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.
The news that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has cancelled her speaking tour of Australia due to ‘security concerns’ should concern anyone who believes in freedom. It is a dark day when a woman who fled to the West to escape the Islamist suffocations of Somalia, and precisely so that she might think and speak freely, feels she
Today is a great day for British democracy. One of the greatest ever, in fact. Tune out Project Fear, with its overblown claims that Brexit will cause economic collapse and possibly revive fascism, and just think about what is happening today. The largest democratic mandate in the history of this nation, the loudest, clearest, most
Here’s a cast-iron law of the media in 21st-century Britain: the hysteria about a Daily Mail article will always be worse than the Daily Mail article itself. It will be more silly, shrill, over-the-top, reactionary and potentially harmful to public life than the polemic or editorial or sidebar shot of a half-dressed celeb it is
For someone who once branded his own Cabinet colleagues ‘bastards’ — and two decades later said he only called them bastards because they were bastards — John Major has of late become weirdly sensitive to rough, colourful language. He’s peeved at what he calls ‘ultra Brexiteers’, who are big meanies, apparently. These ultras are launching
It is testament to the chilling effect of libel law on public discussion that I feel nervous about the sentences I’m about to write. The libel ruling against Katie Hopkins is obscene. The punishment of her to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds for making a mistake on Twitter is disgusting. To punish
It’s a curiosity of the 21st century that there is no one quite as bigoted as the person who screams ‘bigot!’ all the time. More often than not, those who casually brand as bigots anyone who has the temerity to hold a different point of view to theirs are the ones behaving with bigotry. Consider
The chattering classes have officially lost it. On both sides of the Atlantic. Of course they’d been teetering on the cliff edge of sanity for a while, following the bruising of their beloved EU by 17m angry Brits and Hillary’s loss to that orange muppet they thought no one except rednecks would vote for. But
Even now, even following their historic thrashing in Copeland, Labourites still cannot face the truth. Sure, there are Twitter tears this morning. I’m sure the vibe in Corbyn’s office is skittish and fearful. There’ll be an explosion in ‘What now for Labour?’ articles. But they still do not get the yawning, abyssal depth of the
Never in recent years has a party deserved to lose an election, to be demolished by people’s ballots and fury, as much as Labour does in Stoke. The way Labour has treated this northern constituency is a microcosm of the metropolitan contempt it now feels for all the rough-handed, gruff-voiced non-Londoners who once made up
This afternoon, across Britain, the most pro-establishment demo of modern times will take place. Sure, the Stop Trump protesters gathering outside Parliament and elsewhere will look and sound rad. They’ll chant and rage and blow whistles and hold up placards with Trump done up like a tangerine Hitler. But don’t be fooled. These people are
The brass neck of Tony Blair. The Brexit vote was ‘based on imperfect knowledge’, says the man who unleashed barbarism across the Middle East on the basis of a student dissertation he printed off the internet. Who marched thousands into unimaginable horror on the basis of myth and spin. That NHS claim on the side
Britain is in the grip of an epidemic, apparently. An epidemic of hate. New figures, compiled by the Press Association, suggest that hate crimes soared to ‘record levels’ in the three months following the EU referendum. Only four police forces around the country recorded a decrease in hate crimes; the others saw a spike. And in
I can forgive many of the sins of the Trump-is-Hitler, Brexit-is-Beelzebub lobby. I mean, we all lose the plot occasionally. We’re all susceptible to freaking out. One day you’re a paragon of measured political chatter and the next you’re on Twitter at 3am screaming ‘FASCIST!’ at eggs and plotting to make Hampstead a republic so
The Twitter-cheering for John Bercow, the transformation of him into a Love, Actually-style hero of British middle-class probity against a gruff, migrant-banning Yank, could be the most grotesque political spectacle of the year so far. Not because it’s virtue-signalling, as claimed by the handful of brave critics who’ve raised their heads above the online orgy
The movement for free speech on campus was born at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964. Last night it died there. In the intolerant screams, smashed glass and fire — actual fire — of the Berkeley protesters who successfully prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking, the ideal of free speech on campus was dealt a
I don’t like Donald Trump. I think his executive order barring travel from certain countries is rash and illiberal. And yet I cannot get behind the hyperbolic, Holocaust-citing protests against him. I cannot line up with the idea that he’s a uniquely bad president, possibly the worst ever; that he’s an ‘aberration’, ‘abnormal’, someone we
During the massive, impressive Women’s March in London on Saturday, in which thousands of noisy women, men and children stuck it to Trump, the organisers tweeted the following: ‘We are the people.’ Wait — it’s okay to say ‘the people’ again? Since Trump’s victory in November, and even more so after the Brexit Revolt in
It happened because you banned super-size sodas. And smoking in parks. And offensive ideas on campus. Because you branded people who oppose gay marriage ‘homophobic’, and people unsure about immigration ‘racist’. Because you treated owning a gun and never having eaten quinoa as signifiers of fascism. Because you thought correcting people’s attitudes was more important
The angrier, snootier sections of the Remain camp have done many bad things since 23 June. Some have suggested Brexit should be overthrown. Others have issued terrible libels against Leave voters, branding them ‘low information’ and xenophobic. Witness Nick Clegg in this Guardian video published this week having a good old laugh at Sheffield people
Many mad things are happening on campuses. Fancy-dress parties are banned lest the costumes offend minority groups. Saucy pop songs are forbidden lest they turn male students into marauding sex machines. Controversial speakers are No Platformed. But perhaps the worst thing is the rekindling of the racial imagination, the return of judging people by race.
