On a point of accuracy, Conor:

In the Spectator blogpost by Martin Bright that you link to, he does *not* concede that his sacking from the NS had “nothing to do” with Gordon Brown.

Asked about this in the comments, he writes, “Was I sacked by Gordon Brown? well that’s a question for the Prime Minister”.

Then, when pressed, he responds by saying, with understated euphemism, “I left the New Statesman after three and a half years to pursue other projects. I don’t know if Gordon Brown was happy or sad about it. I doubt he even noticed.”

Taken together, those two comments are not quite the airy dismissal of Cohen’s claim that a casual reader of this post would imagine. If Bright is clear in his own mind that displeasing Gordon Brown had nowt to do, even indirectly, with his departure from the NS, it’s hard to see why he would have written the first statement, even if he subsequently tries to draw a line under the subject and move on.

But if he doubts that Gordon Brown even noticed his departure than he is saying that he was not sacked on the Prime Minister’s orders – which is what Nick Cohen claims in his speech. Listen to what he actually says again.

I understand that Charlie Whelan was rather abusive to Martin’s wife at a drinks reception on one occasion – but that is not the same thing at all.

Come on Mr Eugenides!

Nick Cohen asserted in the most strident possible terms that Gordon Brown “sacked” Martin Bright. That charge is utterly and comprehensively refuted by Bright’s comment: “I don’t know if Gordon Brown was happy or sad about it. I doubt he even noticed.”

it’s hard to see why he would have written the first statement, even if he subsequently tries to draw a line under the subject and move on

No it isn’t. He’s trying to spare Cohen’s blushes, by avoiding bluntly stating that his friend was talking crap. But that is, undoubtedly, what his comments add up to.

I doubt if he has ever been near a conflict zone in his life, yet he feels qualified to claim that humanitarian aid workers have become too ‘risk-averse’

I think you missed out the most astonishingly arrogant example of this general trend: Nick Cohen, well-paid columnist from the notoriously dangerous Islington, accusing Nelson Mandela of cowardice:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23499433-details/Please+don%27t+be+a+coward%2C+Mr+Mandela%3A+speak+out+now/article.do

Thanks Duncan, yes I had missed that one. Given that Nelson Mandela did use that speech to denounce repression in Zimbabwe did Nick Cohen ever write a follow up I wonder?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article4214924.ece

What Nick Cohen actually said at the Orwell awards was that Martin Bright should have been long-listed for the prize because he ‘has been fired by the government. When no one on the left gives him any support, Gordon Brown goes for him. This not a story for the BBC, it is not a story for any of you people, it is not a story for the Guardian or the Times. The Prime Minister sacks the political editor of the New Statesman for doing a programme about Ken Livingstone . . . .’

and then he starts shouting at people.

That is actually an incredibly serious allegation and would be a massive indictment both of freedom of the press in Britain and of the ability of journalists to defend it,if it were true so perhaps Martin can help to clarify things for us definitively.

“Perhaps the zeal of his conversion has convinced him that he is now the only true defender of his newly adopted faith.”

It’s mostly this one, I think. But you are right, it’s an on-going question as to why oh why he won’t just come out of the closet. At least Melanie Philips was honest about turning coat.

When all’s said though, I do find it very sad that Cohen, the man who gave us the outstanding collection Cruel Britannia, could go on to write self-referential, self-referential drivel like What’s Left?

Having said that, I wish the Observer would sack him and let Catherine Bennett write two columns every week.

“Perhaps the zeal of his conversion has convinced him that he is now the only true defender of his newly adopted faith.”

It’s mostly this one, I think. But you are right, it’s an on-going question as to why oh why he won’t just come out of the closet. At least Melanie Philips was honest about turning coat.

When all’s said though, I do find it very sad that Cohen, the man who gave us the outstanding collection Cruel Britannia, could go on to write self-referential, self-righteous drivel like What’s Left?

Having said that, I wish the Observer would sack him and let Catherine Bennett write two columns every week.

That video should be embeddeed here! If I ever need some cheering up, I always go back to it. It’s pure quality.

That and combined withis his haughty pronouncements on how liberals were nasty for having little time for Sarah Palin. That was a talking point straight from Melanie Phillips.

Well we don’t want to be accused of trying to censor people Paul!

But I think that the decision by the Observer (the paper that founded Amnesty International) to publish an article defending the use of torture against people arrested under anti-terrorism laws was one of the most shameful in its history.

