Author Archives: Kenan Malik

PREVENTING TERROR OR FREE SPEECH?

June 18, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This is the opening to my essay on the flaws of Britain’s Prevent strategy, published in the Observer on 15 June 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. If you believe that immigration has destroyed Western civilisation, I might think you’ve become too drunk on Robert Jenrick and Allison Pearson, Douglas Murray and Melanie Phillips. The British state, though, may well mark you down as being on the path to terrorism. According to an online training course for Prevent, […]

Categories: Britain, Free Speech, War on terror • Tags: anti-terror laws, deradicalisation, ethnonationalism, prevent, rightwing terrorism, terrorism, usman khan, white supremacism

IS THERE BLACK IN THE UNION JACK?

June 11, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This is the opening to my essay on race, whiteness and British identity, published in the Observer on 8 June 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. “There ain’t no black in the Union Jack, send the fucking bastards back.” It was a common chant in football grounds in the 1980s, directed at black players, and at black fans, too. Britain is a very different place today, that old raw racism much diminished, both on the terraces […]

Categories: Britain, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: britishness, matthew goodwin, national identity, nationalism, racism, union jack, white decline

AFTER MACINTYRE

June 4, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This is the opening to my essay on the the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, rpublished in the Observer on 1 June 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. “Since I understood liberalism,” Alasdair MacIntyre once told an interviewer, “I have wanted nothing to do with it.” His death, last month, has robbed us of one of the most important moral philosophers of the past century. Born in Glasgow in 1929, he spent most of his life teaching in America. […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: after virtue, alasdair macintyre, enlightenment, liberalism, marxism, modernity, moral thinking

THE MONSTER ISRAEL HELPED CREATE

May 28, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This is the opening to my essay how Israel helped nurture Hamas for its own ends, published in the Observer on 25 May 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. “They want Hamas to remain in power”, claimed the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, after European and Canadian government criticisms of Israel’s actions in Gaza. Many British commentators agree, denouncing the UK government for standing with Hamas. The horror killings of two Jewish Israeli embassy staff in Washington DC added weight to such […]

Categories: International, Justice & Liberties • Tags: benjamin netanyahu, first intifada, gaza, hamas, israel, israel's role in nurturing hamas, plo

WHY WE ARE BECOMING AN ISLAND OF STRANGERS

May 21, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This is the opening to my essay on the real reasons we are becoming an “island of strangers”, published in the Observer on 18 May 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. “Society? There is no such thing!” Margaret Thatcher famously told Woman’s Own magazine in 1987. “There are individual men and women, and there are families.” Thatcher’s critics viewed her sentiment as expressing a soulless selfishness, her supporters as an assertion of personal responsibility. Writing in 2006, the […]

Categories: Britain, Class • Tags: "no such thing as society", austerity policies, deindustrialisation, island of strangers, keir starmer, margaret thatcher, society, thatcherism

IMMIGRATION AND THE POLITICS OF CYNICISM

May 14, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This is the opening to my essay on the row over the government’s India trade deal, published in the Observer on 11 May 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. ”Two-Tier Keir betrays British workers.” “Labour’s Tax Break for Indian Workers.” “British workers come last in Starmer’s Britain.” “An open door for further mass uncontrolled immigration of low skilled workers.” “This is not the time to trade away immigration controls.” Quotes and headlines from Nigel Farage, the Daily Mail, Robert […]

Categories: Britain, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: conservatives, cynicism, immigration, nigel farage, politics of cynicism, reform uk, uk-india trade deal

HOW HANNAH ARENDT STILL SPEAKS TO US

May 7, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This is the opening to my essay on Hannah Arendt and her significance today, published in the Observer on 4 May 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. “What happened? Why did it happen? How could it have happened?” asked Hannah Arendt in a preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism. These were “questions with which my generation had been forced to live for the better part of its adult life”. Among the most influential political thinkers of the 20th […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: aime cesaire, antisemitism, frantz fanon, hannah arendt, holocaust, imperialism, jewishness, nazism, race-imperialism, racism, scramble for africa, stalinism, the origins of totalitarianism

THINKING THROUGH SEX, GENDER AND RIGHTS

April 30, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This is the opening to my essay on the Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of “woman” in the Equality Act, published in the Observer on 27 April 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. The debate over the Supreme Court judgment on sex and gender and the meaning of “woman” within the Equality Act 2010 has been almost as illuminating as the judgment itself. The court affirmed that the meaning of “woman” in the Equality Act refers […]

