Mick Hume (born 1959) is a British journalist and author whose writing focuses on issues of free speech and freedom of the press. Hume was a columnist for ''

The Times ''The Times'' is a British Newspaper#Daily, daily Newspaper#National, national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its modern name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its si ...

'' for ten years from 1999, and was described as "Britain's only libertarian Marxist newspaper columnist". Hume was born in

New Haw New Haw is a village which is part of the Runnymede (borough), Borough of Runnymede in Surrey, England. It is located approximately south of Addlestone and boxing the compass, southwest by west of London. Geography New Haw borders Byfleet, Ad ...

Surrey Surrey () is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South East England. It is bordered by Greater London to the northeast, Kent to the east, East Sussex, East and West Sussex to the south, and Hampshire and Berkshire to the wes ...

, and educated at Woking County Grammar School for Boys and the

University of Manchester The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The University of Manchester is c ...

. In his twenties, Hume became editor of ''the next step'', newspaper of the now-defunct Revolutionary Communist Party, of which Hume was a member for a decade until it folded. After the RCP folded in 1996, Hume helped to relaunch the magazine as '' LM'', which he edited until it was forced to close in 2000 after losing a libel suit brought by

ITN Independent Television News (ITN) is a UK-based media production and broadcast journalism company. ITN is based in London, with bureaux and offices in Beijing, Brussels, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, New York City, New York, Paris, Sydney and Washin ...

, over claims that the magazine had made concerning ITN's reporting of Trnopolje camp in Bosnia. In 2001, Hume was launch editor of the online magazine '' Spiked'', the UK's first web-only comment and current affairs publication. In 2015, he became ''Spiked''s editor-at-large. Hume's book, ''There Is No Such Thing As a Free Press – and we need one more than ever'' was published in October 2012 in response to the Leveson Inquiry and the debate about press regulation in the UK. Daniel Finkelstein of ''The Times'' described it as "a masterclass in the writing of polemic".

References

Books

* ''Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?'' (HarperCollins, 2015),

External links

Mick Hume's column in ''The Times''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hume, Mick 1959 births Alumni of the University of Manchester British male journalists British republicans Living people Revolutionary Communist Party (UK, 1978) members British libertarians People from the Borough of Runnymede Deniers of the Bosnian genocide