Nick Cohen: Writing from London

From Index on Cenorship
Journalist, author and free speech advocate Nick Cohen was, for a while, a lively presence on Twitter. He gave up the highly addictive site to work on his latest book, a polemic on censorship called You Can’t Read This Book (as more than one reviewer has pointed out, you can and should read this book).

Book completed and published, Cohen set out on the promotional slog required of authors, and rejoined Twitter 10 days ago in order to plug his work. After a few tweets alerting real-world friends to his presence, Cohen found his account (@NickCohen2) suspended, without explanation.

Bemused, Cohen tried to set up a new account (@NickCohen4), using a different email address. Again, Cohen sent a few tweets before finding the account suspended within hours.

Cohen is yet to have an explanation of the suspensions.

The irony to a free speech advocate being blocked from the web is clear, not least as Cohen praises Twitter in his book. But the Observer columnist has had previous trouble with his online profile. Cohen’s Wikipedia page was subjected to repeated slanderous edits by “David Rose”, later outed on the Jack of Kent blog as Independent journalist Johann Hari, who had a very public falling out with Cohen in the pages of Dissent magazine. “David Rose” was found to have maliciously edited several other “enemies” Wikipedia pages, including that of Telegraph blogger (and former colleague of Hari at the New Statesman) Christina Odone.

Index on Censorship
By Marta Cooper
England’s libel laws have turned the country into “liberty’s enemy”, Observer columnist and author of You Can’t Read This Book Nick Cohen said at last night’s launch of Index and English PEN’s final report of the Alternative Libel Project.
“We virtually invented freedom of expression, but any scandal can go to the High Court,” Cohen said.

Carry on reading

Do you feel morally superior to the Taliban?”. The actor, channeling Martin Amis, wants a show of hands.
Slowly, a few hands go up, including mine. “Only about a fifth of you”.

Carry on reading

Reviewed by Michael Cross

Lawyers do not figure highly in the estimation of newspaper columnist Nick Cohen. His broadside at censorship in a liberal age paints solicitors, barristers and judges as the lackeys of oligarchs and snake-oil sellers and conspirators in liberal silence when the going gets tough.

According to Cohen, free speech in our supposedly tolerant, internet-enabled, chattering society is under threat from the state, money and religion. Of these, the state is the least-threatening force. The very fact that the ‘Twitter joke’ trial was itself an object of ridicule (though no joke for the chap in the dock) makes Cohen’s point that, in Britain today, journalists, satirists and activist lawyers are not afraid of the state.

Money buys a better class of gag. Cohen’s target is ‘a town called Sue’ (a Geoffrey Robertson line, I recall) – London and its readiness to deploy English libel law at the service of dubious characters in any corner of the world, serving the wealthy ‘as attentively as the shop girls in the Harrods food hall’. As many of the litigants that Cohen names are still living, wealthy and prickly, I won’t make work for the Gazette’s libel lawyer by identifying them here.

I’m going to be even more circumspect about Cohen’s third threat to free speech: God. Or rather, the self-censorship that surrounds any critical or humorous treatment of Islam since the Satanic Verses affair.

Anyone who read Cohen’s important 2007 polemic What’s Left? will have no doubt where he stands on the matter of, as he sees it, so-called liberals who will surrender their principles in the name of multiculturalism. When the lord chief justice and archbishop of Canterbury murmured in support of sharia law, Cohen notes: ‘Women lawyers at the bar, who complained so vociferously about the law’s glass ceiling, did not accuse the archbishop and the judge of sexism.’

The point is that, while a threat from the state will cause inconvenience and guarantee a certain celebrity, a gag from a wealthy libel litigant will cause bankruptcy, while being gagged by a religious fanatic may involve death threats, or even death. And the liberal establishment is likely to shuffle, embarrassed, away.

In his original preface to Animal Farm, Orwell wrote: ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’ That still stands.

Of course you can read Cohen’s book. But, if my explorations of lefty north London bookshops last weekend are anything to go by, you won’t find it very prominently displayed.

Michael Cross is news editor of the Law Society Gazette

Can actors at the National Theatre quote Christopher Hitchens’ destruction of Shirley Williams for her failure to defend freedom of speech against suicide murderers on Question Time, while all the time contorting themselves in athletic dance moves? My somewhat surprising answer is ‘yes they can’.
Carry on reading

Review of You Can’t Read This Book by Michael Ezra

“A book is far more enjoyable if it is well written. Cohen can certainly write. You Can’t Read This Book is accessible and erudite. There are not many writers who, in a single book, can discuss the Peloponnesian War, comment upon Xenophon and Plato’s view of Socrates, give an opinion on Karl Marx’s beliefs in the inevitability of the proletarian revolution, and quote the Bible’s Leviticus, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Honoré de Balzac, John Stuart Mill, George Orwell, Saul Bellow and Joel Feinberg, while, at the same time, having the chutzpah to use the phrase, “fercockt Western putzes.” The late Christopher Hitchens, to whom the book is dedicated, was one; Nick Cohen is another.”

Carry on reading

Welcome to Without Prejudice. Joining regulars Carl Gardner and David Allen Green: The writer and journalist Nick Cohen and former prospective Tory candidate for Parliament and policymaker Joanne Cash.

Tonight’s topic is Free Speech and how privacy and libel law may impact on this cherished right. Nick Cohen’s excellent You Can’t Read This Book formed the basis for our discussion and I have no hesitation in encouraging you to read it. It is available on Amazon – a fascinating discussion for lawyers and others interested in free speech.
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