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Kenan Malik

Kenan Malik

The Guardian

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Who should have the last word on assisted dying in a secular Britain?

For many years, I used to give an annual lecture to theology students training to be Anglican priests at Trinity College, Bristol, on “Why I am an...

01.12.2024 10

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

I’ll defend Allison Pearson’s right to be obnoxious – as she should defend mine

There are few columnists with whom I disagree more than I do with the Daily Telegraph’s Allison Pearson. Yet, I welcome the decision by the police...

24.11.2024 70

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

How a small group of Amazon workers took on big business and challenged traditional unions

‘The union wants to protect workers. The employer wants to protect workers. How do I choose between them?” So asks one young worker in Union, a...

17.11.2024 9

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Cosplaying social justice is the new elitist way of elbowing out the working class

When Musa al-Gharbi first arrived in New York in 2016, what he most noticed was the operation of a “racialized caste system” under which...

10.11.2024 50

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Today’s populism is informed by bigotry, but its roots lie in the promise of equality

‘American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” Not a comment on this year’s presidential campaign but an observation on another US...

03.11.2024 40

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Our first political prisoner? No. Locking up dissenters is an ignoble British tradition

In July 1967, the Black Power activist Michael X addressed a meeting in Reading. “The most savage human being in the world,” he told the audience,...

27.10.2024 40

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

The Observer view on the death of Yahya Sinwar: Joe Biden must use this moment to press for peace

Contrasting reactions to the chance killing by Israeli soldiers of Hamas’s top leader, Yahya Sinwar, offer a chastening guide to the dismal,...

20.10.2024 30

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Pumping the unemployed with weight-loss drugs echoes Victorian attitudes to the poor

In early 2023, Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, chief executive of the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, and its UK corporate vice-president...

20.10.2024 80

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Israel is not ‘saving western civilisation’. Nor is Hamas leading ‘the resistance’

‘Israel is not invading Lebanon, it is liberating it.” So proclaimed France’s pre-eminent liberal philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy as Israeli...

13.10.2024 100

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Can liberal conservatism survive the remaking of the right? We’ll soon find out

Conservatism, the late philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, emerged into the modern world as “a kind of ‘yes but…’” response to liberalism....

29.09.2024 70

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Too white? Too black? Too woke? Politics by labelling is a disease of our times

Yes, I’ve been called a “coconut”. When Marieha Hussain wrote the word on a placard she carried on a Palestine march last November, it was to...

22.09.2024 10

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Trump’s fantasy that migrants are eating cats proves the meme has prevailed over real politics

If one town could be emblematic of the vicissitudes of blue-collar life in America, Springfield, Ohio, might be as good a pick as any. At the heart of...

15.09.2024 80

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Pride or shame? British history is too complex to be seen in such glib terms

‘Britain’s long and proud history has been trashed by the self-hating left.” “British history is not being taught and people are hugely...

08.09.2024 10

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Defending working-class interests requires more than simply opposing immigration

‘Immigration harms British workers. We must restrict immigration to improve working-class lives.” That is the subtext – and often the explicit...

18.08.2024 50

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

The roots of this unrest lie in the warping of genuine working-class grievances

“The British soul is awakening and stirring with rage at what these people are doing,” the Spectator’s Douglas Murray told former Australian...

11.08.2024 20

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

James Baldwin taught us that identities can help us to locate ourselves. But they trap us too

James Baldwin was about 10 when he first read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. The character in the novel that most spoke to him was not the...

28.07.2024 60

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Aristopopulists like JD Vance can offer only empty promises to the working class

‘The tragedy of Trump’s candidacy is that, embedded in his furious exhortations against Muslims and Mexicans and trade deals gone awry is a...

21.07.2024 90

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Muslims aren’t single-issue voters. Gaza was a lightning rod for their disaffection

Should we celebrate or fear the “Muslim vote”? The success of independent candidates running on pro-Palestinian tickets, four of whom were...

14.07.2024 9

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Biden, Putin, Xi, Modi: what is it that keeps old ideas, as well as old people, in power?

‘States when they are in difficulties or in fear yearn for the rule of the elder men,” wrote Plutarch, the first-century Greek historian and...

07.07.2024 60

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Julian Assange is free, but his case is a grim reminder of the fragility of press freedom

It was a messy ending to an often chaotic story. Julian Assange was released last week from Belmarsh prison to board a flight to the US-governed...

30.06.2024 30

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Improving people’s lives should be Labour’s first priority. Not that Ming vase

This should be an election at the heart of which are the issues of poverty, inequality, precarity and low pay. It is, after all, a campaign in which...

23.06.2024 40

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Far-right policies don’t become palatable just because mainstream politicians adopt them

Far right? Hard right? Radical right? Or just plain right? The success in the recent EU elections of parties such as Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement...

16.06.2024 60

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Playing the victim card is how elites game the system. Just look at Manchester City

If you want a metaphor for the state of contemporary politics, you could do worse than keep an eye on the football. Not Euro 24, the tournament that...

09.06.2024 20

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

The affluent can have their souls enriched at university, so why not the poor as well?

‘We must crack down on low-value university degrees.” Who claimed that and when? It might have been Rishi Sunak last October. Or Sunak last July....

