Cruel Britannia: Reports on the Sinister and the Preposterous - Softcover

Cohen, Nick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1859842887 ISBN 13: 9781859842881

Publisher: Verso, 2000

Synopsis

While the rest of the media lounge in the warm glow of New Labour’s rosy dawn, one journalist in Britain has been a consistently sharp and witty scourge of Tony Blair and his bandwagon babes. Step forward Nick Cohen, denizen of the Observer newspaper’s celebrated ‘Hold on a Minute’ column and a writer who has regularly identified Labour’s Third Way as the mid-point between truth and lies, decency and hypocrisy, honesty and corruption. Whether he is tearing into Labour’s plans to privatize the prison system and introduce curfews for teenagers, or detailing the government’s cozying up to Rupert Murdoch and the hot money traders in the City, Cohen maintains a peerless grasp on the power that flows from fusing invective with scrupulous investigation. Even Downing Street Policy Advisor Andrew Adonis was forced to concede that ‘no one is better at getting under the Government’s skin’. A coruscating barrage of dispatches from his sniper’s post, Cruel Britannia celebrates Cohen’s lonely stand. It will revivify the disillusioned who anticipated something better from Labour’s ascent and fortify those on the left who expected little and received precisely that.

About this title

About the Author

Nick Cohen is a columnist for The Observer newspaper. His articles have appeared in a wide range of publications including the Independent on Sunday, London Review of Books, New Statesman, Jewish Quarterly and Modern Review. He lives in London.

From Publishers Weekly

A leftist British journalist, Cohen is the kind of writer who must relish making enemies. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Labor Party cohorts are his main targets in this collection of columns on politics and society that were previously published in the British press, mostly in the Observer. Cohen's big issue is that Blair's New Labor has mimicked its Conservative Thatcherite predecessors. As he writes in his introduction: "The same themes kept being heard, the same vices were displayed, only the suits were different." Cohen's caustic tone indicates that he feels personally betrayed that Blair's government hasn't adhered to the unionist politics that Cohen obviously favors. With the class-based anger that is a tradition in England, he also takes on the legal system, psychologists and the media. Occasionally, as in a piece criticizing Britain's unwillingness to impose trade sanctions on Burma's military regime for its support of the drug trade, Cohen hits his mark. As often as not, however, his razor pen misses, as in a McCarthyesque column excoriating Labor for hiring an economic consultant who once worked for the CIA. To most readers, the sum total of these columns will add up to a dogmatic voice from the leftist wilderness. Of course, a minority will relish the questions he raises, and more than a minority will take pleasure from the sharpest jottings of his poison pen. But even Americans who share his views (and those who feel toward Bill Clinton the way Cohen feels toward Blair) will have to be avid followers of British politics and society to fully appreciate this collection. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1859842887
• ISBN 13: 9781859842881
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 260