Author Archives: Kenan Malik

“THE ENEMY IS PUTIN, NOT PUSHKIN”

June 22, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on why the Ukraine war should not lead us to boycott Russian culture, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 18 June 2023, under the headline “We can revile Putin’s violence in Ukraine, but we’re not at war with Russian culture”. On 4 September 1939, the day after Britain had declared war on Germany, the BBC Proms opened with extracts from Richard Wagner’s works including The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, Götterdämmerung, Tristan and Isolde, Tannhäuser and Die Walküre. Later concerts that year included works […]

Categories: Culture & Books, International • Tags: cultural boycott, culture, elizabeth gilbert, hanif kureishi, herder, russia, russian culture, sensitivity readers, ukraine war, vladimir putin, wagner

MORAL OUTSOURCING FROM HUMANS TO MACHINES

June 15, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the problem of blaming machines for human decisions, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 11 June 2023, under the headline “Fantasy fears about AI are obscuring how we already abuse machine intelligence”. Last November, a young African American man, Randal Quran Reid, was pulled over by the state police in Georgia as he was driving into Atlanta. He was arrested under warrants issued by Louisiana police for two cases of theft in New Orleans. Reid […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics, Science & Technology • Tags: ai, ai bias, artificial intelligence, chatgpt, facial recognition, moral outsourcing, moral panic, rumman chowdhury

TRAMPLING OVER BORDERS TO STOP THE BOATS

June 8, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on how anti-immigration policies trample over the sovereignty of poorer nations, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 4 June 2023, under the headline “The EU pays Africa’s brutal militias to lock up migrants. Britain wants to follow suit”. “Please help, today one person self dead by petrol because hopeless.” Sally Hayden received the text in October 2018. The Irish Times journalist was one of the few outsiders trusted by refugees locked up in Libya. The text was about Abdulaziz, who […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: eu immigration policy, immigration policy, libya, robert jenrick, sally hayden, stop the boats

FREE SPEECH ADVOCATES DENYING FREE SPEECH

June 1, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on “free speech advocates” who seek to restrict free speech, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 28 May 2023, under the headline “If you defend free speech, you must defend it all and not silence those you disagree with”. Normally, I’m keen for this column to be widely read. This time, though, I hope not too widely. I’d be happy if it doesn’t catch the attention of Jacob Rees-Mogg or of government officials. I’m due to […]

Categories: Academia, Britain, Free Speech • Tags: censorship, dan kaszeta, free speech, free speech union, gender critical feminism, jacob rees-mogg, prevent, trans rights, universities

PROTEST AND DEMOCRACY

May 25, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on why democracy cannot function without protest, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 21 May 2023, under the headline “Once we ask the Lee Anderson question, our democracy is on a slippery slope”. “I’ve looked at your website and it says you embrace democracy,” Tory MP and Conservative Party deputy chair Lee Anderson said to Graham Smith, chief executive of the anti-monarchist campaign group Republic, during a Parliamentary Select Committee hearing last week. “If you embrace democracy so […]

Categories: Britain, Justice & Liberties • Tags: anti-union laws, democracy, lee anderson, policing, public order act, right to protest, trade unions

ON IMMIGRATION, NEUROTIC POLITICIANS AND A MORE RELAXED PUBLIC

May 18, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on why the public is more liberal about immigration than are politicians, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 14 May 2023, under the headline “It’s no longer ‘the will of the people’ to turn our back on asylum seekers”. “It is designed to meet the will of the British people in a humane and fair way.” So wrote the home secretary, Suella Braverman, and the justice secretary, Alex Chalk, about the government’s Illegal Immigration Bill in […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: channel migrants, illegal immigration bill, immigration panics, immigration statistics, rwanda deportation scheme, suella braverman

THE LEGACIES OF THE 1848 REVOLUTIONS

May 14, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This review of Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 was published in the Observer on 7 May 2023 “We are standing at a turning point in Europe’s fortunes”, warned the Prussian diplomat Joseph von Radowitz in February 1848. He was speaking of the year in which revolution spread through Europe at startling speed. In January, Sicily erupted in revolt against the Bourbon king Ferdinand II. Six weeks later, an insurrection in Paris overthrew the French king […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History • Tags: 1848 revolutions, christopher clark, liberalism, marxism, radicalism

