Pandaemonium

NOT SO BLACK AND WHITE

April 13, 2022 by Kenan Malik

. It’s out. Well, details of my forthcoming book, anyway. The book itself, Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics will be published in January by Hurst. Here’s the blurb from the Hurst brochure: Is white privilege real? Does American history begin in 1619 or 1776? Why has left-wing antisemitism grown? How racist is the working class? Who benefits most, when anti-racists speak in racial terms? . These very different questions have […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Kenan Malik, Not so Black and White

IMMIGRATION POLICIES THAT CREATE THE IMMIGRATION CRISIS

November 10, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on why immigration policies create the immigration crisis, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 6 November 2022, under the headline “Sealed borders are a fantasy and talk of invasion is toxic. There is an alternative“. On one thing, Suella Braverman is right. The system is broken. But about almost everything else, she is grievously wrong, especially about the reasons for it being so. The cause of the brokenness is not a surge of migrants and asylum seekers, still […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: asylum seekers, channel migrants, deterrence, eu immigration policy, immigration panics, immigration policy, polarisation, priti patel, rwanda deportation scheme, suella braverman

NEW POETRY FLOWERING ON THE STEM OF THE OLDEST

November 3, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 30 October 2022, under the headline “TS Eliot’s Waste Land was a barren place. But at least a spirit of optimism still prevailed”. He promised “a new start”. I made no comment. What should I resent? No, not a response to the Tory leadership chaos but lines from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. This month marks the centenary of the publication of Eliot’s masterpiece, one of […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: antisemitism, christianity, modernism, optimism, pessmism, poetry, ralph ellison, the waste land, ts eliot, virginia woolf

ON POLITICS AND HUMAN FLOURISHING

October 27, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the Beveridge Report and the idea of human flourishing, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 23 October 2022, under the headline “If this chaos does not make us rethink our idea of the good society, whatever will?” “Out of intermittent labour spring our gravest woes. It produces in the labourer intermittent energy; the off-days become habitual; with indolence comes intemperance; with uncertainty of employment comes recklessness about the future; from these result pauperism and the […]

Categories: Britain, Philosophy & Ethics, Politics • Tags: beveridge report, communitarianism, community, free market, human flourishing, libertarianism, poor laws, society, undeserving poor, welfare state, william beveridge

PICTURING ANOTHER WORLD AND OUR WORLD

October 20, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the photography of Chris Killip and Graham Smith, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 16 October 2022, under the headline “To romanticise or demonise – not the only ways to frame working-class lives”. An old man walking between rows of terraced housing and, behind him, the sky erased by the huge bow of a ship being built. A teenager picking coal on a beach. A man manoeuvring his horse and cart around a car dumped […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Culture & Books • Tags: chris killip, darren mcgarvey, graham smith, lynsey hanley, photography, poverty, poverty safari, seacoalers, susan sontag, working class

A SMALL STATE NOT SO SMALL FOR SOME

October 13, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the myths of the “small state”, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 9 October 2022, under the headline “Libertarians will let you live life as you wish – as long as you’re rich and powerful”. “I’m not going to tell you what to do or what to think or how to live your life,” Liz Truss told the Conservative party conference last week. “When the government plays too big a role, people feel smaller.” Conservatives have […]

Categories: Britain, Politics • Tags: anti-union laws, conservative party, hostile environment, liz truss, policing, small state, strikes, suella braverman, workers rights

BLUE LABOUR AND THE CRITIQUE OF LIBERALISM

October 6, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on radical and conservative critiques of liberalism, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 2 October 2022, under the headline “From Aristotle to Meloni, the ‘common good’ has been used to divide and rule”. A prime minister elevated to her role on the basis of 81,000 votes from Conservative party members; the imposition of a regressive “mini”-budget; a policy that a majority of people oppose but the real challenge to which has come through the actions of a handful […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Politics • Tags: blue labour, brothers of italy, common good, communitarians, conservatism, david goodhart, edmund burke, far right, giorgia meloni, maurice glasman, postliberals, radical universalism, reactionary right, roger scruton, universalism

LIBERALISM, CLASS POLITICS AND THE CULTURE WARS

September 29, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on changing public attitudes and the culture wars, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 25 September 2022, under the headline “Britain is becoming a more liberal and open society. But we are ever more divided too”. “The ‘woke’ outlook on national identity, national sentiment and immigration now tends to be the more popular”; and “whereas it might once have represented a widespread view, now the ‘anti-woke’ position on ‘culture war’ issues often appear to be more of a […]

