Search

Cuckooland: Where the Rich Own the Truth by Tom Burgis William Collins, [pounds sterling]18.99, pp. 304 In March 2020, Charlotte Leslie, a former Conservative MP, and widely regarded as a [...]

Protestors on the anti-Brexit marches have sensed an eerie absence. 'What is it?' I thought back in March as I stood on a soapbox to address an audience so jammed [...]

To say that the May administration is 'the worst government anyone can remember' is to abuse the English language. It isn't a government but a collection of factions so far [...]

Middle-class hatred of the upper class used to erupt regularly in Britain. From 1815 to 1914, it inspired the campaigns against rotten boroughs, the corn laws and the House of […]

The phrase 'existential crisis' is thrown around too easily. But it is hard to find a better description of the state of the Labour party, whose members and supporters overwhelmingly [...]

In the early hours of 9 June 2017, Jeremy Corbyn conceded defeat. For the luckless political journalists forced to cover the Labour campaign this was a rare moment. The leader [...]

In early 2003, the largest co-ordinated protests in history took place against the Iraq war. This, argues Nick Cohen, was a failure of solidarity with the Iraqi people. In this [...]

I've had Professor Ted Honderich's books on my shelves all my adult life. I won't pretend to reach for them often, but the argument of his 1976 essays on violence [...]

If we had had an argument in a pub about new Labour when it came to power--and for all I know we may have done--I would have been adamant on [...]

On a hot Saturday in June, 1,100 people gathered for a conference in Westminster organised by Compass, a liberal-left pressure group which thrashes out the arguments about what on earth [...]

BBC4 has had the good idea of running a series on the lost world of the 1970s left. It has produced films on radical feminists, who did change the world [...]

On the Saturday of the great anti-war demonstration of 2003, I watched one million people march through London, then sat down to write for the Observer. I pointed out that [...]

The nine novels of Christopher Brookmyre are worth reading even if slick comedy thrillers aren't to your taste. Eight were published after new Labour came to power, but for all [...]

In 1970 opinion polls showed that only 19 per cent of the population favoured joining what was then the Common Market. Fifty-seven per cent were against, their Euroscepticism sustained by [...]

I went the other day to London Metropolitan University, the former North London Polytechnic, about a mile north of Granita, the restaurant where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown decided how [...]

Every now and again, practice lives up to theory. Although there's yet to be an example of a supporter of free speech going to the West End and being confronted [...]

Every now and again, Khurshid Ahmed, a leading figure at the Commission for Racial Equality, has encounters with strangers which border on the surreal. Men and women who appear to […]

Just before the war against Iraq I began to receive strange calls from BBC journalists. Would I like information on how the leadership of the anti-war movement had been taken […]

If Lord Hutton's inquiry has achieved nothing else, it has shown that the BBC took Tony Blair's opponents to war on a false prospectus. The Sunday Sport or a pirate [...]

Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, one of the hit films of 2002, starred Tom Cruise as a detective in the Washington, DC of 2054. He is a 'pre-crime' solver who calls [...]

Unless there are concessions from the top brass of London's Metropolitan Police, the following scene will occur at some point next spring. Black and Asian police officers will assemble near [...]

Editors who chose to lead national news bulletins the other day with the story of a small train accident in Camden, north London (not many injured, let alone dead) appeared [...]

The worst fate for a satirist is to be taken at face value. In 1958, Michael Young, one of the authors of the 1945 Labour manifesto, looked at the country [...]

In the great 1970s sitcom Rising Damp, the late Leonard Rossiter played Rigsby, the miserable owner of a boarding house. In one episode, he was forced to find reasons to [...]

At the end of last year, it seemed that the over-quoted remark that 11 September 'had changed everything' seemed as discredited as 'Things can only get better'. No one in [...]

It was commonplace to say in the 20th century that the Labour Party owed more to Methodism than Marxism. In the 21st, it will owe nothing to either. The Nonconformist [...]

How to fill the days? When both major parties agree that the worst type of capitalism is the best and only way, what is there left to argue about on [...]

Nick Cohen reveals the astonishing details of how a little-noticed international agreement could undermine the basis of the welfare state After the Potters Bar crash, the airwaves buzzed with demands [...]

The best way to understand how those big-hearted Aussies regard refugees is to think of pollution. Like oil slicks, other countries' refuse drifts on the oceans without a thought for [...]

Ever since Tony Blair went shoulder to shoulder with George W Bush, critics have wondered what Britain is receiving in return for his support. Where, they asked, was the special [...]

I have debated with members of the Institute of Directors a couple of times and, although we disagree on the basics -- they view my ideas as a danger to [...]

'What a lot of garbage!' cried David Blunkett at criminologists who had asked him what he thought he was doing. 'It's time people grew up in [this] country and helped [...]