Nick Cohen is the author of What's Left and You Can't Read This Book.
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From Venezuela to Zimbabwe, the noise that defines failing states is the wail. It’s not our fault, their leaders cry. We are the victims of a foreign conspiracy, fifth columnists and saboteurs. The most obvious and least discussed consequence of last night’s capitulation by the British Prime Minister to the right of her party is
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Britain moved a step close to Weimar yesterday when the Prime Minister used the threat of terrorism to get her way. Being a conservative woman of the upper-middle class, Theresa May did not precisely mimic the cries of ‘there will be blood’ that come from the right’s more deranged corners. You don’t talk like that
From our UK edition
Britain moved a step close to Weimar yesterday when the Prime Minister used the threat of terrorism to get her way. Being a conservative woman of the upper-middle class, Theresa May did not precisely mimic the cries of ‘there will be blood’ that come from the right’s more deranged corners. You don’t talk like that
From our UK edition
Even though Jeremy Corbyn and the men and women who support him are often shabby and occasionally reactionary figures, the rarest criticism you hear of them is criticism from the left. Political commentary in Britain runs like water through pipes. Conventional opinion holds that if you are left wing, you support the Labour leadership, and
From our UK edition
Even though Jeremy Corbyn and the men and women who support him are often shabby and occasionally reactionary figures, the rarest criticism you hear of them is criticism from the left. Political commentary in Britain runs like water through pipes. Conventional opinion holds that if you are left wing, you support the Labour leadership, and
From our UK edition
Hungary is the Venezuela of the Western right. Just as radical leftists revealed the emptiness of their concern for the powerless by applauding as Chavez and Maduro’s gang of thieves reduced the poor to starvation, so conservatives’ admiration for Viktor Orbán shows the ephemerality of right-wing ‘civilisation’. Conservatives never fail to miss an opportunity to
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It is now standard on the right to say that the establishment is sabotaging Brexit. I could pick one of half a dozen writers for this magazine, who wallow in the language of victimhood as luxuriantly as any of the alleged snowflakes they so unselfconsciously denounce. The inevitable failure to transfer the impossible demands of
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The British are like patients with an incurable illness. Thinking and worrying can do no good, but those who understand Britain’s sickness can think of nothing else. Rationally, we understand there is nothing we can do about Brexit until and unless the balance of forces shifts in Westminster. No one knows what will happen next.
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Republicans hate to admit it, but the stability brought by the long reign of that most careful of monarchs Elizabeth II has helped Britain manage the decline from empire to middle-ranking power surprisingly well. As the Treason Act of 1351 is no longer in force, and to ‘compass or imagine’ the death of the sovereign
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A year ago, campaigners for a ‘people’s vote’ seemed an eccentric bunch of no hopers and bad losers. Mocked as ‘remoaners’, their arguments barely covered by the media, history had left them behind. As the leave campaigns’ central claim that we could have the benefits of EU membership while leaving the EU is revealed for
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To anyone who knew the late and much-missed Norman Geras, the idea that the state could consider his work an incitement to terrorism would have been incomprehensible. Geras was an inspirational politics professor at Manchester University, and a polemicist and moral philosopher of exceptional insight. He devoted much of his energy to opposing the murder
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Shortly before his death, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote that capitalism crushed the integrity of artists and intellectuals. Assessed only in terms of their commercial appeal, they became ‘a sub-department of marketing’. In a touching display of filial loyalty, Julia Hobsbawm seems to be proving her old dad right. The former head of New
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The conventional wisdom that we live in echo chambers always seemed too convenient an explanation of political polarisation to be true. Believers could convince themselves that their causes lost, not because they were faulty or fantastical or outright wicked, but because their opponents had brainwashed a majority of the electorate to reject them. For all
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The alliance between the white far left and the Islamist right is a dirty secret in plain sight. Few can bear to look at it. None of the books and documentaries on Corbyn’s takeover of the Labour party asked, even in passing, how people who professed to be socialists and feminists, found themselves promoting theocrats
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You rarely come across a character in modern literature like Jimmy Knight. He’s a racist, but that’s not what makes him a novelty act. racists, after all, are deplored everywhere in the culture industry, from Hollywood to Pinewood Studios. Of this racist, however, his ex-wife says: ‘I wouldn’t trust him if it was anything to
From our UK edition
You rarely come across a character in modern literature like Jimmy Knight. He’s a racist, but that’s not what makes him a novelty act. racists, after all, are deplored everywhere in the culture industry, from Hollywood to Pinewood Studios. Of this racist, however, his ex-wife says: ‘I wouldn’t trust him if it was anything to
From our UK edition
Cold calculation suggests there won’t be a second referendum. It could destroy both the Tory and Labour parties, and in any case, we appear to be heading for a classic EU fudge that will postpone hard choices. But as all predictions in 2018 are likely to be false, and the Tory right appears determined to
From our UK edition
Cold calculation suggests there won’t be a second referendum. It could destroy both the Tory and Labour parties, and in any case, we appear to be heading for a classic EU fudge that will postpone hard choices. But as all predictions in 2018 are likely to be false, and the Tory right appears determined to
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The far left is preparing the ground for its coming purge of the Labour party by burning down every rational objection that stands in its way. To take the most rational objection to its plans, consider the case of a Labour MP who breaks with Jeremy Corbyn on Brexit or racism. He or she is
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This is the English version of a piece of mine that was first published in DIE WELT on 4 August 2018, in which I attempt to explain to German readers why anti-Semitism, of all things, is dominating politics in Britain, of all places. Germans visiting Britain before Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour party
