A typically measured, nuanced, balanced & not at all bitter, unhinged, provocative or resentful Nick Cohen, who has been on quite a journey since describing Zionism as "colonialism" in the early 2000s, to demonising the wrong sort of left-wingers in the pages of The Spectator.
Nick Cohen was for many years a critic of Tony Blair's foreign policy, but then began to modify his views after 2001, advocating the 2003 invasion of Iraq & becoming a critic of the Stop the War Coalition.

Curious.
In 2006, he was a leading signatory to the Euston Manifesto, which proposed what it termed "a new political alignment", in which the left would take a stronger stance in favour of military intervention & against so-called anti-American attitudes - also signed by Julie Burchill.
Cohen also supported the NATO-led intervention in Libya to oust Gaddafi in 2011, & in 2012, he called for Western military intervention in the Syrian Civil War.

In 2006, the Muslim Council of Britain suggested Cohen was "part of a circle of pernicious Islamophobic commentators".
In August 2014, Cohen was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence, & in 2015, he criticised Ecuador for granting political asylum to Julian Assange, calling Ecuador a "petro-socialist authoritarian state".
And here's the rambling, contradictory, grifting, predictable, opportunist Left-bashing "left-wing" half-wit in all his snide & pompous glory:

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More from @docrussjackson

30 Sep
Tory & @UKLabour vote share*, 1918 - 2019.

Only THREE times since 1918, has a vote swing of over 9% been recorded: to a National Govt in 1931, & to Labour in 1945 & 2017.

*The UK's antiquated FPTP electoral system means seats are more important than either votes or vote share. Image
On three occasions, the party with the most votes did not win the most seats.

In 1929 and in February 1974, Labour polled fewer votes than the Conservatives but had more MPs. In 1951 the Conservatives won the most seats, but received fewer votes than Labour.
Votes/seat #GE2019

SNP 26K
Tory 38K
Labour 51K
LibDems 336K
Greens 865K

#GE2017 resulted in a hung parliament.

At #GE2019, Johnson's Tories got just 329,767 more votes than in 2017, but an 80 seat majority., despite fewer than 3 in 10 of the electorate voting Tory. Image
Read 11 tweets
20 Sep
'Deregulation' has been the mantra of successive Govts. Its proponents claim it increases competition, drives down prices, & drives up consumer satisfaction.

With gas suppliers folding, prices rising, & satisfaction plummeting, the current debacle suggests the opposite is true.
Although deregulation is going VERY well for some...
Maybe we should deregulate the tax system?

Why not outsource or privatise the #HMRC?

In 2004, an IT contract for the tax credit system was awarded to Capgemini, Fujitsu & BT - one of the biggest ever IT outsourcing contracts, at a value of £2.6 billion, now risen to £8.5bn!
Read 4 tweets
20 Sep
Lecture: 'A War on Science? The Death of Expertise? Rethinking Vaccine Hesitancy'.

Vaccine hesitancy is framed as a problem of public misunderstanding of science, so vaccine outreach focuses on educating the misguided public.

This is a flawed approach.

peritia-trust.eu/peritia-lectur…
Where vaccine hesitancy continues, cynicism has bred the harsher view that the hesitant publics are anti-science and/or anti-expertise.

Yet research into science and the publics lends strong support to a different view, which it is very important to understand.
Public attitudes regarding scientific claims turn crucially on epistemic trust (an individual's willingness to consider new knowledge as trustworthy) rather than familiarity with science itself: it follows that it is poor trust in expert sources that engender vaccine hesitancy.
Read 5 tweets
19 Sep
Why on earth are so many Tory MPs keen to explore health insurance when we already have the #NHS?

Oh.
Remember back in 2014, when @unitetheunion released a list of 70 MPs with proven links to private healthcare providers, & ALL OF THEM voted in favour of the Health & Social Care Act, a bill that went a long way towards privatising swathes of the #NHS?

mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/s…
Some of the current & former MPs with proven links to healthcare providers:

Sajid Javid
Priti Patel
Kwarsi Kwateng
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Amber Rudd
Nadhim Zahawi
Oliver Letwin
IDS
David Cameron
David Davis
Michael Fallon
Liam Fox
Jeremy Hunt
Penny Mordaunt
John Redwood
Jo Swinson Image
Read 5 tweets
19 Sep
A #THREAD on free-market fundamentalist ex-banker Sajid Javid's recent grotesque & condescending speech to the opaquely funded free market think tank, the Centre for Social Justice: "The hidden costs of #COVID19: the social backlog"

gov.uk/government/spe…
The 'Centre for Social Justice' is another opaquely funded free-market think tank, co-founded by IDS, Tim Montgomerie, Mark Florman & Philippa Stroud, specialising in generating moral panics which demonise the poor using 'decision-based evidence making'.

archive.discoversociety.org/2014/05/06/the…
He starts off with condescending & insensitive remarks: "I’VE faced some challenges in MY time in government. The crisis of rough sleeping. The tragedy of #Grenfell. The injustice of #Windrush" - disgraceful episodes, caused primarily by deregulation & the Culture War Tory Govt.
Read 32 tweets
19 Sep
It's irresponsible to allow Martin Daubney on the clickbait #vine show to say unchallenged ‘there is no proof that children spread the virus’.

It's unacceptable that broadcasters are complicit in spreading #disinformation, when Britain has the highest COVID death rate in Europe. ImageImageImage
We've known for a long time that children DO 'spread the virus', & it's just a blatantly misleading & dangerously irresponsible lie for mini-Farage Daubney to claim that there is no evidence that they do.

Shameful broadcasting.

#vine

theconversation.com/children-may-t…
Daubney also lied about COVID child-deaths: he said 'only 10 under 18s had died & they all had underlying health conditions', but we know that six under 18s with no underlying health conditions died from Covid19 in England before the end of February 2021.

fullfact.org/health/mail-un… ImageImage
Read 16 tweets

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