POOR HOUSING IS A POLITICAL CHOICE

May 11, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on why good housing is not utopian, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 7 May 2023, under the headline “If you think decent homes for all is an impossible dream, take a look at Vienna”. Why shouldn’t working-class people own their own homes? It’s a rhetorical question that has provided the justification for the transformation of housing policy over the past half century in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s “property-owning” revolution in the 1980s. “I want […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Politics • Tags: council housing, home ownership, housing, nimbyism, nye bevan, property owning democracy, social housing, thatcherism, vienna housing

DIANE ABBOTT AND A BLACK AND WHITE WORLD

May 4, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the debate about Diane Abbott’s views on race and the Holocaust, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 30 April 2023, under the headline “Diane Abbott’s letter shows how antiracism has been reduced to decrying ‘white privilege’”. In 1996, Diane Abbott wrote a column for the Hackney Gazette objecting to the recruitment of Finnish nurses to work in a local hospital. The NHS, she argued, should be employing local people, not importing them from abroad. It’s a familiar claim, though […]

Categories: Britain, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: antisemitism, bernie grant, channel migrants, diane abbott, holocaust, identity politics, immigration panics, racial categories, racism, robert jenrick, universalism, white privilege, whiteness

CASTING CLEOPATRA IN BLACK AND WHITE

April 27, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the debate around Netflix casting a black actor as Cleopatra, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 23 April 2023, under the headline “When Cleopatra was alive, she wasn’t categorised by the colour of her skin”. In 1751, the great American polymath Benjamin Franklin worried about the small number of “purely white People in the World”. “All Africa,” he wrote, “is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny… And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Race & Immigration • Tags: afrocentrism, ancient egypt, ancient greece, black identity, cleopatra, egypt, hellenistic world, identity politics, jada pinkett smith, martin bernal, netflix, racial categories, racism, shelley haley, white race

WHICH ELITE REALLY RUNS BRITAIN?

April 20, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on Matthew Goodwin’s book on the “new elite”, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 16 April 2023, under the headline “This obsession with a ‘new elite’ hides the real roots of power”. In 1956, the radical American sociologist C Wright Mills wrote about what he called, in the title of a book, The Power Elite. America’s elite, he observed, forms a “compact social and psychological entity” that “towers over the underlying population of clerks and wage earners” […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Culture & Books • Tags: barbara ehrenreich, c wright mills, catherine liu, elite, liberal elite, liberalism, matthew goodwin, new elite, pmc, rwanda deportation scheme, virtue hoarders

“NO ONE HAS BEEN HELD ACCOUNTABLE”

April 13, 2023 by Kenan Malik

It opens with birdsong in the dark. It ends with brightly lit blank screen. In between, we look out from a helicopter, flying across London before arriving at the destination we know we have come to see, yet dread seeing, the burnt corpse of Grenfell Tower, around which the camera circles, again and again. Steve McQueen’s new short film Grenfell is more memorial than documentary. There are no people in it and no words. Its heart is the building, blackened, blistered, mute […]

Categories: Britain, Justice & Liberties, Politics • Tags: capitalism, elite, free market, grenfell fire, justice, peter apps, poor, steve mcqueen

ROTTEN FROM THE CRADLE TO THE GRAVE

March 30, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the state of the welfare state in Britain, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 26 March 2023, under the headline “From the cradle to the grave, there is something rotten in the state of welfare”. From the cradle to the grave. Once that phrase was a description of the ambition of the welfare state. Now, it is an illustration of how far that old vision has frayed. An illustration, too, of the extent to which […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Politics • Tags: benefit sanctions, childcare, inequality, jeremy hunt, life expectancy, poverty, state pensions, welfare state, workfare

AN ECHO OF BRITAIN’S SHAMEFUL PAST

March 23, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the historical echoes of current British asylum policies, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 19 March 2023, under the headline “‘Stop the boats’ does echo the language of the 30s – but those words were English”. It has become a familiar political pas de deux. One side draws an analogy between some current policy or practice and 1930s Germany, as if Nazis provide the only measure of moral degradation. The other side uses outrage at […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: aliens act 1905, antisemitism, channel migrants, gary lineker, immigration policy, internment camps, jewish refugees, louise london, nazism, rwanda deportation scheme, stop the boats

VERMEER AND THE INVOCATION OF THE HUMAN

March 16, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the beauty and significance of Vermeer, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 12 March 2023, under the headline “Vermeer’s luminous interiors gave us a new way into the inner worlds of others”. There is a scene in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead in which the main character, John Ames, a pastor, walking to his church, comes across a young couple in the street. “The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Human • Tags: amsterdam, art, gilead, harold bloom, human mind, humanism, inner world, marilynne robinson, rijksmuseum, vermeer