Category Archives: Britain

BRITAIN’S ABSENT OPPOSITION

February 26, 2017 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times, on the results of the Stoke-on-Trent and Copeland by-elections in England, and their meaning for national politics: As party leader, Mr Corbyn has been a disaster. He is opposed by a majority of Labour members of Parliament, and has signally failed to win popular support outside the party’s base. Yet the party’s problem goes much deeper than its leadership. At the heart of its crisis lies the question: […]

Categories: Britain, Politics • Tags: british politics, labour party, working class

THE PROBLEM IS MORE THAN INTEGRATION

December 18, 2016 by Kenan Malik

A shorter version of this article was published in Al Jazeera English. ‘Drawing on what we have seen and heard during the review, we suggest integration is the extent to which people from all backgrounds can get on.’ So suggests the Casey Review, the latest British government study of the problems of immigration and integration. Last year civil servant Louise Casey was asked by the then prime minister David Cameron ‘to consider what could be done to boost opportunity and integration in […]

Categories: Britain, Multiculturalism, Race & Immigration • Tags: british politics, casey report, casey review, immigration, integration, islam, multiculturalism, muslims, social cohesion, working class

‘I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK’

October 27, 2016 by Kenan Malik

‘I don’t recognize my country’. ‘I want my country back’. These have for many years been the sentiments of those opposed to immigration into Britain. Immigrants, so the critics claim, have taken over ‘our’ country, turning cities into mini-Kingstons or little Lahores, creating, in the words of David Goodhart, former director of the centre-left think tank Demos, ‘an England that is increasingly full of mysterious and unfamiliar worlds’. Or, as the Oxford University demographer David Coleman, a vocal opponent of mass migration, put […]

Categories: Britain, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: brexit, david runciman, eu referendum, european union, immigration, populism, racism, working class

ON THE GRAMMAR SCHOOLS DEBATE

October 20, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of the article I wrote last month for the International New York Times on the grammar schools debate in Britain. (I cannot publish my INYT articles on Pandaemonium until a month after it is published in the newspaper.) It was originally published under the headline ‘Why Britain Fails in Class’. Few people could have predicted the first policy on which Britain’s new prime minister would take a stand. It is none of the issues that have […]

Categories: Britain, Politics • Tags: britain, british politics, conservatives, education, equality, grammar schools, inequality, left, social mobility, theresa may, ukip, working class

THE BATTLE OF CABLE STREET

October 5, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Eighty years ago this week, anti-fascists in East London confronted Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts as they tried to march though what was then a largely Jewish area. Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was notorious for using marches and rallies as cover for vicious attacks on Jews. The confrontation has gone down in folklore as ‘The Battle of Cable Street’. Many myths have grown around the confrontation, including about the role of the Communist Party, which has often claimed for itself the […]

Categories: Britain, History, Justice & Liberties • Tags: anti-fascism, battle of cable street, communist party, fascism, joe jacobs, oswal mosley

WHY BRITAIN FAILS IN CLASS

October 1, 2016 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times on the grammar schools debate in Britain: The fact that neither selective nor nonselective school systems have improved social mobility in Britain might suggest that the problem lies in the very idea of using schools to engineer a more equal society. A decent education system can help a few individuals progress beyond the circumstances of their birth, but it is unlikely to change fundamentally the social and economic […]

Categories: Britain • Tags: british politics, Class, education, grammar schools, social mobility

ECHOES FROM THE PAST: FEAR OF THE MASSES

August 14, 2016 by Kenan Malik

A system in which ‘confidence tricksters, rich men, quacks may be given power by the votes of an electorate composed in great part of mental Peter Pans, whose childishness renders them peculiarly susceptible to the blandishments of demagogues and the tirelessly repeated suggestions of the rich men’s papers’. That could have been any number of contemporary commentators, from Richard Dawkins to Andrew Sullivan, expressing their fears about democracy after the Brexit vote in Britain or the rise of Donald Trump […]

Categories: Britain, History, Politics • Tags: aldous huxley, beatrice webb, crowd psychology, democracy, elitism, emile zola, fabians, freud, gustav lebon, liberalism, racial science, vilfred pareto, working class

ON BREXIT, BORDERS, BEING OFFENSIVE (BUT NOT BEING IN A HOLLYWOOD MOVIE)