Categories: Britain, Politics, Women • Tags: equality act 2010, gender, sex, supreme court, supreme court ruling on the meaning of "woman", trans rights, women's rights

VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY AGAINST FREE SPEECH

April 23, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on viewpoint diversity, academic objectivity and free speech, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 20 April 2025, under the headline “Trump’s political bullying of Harvard will do nothing to foster diversity of thought”. Few people want to live in an echo chamber. Many have no problem being friends with those who vote differently to the way they do. And many would probably agree with John Stuart Mill that “he who knows only his own side of the case, […]

Categories: Academia, Free Speech, International • Tags: academic objectivity, affirmative action, anti-woke, donald trump, eric kaufmann, free speech, harvard university, heterodox academy, identity politics, jonathan haidt, michael roth, richard redding, richard shweder

MONOCHROME VIEWS OF, AND BY, MUSLIMS

April 16, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on British Muslims, identity politics, sectarianism and bigotry, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 13 April 2025, under the headline “The identity politics of many Muslims, and critics of Islam, are deeply corrosive”. A poll suggests that most British Muslims identify more with their faith than with their nation. The head of the Saudi-backed Muslim World League counsels British Muslims to talk less about Gaza and more about domestic issues. Labour MP Tahir Ali is criticised for […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Britain, Politics • Tags: biradari system, blasphemy laws, british muslims, clan system, integration, islam, jewish identity, labour party, machine politics, multiculturalism, muslims, parekh report, sectarianism, tahir ali

THE WHITE WORKING CLASS BEYOND THE MYTHS

April 9, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the realities of the white working class, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 6 April 2025, under the headline “The white working class is nothing like what politicians think – or claim – it is”. “Many of those who act as the champions of the white person against immigrants”, Labour MP David Winnick told the House of Commons in 1968, “have not in the past gone out of their way to defend the interests of the white […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Culture & Books • Tags: david winnick, joel budd, underdogs, white working class

FEAR AND SOCIAL ORDER

April 2, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on fear as a means of enforcing social order, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 30 March 2025, under the headline “Just like McCarthy, Trump spreads fear everywhere before picking off his targets”. “Gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that goes into the finding and getting of it.” It’s a line spoken by Walter Huston in the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a story about greed and moral corruption directed […]

Categories: Free Speech, International, Justice & Liberties, Politics • Tags: age of fear, columbia university, deportations, donald trump, fear, free speech, jd vance, joseph mccarthy, mass deportations, mccarthyism, michael roth, social conflict, thought control

ALL THE WORLD A STAGE TO DECOLONISE

March 26, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the debate over decolonising Shakespeare, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 23 March 2025, under the headline “Why decolonise Shakespeare when all the world’s a stage for his ideas on injustice?” “My quarrel with the English language,” James Baldwin wrote in his essay Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare, had been “that the language reflected none of my experience.” And so “I condemned him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression”. Then, he “began […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Justice & Liberties • Tags: akira kurosawa, belarus free theatre, decolonisation, decolonising shakespeare, enlightenment, eurocentric, frantz fanon, helen hopkins, james baldwin, ralph ellison, shakespeare, shakespeare birthplace trust, sulayman al-bassam, universalism, vishal bhardwaj, web dubois

THE MISSING CLASS

March 19, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on how class is a missing category in discussions of the justice system, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 16 March 2025, under the headline “Amid all the noise about the UK’s ‘two-tier’ justice system, there is silence on class”. As so often in such debates, the controversy over new guidelines for courts from the Sentencing Council for England and Wales has obscured as much as it has illuminated. Critics have condemned them as presaging a “two-tier” justice […]

Categories: Britain, Class • Tags: disparities in sentencing outcomes, inequality, justice system, lammy report, poverty, pre-sentence reports, racial disparities, robert jenrick, sentencing council, sentencing guidelines, shabana mahmood, two-tier justice

STATEMENT ON THE DOUGLAS MURRAY DEFAMATION CASE

March 14, 2025 by Kenan Malik

In the wake of the Douglas Murray defamation case against the Observer this week, which focused on a column I had written last August, there have been a large number of claims that I lied or sought to deliberately deceive. This short statement is to clarify what happened and to put the case in context. I accept I was wrong. But I did not deliberately lie or seek to deceive. The column of 11 August 2024, entitled “The roots of […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, Kenan Malik • Tags: defamation, douglas murray