david cameron | Pandaemonium

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

DAVID CAMERON AND THE CENTRE GROUND

October 11, 2015 by Kenan Malik

The Observer asked a number of commentators whether David Cameron’s speech to the Conservative Party conference last week, in which he staked a claim to the centre ground of politics, will reshape the political landscape. Here’s my response. All the responses (including ones from Michael Heseltine, Shirley Williams, Rob Ford and Stefan Collini) are in the Observer. There is nothing new in ideological clothes-swapping. Under Tony Blair, New Labour won three successive elections with the help of “triangulation” – stealing […]

Categories: Britain, Politics • Tags: british politics, centre ground, conservative party, david cameron, new labour, tony blair

BEYOND THE CLICHES ABOUT RADICALISATION

July 22, 2015 by Kenan Malik

Another week, another major speech about the threat of radical Islam and of jihadism, another set of policies to deal with the problem. On Monday, David Cameron gave his latest high profile speech about what he called ‘the struggle of our generation’.The trouble with most of these speeches is that they are rooted in false perceptions of the problem. And the trouble with most of these initiatives is that their real impact is not so much in combating jihadism as […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Britain, War on terror • Tags: british politics, david cameron, identity politics, islamic state, islamism, jihadism, muslims, radicalisation

THE LONDON DIFFERENCE

October 30, 2013 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of my essay on London and immigration policy that was published las month in the International New York Times (I could not contractually published it on Pandaemonium till now). Not so long ago there was a beer commercial on British TV in which two pointy-headed aliens order a pint in a rural pub. ‘Up from London, are we?’, the barman asks politely. If the rest of Britain often views London as a planet from outer space, […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: boris johnson, british politics, david cameron, immigration, london, working class

MORAL POVERTY AND THE RIOTS

August 12, 2011 by Kenan Malik

The riots, David Cameron told Parliament this week, revealed a ‘deep moral failure’ in British society. It’s an argument echoed by many others, from Melanie Phillips to the Archbishop of Canterbury. The language of morality, and of moral failure, comes easily to the lips of rightwing politicians and pundits, being all too often a means of individualizing social issues, of pinning the blame on some of the weakest in society for the problems caused by public policy, social inequality and […]

Categories: Britain • Tags: big society, britain, british politics, david cameron, ethics, market ideology, melanie phillips, morality, poverty, protests, riots