My leaving the New Statesman was my own decision. I had been there for longer than my two predecessors and it was time to move on. My work on Ken Livingstone did not go down with certain sections of the Brown camp. I simply don’t know what Gordon Brown thought of this or my political editorship. Some within his inner circle seek to second guess the Prime Minister and some, including Charlie Whelan, may have sought to destabilize my position with the magazine’s then owner, Geoffrey Robinson. But seriously, only Geoffrey and Gordon know whether it went any further than that.

I disagree with Conor Foley’s take on Nick’s book, which I believe to be a colllection of one of the work of one of the country’s finest columnists. I don’t agree with Nick on a whole range of issues. But until we on the left begin to address some of the serious criticisms Nick raises rather than slinging rather pointless insults there is no hope for us.

But until we on the left begin to address some of the serious criticisms Nick raises rather than slinging rather pointless insults there is no hope for us.

Hmm.

But until Nick begins to address some of the serious arguments those on the left raise, rather than slinging pointless insults, there is no hope for him.

Better.

Thanks for that Martin. But isn’t this the fundamental problem with Nick’s writing style and technique?

How can anyone respond to the speech he made at the Orwell awards other than by saying ‘it is not true’. Similarly, how can one engage in debate with either of the two positions that Nick has advanced on Afghanistan that I quoted from above?

I was working for UNHCR in Kosovo on 9/11 and some of my colleagues went to Afghanistan immediately. If I had read Nick’s first article at the time (we did not have access to British newspapers) I would have fallen off my chair in astonishment. When I read his second piece (shortly before I was due to go back to Afghanistan where several of my friends have been killed before and since) I was equally amazed (and completely outraged).

Nick’s contributions to the debate about humanitarian intervention have been the most uniquely ill-informed and unhelpful that I have read by any mainstream media commentator. To paraphrase Nick himself ‘how many Burmese died because of the stupid political posturing of Kouchner after Cyclone Nargis and how many Darfuris died because Bush and Blair kept hinting they were going to use military force there?’

I have offered to debate these issues face-to-face with Nick on several occasions so let me repeat the offer here. I will probably be in London towards the end of next month so can do it at his convenience. Maybe Martin could chair the meeting!

I’m happy to show up drunk and shout incoherently at everyone.

And how can you expect people to seriously engage with someone who says things like

…British Jews are living through a very dangerous period. They are the only ethnic minority whose slaughter official society will excuse.

“I will probably be in London towards the end of next month so can do it at his convenience. Maybe Martin could chair the meeting!”

I endorse that message.

I’m as disappointed as anyone by Nick Cohen, who has gone from being the one reason to buy The Observer to one of several reasons for avoiding it. But we need to be preciise in our criticism. The piece on Obama and Palin struck me as fair enough. He wasn’t saying liberal criticism of Palin had destroyed Obama’s campaign. He was saying Obama was smart enough to see it had the potential to do so.

Damn. That spelling of ‘precise’ was irony, OK?

In the greatest tradition of blog commenting I want to ignore the substance of your post to nitpick the idea that describing Guantanamo as a Gulag is a regretabble exagerration. We know there were (are?) secret prisons in Eastern Europe, regular renditions to countries that torture, black sites in Afghanistan, Diego Garcia and Iraq, not to mention Guantanamo Bay itself. It may all have been slightly less burtal than the Soviet Gulag, but people were still tortured to death in these prisons and it’s clear we don’t know the worst of it yet.

Cohen was brave on Hassan Butt though.

I’m not sure there’s a great deal of point in analysing Cohen’s comments at the Orwell Prize, when he was clearly too drunk to know what he was doing. The only reason I asked Martin in his comments was that I was amazed he wanted to publicise it – I thought he would be as embarassed as the rest of the audience.

In any case from ‘Why it is right to be anti-American’

http://www.newstatesman.com/200201140006

to Cohen’s support of Policy Exchange’s Anthony Browne for much the same things as he once attacked him:

[2003] This line of cant has been developed by Anthony Browne, an occasional contributor to this paper, and a writer for the Times and Spectator, elite journals both. “Blair’s epidemics” of Aids, TB and hepatitis B are being spread by asylum-seekers, he has asserted to great acclaim. You can understand the reasons for the applause. Browne has moved the debate on. Asylum-seekers are not only scroungers and terrorists but plague carriers, like the rats that brought the Black Death.

