Brendan O’Neill is Spiked's chief politics writer. His new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, is out now.
To see the cruelty of bureaucracy, the injustice that can spring from reducing public life to mere process and human beings to paperwork, look no further than the Windrush scandal. Scandal is an overused word these days. Everything from a politician’s ill-advised tweet to a celeb’s extramarital affair gets chalked up as scandal. But if
Oh America, what have you done to your kids? Consider David Hogg, the 17-year-old survivor of last month’s massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida and now omnipresent media agitator for tighter gun-control laws in the US. That young Mr Hogg’s instant reaction to being criticised by a news anchor was to
I don’t believe Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite. I think most Corbynistas aren’t anti-Semitic. But here’s one thing I can say with utter certainty: if any other politician in the land had commented favourably on an explicitly racist mural, on a vile, caricatured depiction of a certain section of society as evil and dangerous, he
This Cambridge Analytica thing is starting to sound like a chattering-class conspiracy theory. We’re meant to believe that Donald Trump won the presidential election and Brexit was victorious in the EU referendum because sinister rich and right-wing people trawled social media, harvested our inner-most lives, and then planted messages that ‘mind-fucked’ us into voting for
At last, some students in the West are campaigning for freedom and democracy. Following years of supposedly rad students banning pop songs about sex, and force-fielding their campuses against offensive speakers, and even expelling certain newspapers from their common rooms as if they were heretical abominations, a group of students has emerged to demand more
Everyone, understandably, is focusing on the white ‘nostalgia’ bit of Vince Cable’s speech to the Lib Dem conference. His slur against older Brexit voters, whom he thinks voted against the EU because they want to go back to a world where ‘passports were blue, faces were white and the map was coloured imperial pink’, has
Jeremy Corbyn’s speech today in which he confirmed that a Labour government would keep Britain in a Customs Union with the EU was about so much more than trade. It was about the future of the Labour party itself. It sent a clear message about what, and more importantly who, Labour is for these days.
This week, the Corbynistas bared their teeth. They gave us an insight into the mob-like authoritarianism that lurks behind the facade of their ‘kind’ politics. They insisted Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t a spy for the Stalinists while at the same time exposing their Stalinist tendencies. ‘How dare you lump us in with Stalinists?’, they cried, while
Dear right-wing people, please stop the red scares. Please give the Cold War lingo a rest. Please remember it is not the 1950s anymore and that there’s about as much chance of Kevin Spacey taking the title role in a biopic of Jesus Christ as there is of Commies coming to power in Britain. Please
Dear right-wing people, please stop the red scares. Please give the Cold War lingo a rest. Please remember it is not the 1950s anymore and that there’s about as much chance of Kevin Spacey taking the title role in a biopic of Jesus Christ as there is of Commies coming to power in Britain. Please
Should a young person’s vote count for more than an old person’s? Perhaps people under the age of 25 should get two votes and people over 50 just one. After all, the under-25 person will have to live with the consequences of political decisions for far longer than the over-50. On something like Britain’s relationship
So this week two things have got feminists cheering and whooping. First, the coming together of BBC women to demand a hike in their already eye-watering levels of pay. And secondly, the erasure of the walk-on women from darts, the sacking, effectively, of these beautiful, usually working-class women who bring a touch of glamour to
It’s here, at last: the backlash against #MeToo. Finally people are sticking their heads above the parapet and asking if perhaps #MeToo has gone too far. They’re braving the inevitable fusillade of shaming tweets and accusations of ‘rape apologism’ to raise awkward questions about this hashtag movement. They’re wondering out loud if this movement that
Nigel Farage has called for a referendum on the House of Lords. Earlier this week, on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, wearing his trademark dapper hat and velvet-collared coat, Farage laid into Lord Adonis’s anti-Brexit agitation, branding him a ‘dishonest, disconnected, twisting little weasel’ — ouch! He then said that if Adonis’s antics are ‘what the
Britain has a new feminist hero. She’s a diminutive, eye-rolling force of nature. A BS-deflecting defender of the right and ability of women to get stuck into public life as well as any man can. A warrior against the neo-Victorian view of the female sex as fragile and unable to deal with the amorous advances
Movie star Matt Damon has tentatively, politely suggested that the #MeToo cleansing of Hollywood, this chasing of suspected perverts out of the film world, has hints of a ‘culture of outrage’ to it, and guess what has happened to him? Yep, he’s been consumed by the culture of outrage. He’s been insulted, demonised, Twitter-raged against.
In my lifetime, I cannot remember any thing or idea or person getting as bad a press as Brexit has. It’s relentless. It’s not daily — it’s hourly, minutely, by the second. Open a newspaper, switch on the radio, browse the web, and there it is: more Brexit-fear, more predictions of economic calamity and national
This has got to be the own goal of the year. Millennials want people to stop calling them ‘snowflakes’ because it is an unfair term of abuse that damages their mental health. Get your head round that if you can. In response to the accusation that they’re soft, oversensitive and too easily wounded by words
The EU has no shame. It is a completely shame-free zone. How else do we explain the grotesque spectacle of EC President Donald Tusk cosying up to Ireland this weekend, and claiming to respect Irish sovereignty, as if the past 15 years of Brussels treating Ireland as a colonial plaything had never happened? As if
The engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is great news. Great news for them, of course, because they are clearly in love, and who doesn’t like to see a handsome young-ish couple in love? And it’s great news for republicans like me, too, because it confirms the monarchy has now completed its transformation from
