User:NeilClark66/Neil Clark (writer)

Neil Clark (born 1966) is a British writer. His work has appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including The Australian, The American Conservative, Daily Express, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Morning Star and Racing and Football Outlook. He is a regular contributor to The First Post, the online news magazine.

A graduate of Brunel University, in business studies, history and politics, Clark teaches at Oxford Tutorial College, which specializes in GCSE and A-level tuition. He is married to Zsuzsanna Clark (née Feczko), a Hungarian-born freelance writer.

His blog was voted "Best UK Blog" in the 2007 Weblog Awards.

Positions
Clark describes himself as an "unreconstructed leftie" who supports renationalisation of Britain's railways. He is opposed to immigration and argues that some previous Labour voters endorsed the British National Party in the 2009 European elections because of its "traditional left-wing anti-capitalist and anti-globalist economic policies". He criticises those who he says "lectured the plebs" against voting BNP.

He opposes British and U.S. policy in the Balkans and the Middle East. He defended the Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević, whom he described as a "prisoner of conscience" who he believes was murdered through poisoning. Clark believes that:"[A] nuclear-armed Iran- and the acquisition of nuclear weapons by other countries threatened by the insatiable neo-conservative war machine, such as Syria, would be the best guarantor of peace in the Middle East."

Clark opposed political asylum for interpreters who had served the British army in Iraq, arguing:"'If that means some of them may lose their lives, then the responsibility lies with those who planned and supported this wicked, deceitful and catastrophic war...'."

Clark objects to an open-door immigration policy, free abortion on demand, and left-wing attitudes to education. In an article on the Visegrád Group of countries in 2002, he comments they "were never foolish enough to experiment with comprehensive education and progressive teaching methods." Clark advocates a return to the death penalty for drug traffickers and murderers; he has criticised Amnesty International for its objective in removing the practice worldwide. For Clark, the death penalty is "society's most civilised response to murder, as no other punishment warrants the victim the respect he/she deserves."

Most of these views are also associated with the British conservative commentator Peter Hitchens, though Clark criticises Hitchens' opposition to "egalitarianism". He criticises those who in his opinion deny the extent of knife crime in Britain. He has also criticised the current Conservative Party leader David Cameron for what Clark sees as overtly neo-conservative and neo-liberal attitudes.

Clark suggests that a preoccupation with human rights, which he considers a "middle class" concern, led in part to the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites. A defender of the "benign 'goulash communism'" of the János Kádár regime in pre-1988 Hungary, he wrote in 2002:"After the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975, the US was understandably keen to use the issue of human rights as a way of weakening the Soviet Union and its control over Eastern Europe. Human Rights Watch, set up in 1978 as Helsinki Rights Watch by the publishing tycoon Bob Bernstein, was to be the vehicle for achieving this. Over the next ten years the organisation was to play a key role in publicising human-rights breaches behind the Iron Curtain and helping dissident groups there to organise and eventually grow into opposition parties. Vaclav Havel, the Czech President, recognises the debt that he and many others owe to the organisation, and is on record as stating that without Human Rights Watch there would have been no Velvet Revolution in his country."

Criticism
Clark was criticised by columnist Oliver Kamm in The Times—a rival British publication to those Clark writes in—for allegedly copying inaccurate historical quotes from the Internet and for copying material from the Council on Foreign Relations.