Nick Cohen

This morning's editorial in Israel’s left-wing Haaretz newspaper noted a double standard that was also a bad joke. Israel’s Interior Minister’s had declared, 'If Gunter Grass wants to continue to distribute his false and distorted works, I suggest he do so from Iran, where he'll find an appreciative audience.' The minister could not detect the irony in his words, the paper said. It is precisely his decision not to let Grass enter Israel because of a poem he wrote that 'is characteristic of dark regimes like those in Iran or North Korea'. You can read Grass’s poem here. I find it a false and vainglorious work because of its strong element of self-pity. Grass calls it 'What Must Be Said,' as if he is making a courageous stand.

Writing with the optimism of a high-Victorian liberal, John Stuart Mill said that the only legitimate restriction on freedom of speech was to stop the direct incitement to a crime. He picked the example of corn dealers. The 19th century poor hated them. They made inflammatory accusations that the dealers were enriching themselves by keeping the price of bread artificially high. But Mill said ‘An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.

When I spoke to the tax justice campaigner Richard Murphy about Ken Livingstone’s tax avoidance, he said that the practice of individuals pretending that they were companies caused ‘a massive leakage of tax revenue. They have all the tax advantages of a company without the obligation to tell the world what they are doing with the privilege society has granted them.’ You need to think about the secrecy as much as the self-enrichment when considering the behaviour of Livingstone and his kind. For a Chancellor facing a massive national debt the advantages of cracking down on individuals who turn themselves into KenCos are obvious. The Livingstones of the world only pay corporation tax on their earnings rather than the full higher rate of income tax.

At the weekend, I was honoured to award the Secularist of the Year prize to Peter Tatchell on behalf of the National Secular Society. From the stage, I looked across the restaurant where the celebratory lunch was held and saw only intelligent, polite people (if by that stage of the proceedings, intelligent, polite and slightly tipsy people). I had to break the news to them that according to respectable society they were fanatics; the moral equivalents of religious bigots.

If you want to hear a BBC discussion going hopelessly wrong, listen to the ‘debate’ between the Bishop of Lichfield, Jonathan Gledhill and Alan Beith on the Today programme this morning. Radio 4 meant it to be about the established church, and set the Anglican bishop against the Methodist Beith. But a freemasonry of the faithful took over, and ‘balance’ went out of the window. Conformist and non-conformist united against their common enemy, ‘militant secularism’. Not just Anglicans and Methodists, Beith assured us, but Sikhs, Jews, Muslims and Hindus were at one in their fear of the secularist menace. ‘It is bad enough having to put up with the platitudinous propaganda of Thought for the Day,’ I thought, ‘but this is too much.

As the cops round up journalists, Trevor Kavanagh’s protest in the Sun has aroused amazement and some scorn. ‘Witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on Press freedom’ — ran the headline, and the gist of the complaint among my friends was that it was a self-pitying and self-aggrandising piece of work. Whatever you think of the Sun or Kavanagh, however, it is worth hearing him out for three reasons.   1. Kavanagh is being brave. We ought to applaud Hugh Grant for standing up to the tabloids even though he knows they will give him a bad press for the rest of his career. (You will have noticed that nearly everyone else in the celeb pack has let Grant and a few others fight their battles for them while they cower in a prudent silence.

Human rights campaigners need to follow a self-denying ordinance if they are not to become enemies of the values they espouse. Like a civil servant or judge, they must leave their passions at the office door, and oppose the oppressive, whoever they are and whatever the consequences. It is easy for me to say that, but the record of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International tells you that it is hard for them to do so. To their politically committed workers impartiality can feel a thin and bloodless doctrine. It requires them to criticise people they regard as friends and provide inadvertent comfort to enemies. The effort required in maintaining universal principles is too much for them, and explains why human rights organisations have gone off the rails.

The Economist has a rather good, rather smug and – in the end – entirely self-deluding leader about the predicament of the American right this week. It is good because the Economist sets out with neatness and style what policies a Republican candidates must sign up to if he or she is to make it through the primaries. The aspiring president must believe not just some but all of the following: That abortion should be illegal in all cases. That gay marriage must be banned even in states that want it. That the 12m illegal immigrants, even those who have lived in America for decades, must all be sent home. That the 46m people who lack health insurance have only themselves to blame. That global warming is a conspiracy.

Another day at the Telegraph and another attack on Laurie Penny, this time for writing a short piece describing how she had received excellent treatment at a New York hospital. While she was on her sickbed, she reflected that in the States, 'Those who are wealthy enough to afford decent healthcare have their needs met in relative luxury, while those who are poor live in fear of getting ill, worrying that one misadventure might leave you with yet more debts to pay off.' This humane thought inspired one Daniel Knowles of the Telegraph to pen a whole column condemning Penny . ‘I have no intention of defending the American healthcare system,’ he says, and then excoriates Penny for not defending it either.  He depicts her as a dogmatist and a bore.