[2008] Browne has stood up for free speech and against liberal alliances with radical Islam, and exposed the civil servants who were pretending that a rise in HIV was due to poor sex education rather than immigration from African countries where the virus is raging. A former press officer at the Department of Health staff told me that his arguments caused consternation, not least because they were true.

there’s plenty of published material. The latter was especially remarkable given Cohen’s once impressive track record in this area.

until we on the left begin to address some of the serious criticisms Nick raises

The trouble is that I don’t think the criticisms Nick raises are “serious”, because they’re so widely directed, poorly researched and inaccurately stated that they’re not really possible to respond to.

Now I appreciate that nobody likes criticism and that critics always paint a picture of us that we fail to recognise, but even so it’s hard to get beyond “what on Earth is he on about?” even if you don’t feel they’re being made in bad faith. To be honest it’s hard not to feel, as I think Conor clearly does, that what Nick (and not only Nick) is doing is experiencing a reaction against things he personally said or did in the past, blowing them up into caricature and then projecting them onto an all-purpose “the left”. To be honest there’s not a lot you can do to engage with this.

Of course there are things about “the left” that leftists of all kinds will disagree with, vehemently, though naturally what those particular things are will vary according to what kind of leftists we individually are. “The left” is a very large and very broad category. It engages in polemics with itself and fights among itself (to be honest, rather more than I’d like). But if those discussions are to be had they need to be had in a civilised fashion, not through denunciations, guilt-by-association, demands for condemnations, throwing around the word “fascist” indiscriminately, deliberate failure to distinguish between defending someone and supporting them and all the other characteristics of the War On Our Regretted Leftist Youth in which Nick is a leading, if not altogether upright, protagonist. Nick may think he’s channelling the spirit of George Orwell but I think he’s speaking with the voice of some rather nastier characters than that.

You could fill these comment boxes with evidence of Nick’s fast-and-loose approach to the truth, so let me add my small trowel full. I know some commentators (like Sunder Katwala of the Fabians, say) think Nick is right to pick on the far left, but just goes wrong when he picks on more soft left people (er, like the Fabians) . But really his style of argument (misrepresentation, inaccuracy, more truthiness than truth) is used against all enemies. One particular twitch was his claim that the Socialist Workers were trying to get in bed with Islamic fundamentalists by attacking strip clubs. According to Nick “the party’s paper tried to reconcile anti-capitalism and religious fundamentalism by calling on the comrades to protest against Spearmint Rhino lap-dancing clubs”. Now of course the SWP just like protesting against that kind of thing, and Nick just made up in his head the idea this was some kind of moral jihad by “trots in Burka’s ” . Oddly enough, Nick puts this episode in his new book “waiting for the Etonians” – but at the same time seems to have take against strip clubs himself .

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23592670-details/Why+does+Labour+want+a+sex+bistro+in+my+street/article.do?expand=true

it’s just a small example among many Nasty Nick-ism, but one that got on my nerves.

“But until we on the left begin to address some of the serious criticisms Nick raises rather than slinging rather pointless insults there is no hope for us.”

But how can the left address Nick’s points when he is happy to *lie* about what those on the liberal left are doing? I think the recent case of Cohen totally misrepresenting the Fabian Society’s attitude to left-wing Islamic attitudes is a case in point.

Maybe Cohen has some valid criticisms we should listen to. But then again, when he spends so much time screaming about how he’s the only one who knows what it is to be left wing, and the rest of us are cowardly worms – and then goes on to totally misrepresent situations, or possibly outright lie – it’s very hard to have any time for him.

“Engage with his criticisms”? This is someone who once ended a Private Eye piece on the Green Party with “Hitler was an environmentalist too”! What are you supposed to say that will “engage” with such infantile rot – “NO U”?

EJH gets it right (as he usually does) in his first paragraph. It is very difficult to take Nick seriously when he writes so sloppily and he indulges in such overblown rhetoric. My first reaction to an article by Nick is “what is he talking about?” I used to take the trouble to leave comments on his articles, and write to Nick and the editor, asking for an explanation of some of Nick’s references but I never got an answer: I think that we’ve all got better things to do with our Sundays than write to the Observer in the vague hope that someone will explain what Nick is talking about.

Jonathan Coe’s novel “What a carve up!” is mainly a portrayal of a rather unpleasant family, the Winshaws. One of the Winshaws is a journalist, Hilary. She writes a newspaper column every Friday called “Plain common sense”, in which she airs her views on any topic that takes her fancy. At one point (probably mid-1980s) she writes a bitter attack on a group that is protesting against Saddam Hussein’s regime. In 1990 she writes a bitter attack on Saddam Hussein. She appears to see no contradicition. She shows no sign of any real engagement with the issues, or with the actual reasoning of people who disagree with her.

