The last days of George Galloway

~ Nick Cohen
 

(Photo: Getty)

(Photo: Getty)

Spectator 29 March 2016

It takes an achingly long time for the British to see a lickspittle of mass murderers for what he is. For years, you jump up and down shouting ‘look at what he’s done!’ All but a handful ignore you. But he’s a character, the rest cry. He’s not like those poll-driven, focus-group–tested on-message politicians, who speak in soundbites. He is passionate about his beliefs.

So he is, you reply, and that’s the problem. Since the marches against the Iraq war of 2003, I have written against George Galloway. He has supported Baathist regimes it is fair to describe as fascist: Saddam Hussein’s Sunni Arab dictatorship in Iraq after it had gassed the Kurdish ethnic minority, and Bashar al-Assad‘s Shia Arab dictatorship as his terror provoked revolution.

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Boris Johnson: Liar, conman and your next prime minister

~ Nick Cohen

boris

From the Observer 25 March 2016

t is easy to see how Boris Johnson could be prime minister by the autumn. “Leave” wins, and David Cameron resigns. We already know that a majority of the 140,000 or so Conservative party members, who will decide the government of a country of 64 million, back him. Give them the chance, and they will put him in Downing Street.

If countries get the politicians they deserve, the possibility of a Johnson premiership suggests that the British are now a nation of charlatans. Continue reading →

Anti-Semites made me a Jew

~ Nick Cohen

brecht

From the Observer 19 March 2016

 

It took me 40 years to become a Jew. When I was a child, I wasn’t a Jew and not only because I never went to a synagogue. My father’s family had abandoned their religion so he wasn’t Jewish. More to the point, my mother and my grandmother weren’t Jewish either, so according to orthodox Judaism’s principles of matrilineal descent, it was impossible for me to be a Jew.

All I had was the “Cohen” name. I once asked my parents why they had not changed it. After saying, quite rightly, that you should never seek to appease racists, they confessed to thinking that antisemitism was over by the 1960s. After Hitler, humanity would surely see where the world’s most insane hatred led and resolve to put it to one side.

Bertolt Brecht said: “Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”

My parents did not believe Brecht, at least not in the 1960s. Nor did I for a while. I Continue reading →

The Left could take us out of Europe

~ Nick Cohen
 
Jeremy Corbyn Visits The North East

Spectator 24 February 2016

Europe has opened up an unbridgeable chasm in the Conservative party. Labour remains, near as dammit, united. On the EU referendum, an opposition accustomed to defeat has a rare chance of victory. Yet when Jeremy Corbyn makes the case for staying in he speaks without conviction. Like a man called into work on his day off, his weary expression and dispirited voice tell you he would rather be somewhere else. Tory MPs, so divided that it is hard to see how they can stay in the same party, unite in laughing at him.

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‘We told you so, you fucking fools’: the Euston Manifesto 10 years on

~ Nick Cohen

k2

Spectator 18 February 2016

The Euston Manifesto appears a noble failure. It was clear in 2006 that the attempt to revive left-wing support for internationalism, democracy and universal human rights did not have a strong chance of success. Looking back a decade on, it seems doomed from the start. The tyrannical habits of mind it condemned were breaking out across the left in 2006. They are everywhere now. They define the Labour Party and most of what passes for intellectual left-wing life in the 21st century.

 

To take the manifesto’s first statement of principle: the left should be ‘committed to democratic norms, procedures and structures’. An easy statement to agree with, I hear you say. Not so easy when the leader of the opposition, feted by his supporters as the most ‘left-wing’ in Labour’s history, will excuse dictatorial regimes or movements, however reactionary, if and only if, they are anti-West.
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Boris Johnson v Winston Churchill

~ Nick Cohen
LONDON, ENGLAND - FEBRUARY 21: Mayor of London Boris Johnson announces that he will be backing the 'Leave EU' campaign whilst speaking to the press outside his London home on February 21, 2016 in London, England. Mr Johnson announced his intentions for the EU referendum and to which campaign he will lend his support. (Photo by Chris Ratcliffe/Getty Images)Spectator February 2016

Rather rashly, Boris Johnson published The Churchill factor: How one man made history last year. It was without historical merit, or intellectual insight, but Johnson did not intend readers to learn about Churchill. The biography was not a Churchill biography but a Johnson campaign biography, where we were invited to see our  hero as Winston redux.

Both ignored party discipline and conventional routes of advancement, after all. Both were great company. Churchill stayed in the wilderness for years making a fortune from journalism, and so has Johnson. Churchill was a man of principle and so is…

Hold on. That doesn’t work.

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