Nick Cohen: Writing from London

From Standpoint

Of the eight dramas in ITV’s summer season, six were crime stories. The seventh was Doc Martin, an amiable and undemanding romantic comedy. The eighth was Downton Abbey, which is not a crime story but is most certainly a crime. The mystery of why Britain with its thriving theatre and unsurpassed literary tradition is so bad at making television drama becomes easier to solve when you look at the schedules. Soap opera aside, fiction on television means crime fiction. Medical and comic dramas follow far behind. Science fiction is represented only by Doctor Who and its spin-offs; fantasy only by Merlin. Romance, war stories and the television equivalent of literary fiction barely appear.

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From the Observer

For a tyrant whose forces took 13-year-old Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, burned him, mutilated him, shattered his knee caps, cut off his penis and sent his corpse to his parents as a warning against participating in opposition politics, Bashar al-Assad receives remarkably forgiving treatment.

Barack Obama, who purports to be the free world’s leader, proved last week that he can speak his mind when he is confronted with behaviour he believes to be truly beyond the pale when he ordered Congressman Anthony Weiner to resign for tweeting pictures of his bulging briefs to a distressed American woman.

Despite his uncompromising stance on Weiner’s erect penis, Obama still cannot find it in himself to say that Assad must also resign for the slightly more tasteless offence of castrating Syrian boy…

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I’ve a piece on the death on MF Husain in today’s Observer

I wrote a longer article about him in Standpoint a few months ago here

“The truth in Blair’s case is that no good deed goes unpunished. The Windsors have never forgiven him for saving their reputation after the death of Princess Diana and quoting Prince William in his memoirs. With Brown, they appear to dislike him for refusing to spend public money buying them a new yacht, or maybe they simply loathe centre-left politicians. Aristocrats generally do.”

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He might have been magnanimous and settled for winning by 60/40 rather than 69/31. Instead he got greedy and did not restrain himself or his troops.

Read the whole thing

British TV producers love the ethnic minorities but won’t let them work.

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The former US Ambassador to the United Nations Daniel Patrick Moynihan composed an aphorism as he watched dictatorships pile opprobrium on democracies: “The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there.” Journalists, lawyers, academics and opposition politicians can investigate the injustices of democracies, and because they can investigate, injustice is kept in check. They cannot expose the greater atrocities of dictatorships because there is no freedom to report, and hence their greater crimes pass unnoticed.

I have my doubts about the universal jurisdiction of Moynihan’s Law — America was responsible for many great crimes while he was its good and faithful servant. But his insight explains why Jeremy Bowen is blinking at his cameraman in Tripoli, like some startled, uncomprehending mammal who has been shaken by the convulsions around him from a hibernation that has lasted for most of his career.

The BBC’s Middle East editor is not the only expert whose expertise now looks spurious. The Arab uprising is annihilating the assumptions of foreign ministries, academia and human rights groups with true revolutionary élan.

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“The far left is now the British right’s secret weapon. The Tory Party should consider funding its determined effort to destroy the causes it professes to support.”

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The whiff of failure hung over yesterday’s march in London against the coalition’s austerity programme. But whose failure was it: the protesters or those they protested against?
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