There are plenty of journalists like that and unfortunately Nick is one of them. “Marching in support of a fascist dictatorship” is a nice phrase but Nick shows no sign of taking seriously the reasons why more than a million people marched in London on February 15th 2003. He never mentions international law. He shows no sign of understanding that “regime change” could be risky and problematic. Now that “regime change” in Iraq has indeed turned out to be very problematic, and the situation six years later is still “fragile” (according to David Milliband), Nick simply ignores the subject. There is no sign of Nick asking himself the type of hard questions he was suggesting that Robin Cook ask himself.

So, like Conor Foley, I have to wonder whether Nick actually believes what he writes. Has he given more than nano-second of thought to the consequences of starting a war or to whether Saddam or the Serbs really were fascists? When he wrote about “Iraqi bomb atrocities”(in the Standard this week) was he really thinking or was he just on auto-pilot? Is it all just spectacle?

“I have to wonder whether Nick actually believes what he writes”

I wonder if he cares either way, just as long as he gets paid.

He never mentions international law.

I don’t think that’s fair to Nick – IIRC, he had an “amusing” interlude in What’s Left? when he was discussing the encouragement the liberalsses and leftisses gave to the terrorisses, in which he imagined a suicide bomber hurling himself into a crowd while shouting It’s illegal!. (The Iraq invasion, that is).

So far as I can tell, that’s one of Nick’s more in-depth attempts to analyse anti-war arguments, as opposed to just regurgitating stuff he’s read at Harry’s Place.

I think if all he cared about were being paid, he would write less carelessly.

Nick Cohen did make a reference to international law in his ‘Why it is right to be anti-American’ article http://www.newstatesman.com/200201140006

He argued that: “since 11 September he [Tony Blair] has been trying to persuade Washington to help the developing world and agree to abide by international law.”

This piece was written in January 2002 (before the torture memos, the invasion of Iraq and Guantanamo Bay). So what did he mean by the US refusal to abide by international law?

The only reference he makes in the article is to the US Government’s “determination to destroy the Kyoto agreement, International Criminal Court and Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty” But there was nothing illegal in any of those actions. The US was simply exercising its rights not to sign two international treaties that it did not agree with – and to withdraw from another one.

This is an absolutely elementary mistake.

He is using the phrase ‘international law’ to mean ‘something I feel strongly about’. Exactly the acusation that he then threw out those who pointed out that the invasion of Iraq was illegal.

He later did the same thing when he cited the Genocide Convention as providing legal authority for military invasions of other countries without UN approval – when of course it does no such thing.

“one of the country’s finest columnists”? He would fail a first year law course.

Brilliant Connor
Martin
What are the serious issues that Nick raises, that doesn’t involve polemic personal rants.
What do you not agree with Nick.
What do you believe in on say issues like tax, NHS, welfare, immigration and education because I have yet to any true concrete ideas from yourself or Nick only snide articles aimed at the Labour party and one good article on the arts.
But I did like your new deal for the mind. But didn’t Nick agree with Goldberg’s analysis that FDR was a liberal fascist
Also what about taking up Conor’s offer, I am sure the Fabians will host. Also there will bound to be free booze.

How can you say you believe in freedom of speech and then say you will delete any misogynist, racist, homophobic or xenophobic comments? Not that I have any intention of making such comments, I just find your posting rules a bit hypocritical. Besides, the only reason any man will post on here will be to try and impress a girl with poorly researched “principles” based on sentimentality and peer pressure. You lot make me just as sick as the likes of the BNP. It’s about time you all grew a pair.

Aye- I never mention my job to women, I just say I’m a Liberal Conspiracy commentator. Have them all falling into my arms, I do.

Fuck- actually, you’ve won me over to whatever you believe in. Come back and explain what I would be if I only had a pair, and I’ll follow you.

You see, perhaps because you were so busy engaging in important and weighty matters, you didn’t actually deign to say what you consider acceptable, just to give general meaningless abuse. I want to know more so I can be a roaring success in life such as you obviously are.

define success.

“I disagree with Conor Foley’s take on Nick’s book, which I believe to be a colllection of one of the work of one of the country’s finest columnists. I don’t agree with Nick on a whole range of issues. But until we on the left begin to address some of the serious criticisms Nick raises rather than slinging rather pointless insults there is no hope for us.”

I agree that the current book has some good bits.

I also agree that Nick still has the potential to provoke serious debate on the left.

But his ability to do so is going to be seriously limited while he continues to be openly indifferent to the question of whether his boldest assertions have any basis in fact.