02.06.2024 90

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Job ads aimed at the ‘benefits class’ may be well-meant, but smack of contempt

Imagine the scene. It’s a small organisation within the creative industry – an arts centre, perhaps, or a theatre group. Around a table sit people...

26.05.2024 70

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Jürgen Klopp brought not only victories but a fan’s passion for the game

‘It’s not so important what people think when you come in,” Jürgen Klopp observed on being unveiled as Liverpool manager in October 2015....

19.05.2024 100

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

National sovereignty is little defence against the global hunt for profits

‘Do you think you could live on £4.87 an hour?” Liam Byrne, the chair of the Commons business and trade committee, asked Peter Hebblethwaite, the...

12.05.2024 70

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

The IPP scandal Unfair jail sentences – one more example of demonising society’s ‘morally unfit’

David Blunkett acknowledged last week that it was the “biggest regret” of his political life. As home secretary under Tony Blair in 2001, Blunkett...

05.05.2024 50

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

For migrants, ‘deterrence’ doesn’t deter. It’s cruelty, not compassion, Mr Sunak

‘It underscores why you need a deterrent.” So claimed Rishi Sunak in response to the Channel tragedy last week that led to the deaths of five...

28.04.2024 80

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Left silences right, right silences left. But censorship stops us pushing for change

Two conferences in two European cities. Two attempted bans (though only one successful). Two different responses from politicians and the media. All...

21.04.2024 50

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Riz Ahmed’s Defiance: how the visceral racism of 70s Britain gave way to a new era of identity politics

I can still remember the chill I felt on first hearing of the murders of Parveen Khan and her three young children, Aqsa, Kamran and Imran. It was...

14.04.2024 20

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

What a teacher in hiding can tell us about our failure to tackle intolerance

Three years ago, on 25 March 2021, a teacher from Batley Grammar School (BGS) in West Yorkshire was forced into hiding after a religious studies...

31.03.2024 20

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Plundered and corrupted for 200 years, Haiti was doomed to end in anarchy

In December 1914, the USS Machias dropped anchor in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Eight US marines disembarked, sauntered to the Banque National de la...

16.03.2024 10

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Elon Musk v OpenAI: tech giants are inciting existential fears to evade scrutiny

In 1914, on the eve of the First World War, HG Wells published a novel about the possibilities of an even greater conflagration. The World Set Free ...

10.03.2024 40

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Blurring the line between criticism and bigotry fuels hatred of Muslims and Jews

Where do we draw the line between criticism and bigotry? From the uproar over Lee Anderson’s remarks about the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, being...

03.03.2024 50

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Sunderland may not be like London, Cynthia Erivo, but neither is it like the Britain of old

‘A day out of Sunderland is a day wasted.” So claimed Charlie Slater, council leader in the 1970s, and a man known as “Mr Sunderland” to...

25.02.2024 50

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

A century on from Rhapsody in Blue, debates about cultural ‘theft’ rage still

‘The future music of this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original...

18.02.2024 20

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Denouncing critics of Israel as ‘un-Jews’ or antisemites is a perversion of history

William Zuckerman was born in 1885 in the Pale of Settlement, that part of the Russian empire to which Jews were largely confined, a place of poverty...

11.02.2024 200

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

What a legendary historian tells us about the contempt for today’s working class

It is not often that, as a teenager, you get captured by a 900-page tome (unless it has “Harry Potter” in the title). Even less when it is a dense...

04.02.2024 200

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

‘British homes for British workers’ is an empty, century-old, xenophobic slogan

‘Not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for the foreign invaders.” “They can’t get a home for their...

28.01.2024 30

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Amid class prejudice and sensitivities over race, Rochdale’s abused girls were failed

‘Child 44” was raped by many men over a long period of time, eventually forced to have an abortion, aged 13. None of her abusers was charged with...

21.01.2024 9

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

What makes a very British miscarriage of justice? Contempt for the ‘little people’

‘It was a scandal hiding in plain sight.” “The result of a series of choices, the sum of state neglect and corporate wrongdoing.” “Most...

14.01.2024 60

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Claudine Gay’s ousting reveals that the messenger is still an easier target than the message

For some, she is the wretched epitome of the liberal elite; for others, the victim of a “racist mob”. She herself condemns her critics for having...

07.01.2024 8

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

The conflict between history and memory lies at the heart of today’s cultural divides

The difference between the study of history and the construction of public memory, the American historian Arno Mayer observed, is that “whereas the...

31.12.2023 70

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

A culture of greed, riddled with inequality. Global football is a mirror of our age

Nadine Dorries or Jacob Rees-Mogg? Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk? Uefa or the European Super League? Yes, sometimes life seems like a succession of...

24.12.2023 10

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

The Reith lectures miss the point. Politics fails when it avoids the issue of class

‘Solidarity has to come through class.” So insisted Rollie, a member of the audience in the latest of the Reith lectures, given this year by...

17.12.2023 20

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

The west’s dumping of migrants on poor countries is a grisly echo of penal transportation

Imagine that Britain signs a treaty with France agreeing to take its unwanted migrants for cash payment; that France suggests sending lawyers to this...

10.12.2023 80

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

Solidarity with Palestinians is not hate speech, whatever would-be censors say

An award ceremony for the Palestine-born novelist and essayist Adania Shibli is cancelled by the Frankfurt book fair because of “the war started by...

03.12.2023 40

The Guardian

Kenan Malik

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