Mick Hume

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 for 10 years from 1999, and was described as "Britain's only libertarian Marxist newspaper columnist". He has more recently written for The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times.

Hume was born in New Haw, Surrey, and educated at Woking County Grammar School for Boys and the University of Manchester. In his twenties Hume became editor of the next step, newspaper of the now-defunct Revolutionary Communist Party. In 1988 he launched the party's magazine, Living Marxism.

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, 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. He is now Spiked's editor-at-large.

A lifelong Manchester United fan and former season ticket holder, Hume writes a column for the United fanzine Red Issue, entitled "Kicking Against the Pricks - Freedom for Football!". He lives in London with his wife Virginia and two daughters.

Mick 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

• "Mick Hume moves on", New Spiked editor announced, 29 January 2007
• "Speakers' biographies", Communicating the war on terror conference website, 5 June 2003
• "Licence to rile" by Andy Beckett, The Guardian, 15 May 1999 Article on the history of the RCP and Living Marxism

Books

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

External links

• Mick Hume's column in The Times