Categories: Britain, Class • Tags: anti-racism, brexit, british politics, british social attitudes, culture wars, john curtice, liberalism, social polarisation, wokeness

THE THRILL OF THE ACTUAL

September 22, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the virtual and the actual, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 18 September 2022, under the headline “The web has expanded the reach of art but nothing beats standing in front of a Picasso”. It is more than 30 years since I saw Pablo Picasso’s Guernica face to face, as it were, in Madrid’s Prado Museum, shortly before it was moved into the Museo Reina Sofia, where it still hangs. Painted in 1937 in furious protest at […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: andre malraux, art, digital art, guernica, moma, pablo picasso, painting, virtual museum

QUESTIONING THE MONARCHY

September 15, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the need to question the monarchy, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 10 September 2022, under the headline “We can respect popular affection for the Queen and question the idea of royalty”. King Charles III. As soon as one monarch dies, another takes her place. It is a seamless transition that, for many, is both necessary and reassuring, helping sustain the myth of monarchy that, while kings and queens may pass on, the institution endures. […]

Categories: Britain, Politics • Tags: democracy, king charges, monarchy, queen elizabeth, republicanism, royal prerogative, royalty

CUTTING ACCESS, NOT MEETING NEEDS

September 8, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the rise of the regulatory state and its impact of public services, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 4 September 2022, under the headline “It’s no wonder I couldn’t see a GP: limiting access to services is the point”. It’s a problem familiar to millions: the trials of trying to book a doctor’s appointment. Last week, suffering from a debilitating condition but not an emergency, I called the GP surgery to get it checked out. […]

Categories: Britain, Politics • Tags: austerity, grenfell tower, nhs, regulatory state, trilateral commission

HOME OFFICE STATISTICS AND HOME OFFICE PROPAGANDA

September 1, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the reality of immigration statistics, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 28 August 2022, under the headline “There are lies, damn lies, and then there is Home Office propaganda about migrants”. There are Home Office statistics and then there are Home Office press releases. And the gap between the two is often so wide that even the most resourceful migrant would be unlikely to discover a way of navigating from the one to the other. Last week, the […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: afghan refugees, albanians, asylum seekers, channel migrants, home office, immigration, immigration statistics, priti patel, refugees, rwanda deportation scheme

MANAGING THE UNWANTED

August 25, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on Britain’s Rwanda deportation scheme, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 21 August 2022, under the headline “Treating refugees like ‘waste people’ is abhorrent, wherever they end up”. “There are state control, security, surveillance structures from the national level down… Political opposition is not tolerated and arbitrary detention, torture and even killings are accepted methods of enforcing control too.” The email from a Foreign Office official to colleagues in the Home Office in response to Britain’s plans to […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: deportations, fortress europe, human rights, offshoring, paul kagame, priti patel, racism, rwanda, rwanda deportation scheme

TO SAY THE UNSAYABLE

August 18, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on Salman Rushdie and free speech, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 14 August 2022, under the headline “Where Salman Rushdie defied those who would silence him, today too many fear causing offence”. “A poet’s work,” one of the characters in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses observes, is “to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.” “And if rivers of blood flow from […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: ayatollah khomeini, censorship, fatwa, free speech, islam, muslims, offence, peter mayer, salman rushdie, the satanic verses

BENEATH THE SKIN OF OUR OBSESSION WITH WHITENESS

August 11, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the contemporary obsession with whiteness, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 7 August 2022, under the headline “Beneath the skin of our obsession with whiteness lie deeper fears about our place in the world”. It is Viktor Orbán’s worst nightmare: “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” It is the opening line to Mohsin Hamid’s new novel The Last White Man, a line that deliberately echoes […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Race & Immigration • Tags: critical race theory, derrick bell, franz kafka, identity politics, mohsin hamid, racism, ta-nehisi coates, the last white man, viktor orban, white identity, whiteness

THE ENDS OF EDUCATION

August 4, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the working class and the meaning of education, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 31 July 2022, under the headline “If education is all about getting a job, the humanities are left just to the rich”. “We rented a garret, for which we paid (I think) 25s a year, bought a few second-hand forms and desks, borrowed a few chairs from the people in the house, bought a shilling’s worth of coals… and started our […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Culture & Books • Tags: browne report, david runciman, diversity, education, education cuts, humanities, jonathan rose, robbins report, universities, working class