor organisation to the British Revolutionary Communist party. This sinister clique moved as one from the totalitarian left to the corporate right without stopping at any worthwhile point in between. Observers in the audience predicted that China’s combination of communist dictatorship with capitalist exploitation would appeal to Fox.
They were not disappointed. We should stop talking about human rights and freedom of expression, she said. We should hold our own government to account rather than engage in “China-bashing”. Writers, she concluded, have always benefited from the creative stimulus of censorship. By her logic, there was no need to protest when oppression was good for them. It was “worse than risible”, Jonathan Heawood, director of the free expression charity English Pen, told me. “I was surprised that no one from the British Council was prepared to rebut these absurd assertions.” Now he knows why the council stayed silent. The London Book Fair has been rigged.
Fox has taken to the Web to denounce my account. “It’s hearsay but no direct quote and inaccurate” etc
Well, here is the direct quote Jonathan Heawood, the director of English PEN, gave me. “I was at a British Council seminar last September at which Claire Fox chaired a discussion of Chinese literature. In response to a comment from the floor about the number of imprisoned Chinese writers, Fox asserted that we should stop talking about human rights and freedom of expression in order to talk about literature; that we should hold our own governments to account rather than ‘China bashing’; and that writers have always benefited from the creative stimulus of censorship.”
Heawood then went on to tell me that he found this “worse than risible”. He was surprised that “no-one from the British Council was prepared to rebut these absurd assertions”. I used both these lines in my piece.
For the record Heawood was not trying to remember an argument six months after the event. He was so surprised by what he heard that he wrote as soon as the meeting was over on 23 September 2011 to Susie Nicklin, the Literature Director of the British Council to complain about Fox. Nicklin did not attempt to claim that Heawood had misheard or misunderstood Fox. She did not attempt to deny any part of his account.
For those of you who do not know the Revolutionary Communist Party/Institute of Ideas sect and think it incredible that its members would seek to make excuses for the Chinese dictatorship, remember that these are the people who tried to help Milosevic by claiming that pictures of Serb concentration camps were fakes. For those who want the full, foul story, here is a long and brilliant account by David Campbell on how the RCP and its allies manufactured the modern equivalent of holocaust denial.
March 31, 2012
Ian O’Doherty: Where are the protests from the Irish Left against Syria?
From the Irish Independent
Welcome to Syria, where Assad’s crumbling regime, like so many other doomed regimes throughout history, has decided that it is going to go down swinging, killing as many of its people as possible.
It’s completely senseless and borders on the insanely pointless — a bit like Berliners being executed by the Gestapo for looting a pot or a kettle from a bombed-out house in the last days of the war.
So, where are the protests from the Irish left against this vile, murderous Government?
Carry on reading
March 30, 2012
Israel, Palestine and the anti-Semitism of the Left
Nick Cohen has a characteristically good article on “anti-Semitism of the Left” in the April edition of Standpoint. The argument he advances is a fair one. Anti-Semitism has been found across the political spectrum. In Britain the anti-Semitism of the Left was often directed at bankers and financiers. This was the anti-Semitism of Belloc and Chesterton.
But there was also an anti-Semitism of the generally decent liberal elite.
Carry on reading
March 9, 2012
Would you want to be a Freemason?
BBC News
They designed the pyramids, plotted the French Revolution and are keeping the flame alive for the Knights Templar. These are just some of the wilder theories about the Freemasons. Today they are associated with secret handshakes and alleged corruption in the police and judiciary.
But dogged by this “secret society” image, the Freemasons have launched a rebranding exercise
Carry on reading
February 20, 2012
A man with a score to settle. Christopher Hitchens: review of What’s Left
REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Sunday Times
Published: 21 January 2007
WHAT’S LEFT? How the Liberals Lost Their Way
by Nick Cohen
Fourth Estate £12.99 pp296
It is not until quite near the end of this mordant and instructive polemic that Nick Cohen comes right out with his own confession: “My instant reaction to the 9/11 attacks was that they were a nuisance that got in the way of more pressing concerns. Throughout the 1990s, I had been writing about the overweening power of big business and how it could corrupt democratic governments. I had lambasted new Labour for its love of conservative crime policies and attacks on civil liberties for years. Attacking Tony Blair was what I liked doing — what got me out of bed in the morning. Accepting that fascism is worse than western democracy, even western democracies governed by George W Bush and Tony Blair, sounds very easy in theory, but it is very difficult to do in practice when you are a habitual enemy of the status quo in your own country.”
He might have left it at this. 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.”
read more »
February 17, 2012
The Pod Delusion
Episode 123 – 17th February 2012
February 17, 2012 | Author: James O’Malley
This week is a bit of a secularism special – punch your fist in the air at the Rally to Defend Freedom of Expression, find out about the perils of censorship in Nick Cohen’s new book and get the accurate story on the Bideford council prayers ruling. Plus we talk about a new survey showing Christians aren’t terribly Christian, find out why Alan Turing deserves a pardon and solve the mystery of which Sherlock Holmes adaption is best.
Full broadcast here
Direct MP3 Link
(ft Richard Dawkins, Nick Doody, Kate Smurthwaite, Rhys Morgan, Joan Smith and Anne-Marie Waters)
Nick Cohen Interview (18:10) by Liz Lutgendorff & James O’Malley
Census Christians (28:54) by James O’Malley (ft Paula Kirby)
Bideford Council (37:35) by Liz Lutgendorff (ft Tessa Kendall)
Turing Pardon (45:00) by Peter Rowlett
Sherlock and Copyright (54:56) by Tom Hodden
The sketch at the end is by David Lovesy & Brian Two
Follow-Up Links
Listen to the rally to defend free expression in full here.
One Law For All
Full Nick Cohen interview:
(Check back in the morning!)
Buy Nick Cohen’s ‘You Can’t Read This Book’ here.
Full Paula Kirby Interview:
Nick Cohen