July 28, 2016 by Kenan Malik

I recently gave a long interview to Dutch journalist Marco Visscher about Brexit, migration, democracy, politics, being offensive, growing up in racist Britian, and not being in a Hollywood movie. It was published in the Belgian magazine Knack (and a shorter version in the Dutch paper Trouw). The interview has been translated from English to Dutch then (roughly) back to English, so may not read very coherently in places. I have edited it lightly. It was published in Knack under […]

Categories: Britain, Kenan Malik • Tags: anti-racism, brexit, british politics, cultural diversity, democracy, european union, free speech, immigration, left, populism, racism

TALKING MIGRATION, BREXIT AND HOSTILITY

July 21, 2016 by Kenan Malik

I took part last week in a ‘Talking Migration’ podcast with Rob Ford, Professor in Political Science at the University of Manchester, about the Brexit vote and the role within it of migration, and of hostility to migration. ‘Talking Migration’ is a podcast series produced by Clara Sandelind of the University of Huddersfield. (I sound in the podcast as if I’m standing in the middle of a cave and shouting – my apologies, I was obviously sitting in a highly resonant […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: brexit, british politics, europe, european union, immigration, racism, working class

ON DAVID CAMERON’S LEGACY

July 17, 2016 by Kenan Malik

The Observer today ran a series of short comments on David Cameron’s legacy. Here is my take (the original, not the Observer‘s cut version, which made a short comment even shorter). Had David Cameron not won an election he never expected to win, he might not have lost a referendum he never expected to lose. Had the 2015 general election produced a continuation of the Coalition government, as many, including Tories, expected, it is unlikely that there ever would have been […]

Categories: Britain, Politics • Tags: brexit, british politics, conservative party, david cameron

BRITAIN, EUROPE AND THE REAL CRISIS

June 29, 2016 by Kenan Malik

The decision by British voters last week to leave the European Union has brutally exposed two features of contemporary British politics. The first is the depth of popular disaffection with mainstream political institutions. The second is the paralysis of the political class in the face of this disaffection. The Brexit victory was buttressed by a coalition of disparate social groups. Traditional Conservative supporters in the shires and the suburbs have long been suspicious of the European project. Few were surprised […]

Categories: Britain, International, Politics • Tags: brexit, british politics, europe, european union, far right, front national, left, populism, ukip, working class

THE REVOLT OF THE FRAGMENTS

June 25, 2016 by Kenan Malik

It was, without question, a bloody nose for the political establishment, the biggest it has received for decades. And many have read the unexpected success of the Leave camp in the British EU referendum straightforwardly as a revolt against the political class and as a victory for democracy. Yes, it was a revolt against the political class in London and in Brussels. But the referendum result was also far more complicated than that. The anti-EU sentiment was not UK-wide. It […]

Categories: Britain, Politics • Tags: brexit, british politics, eu referendum, european union, labour party, left, populism, scotland, solidarity, working class

BEYOND THE BREXIT DEBATE

June 21, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Whatever the result of the Brexit referendum on Thursday, of one thing we can be sure: Britain will neither be invaded by marauding Turks, as anti-EU campaigners suggest might happen if the country votes ‘Yes’, nor will Western civilization collapse, as EU president Donald Tusk fears after a ‘No’ vote. There will undoubtedly be economic and political turbulence, but Britain will not be staring into the abyss, however it votes. But, if the world will not end for Britain, neither will the […]

Categories: Britain, International • Tags: boris johnson, brexit, british politics, democracy, european union, fortress europe, labour party, migration crisis, populism

ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE LEFT

May 29, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of the article I wrote last month for the International New York Times on the controversy about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. (I cannot publish my INYT articles on Pandaemonium until a month after it is published in the newspaper.) It was originally published under the headline ‘The British Left’s Jewish Problem’. I have slightly edited it to take account of the fact that the original was published before the London Mayoral election. It has, admitted […]

Categories: Britain, Politics • Tags: anti-semitism, conspiracy theories, identity politics, jeremy corbyn, ken livingstone, labour party, left, muslims, naz shah

BEYOND FEAR AND INDIFFERENCE

May 15, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This essay on Sadiq Khan’s London Mayoral victory, Trevor Philips’new pamphlet on diversity and the public discourse on Islam was published in the Observer, under the headline ‘Muslims are not a ‘different’ class of Briton: we’re as messy as the rest’. ‘It shows it is possible to be Muslim and a Westerner. Western values are compatible with Islam.’ So said Sadiq Khan after his victory as London mayor. Trevor Phillips, former chief of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, takes […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Britain, Multiculturalism • Tags: britain, british asians, free speech, identity politics, islam, muslims, sadiq khan, trevor phillips