Brendan O’Neill | The Spectator columnists & writers

The twisted logic of Shamima Begum’s defenders

Shamima Begum is back in the news. Firstly because she’s had a makeover. She can be seen on the front page of today’s Telegraph sporting long, flowing locks, trendy shades and Western clothing. Is Shamima the Islamist now aspiring to be Shamima the celeb? Perhaps she’s angling for her own reality TV show: The Real Housewives of Raqqa. But the second reason she’s in the news is because the British-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor has expressed sympathy for her. He says she’s a victim of British racism. I really wish Sir Anish would stick to what he’s (very) good at — public art installations — and leave the Shamima business alone. Because his comments are risible. They aren’t only factually wrong — they’re morally wrong, too.

The elitism lurking at the heart of the green movement

There’s a movement in the UK that is trying to block the building of essential new council housing. It is also agitating to stop the opening of a new coal mine, which would deprive working men and women of a good, honest way to make a living. What is this movement? A neo-Thatcherite organisation, perhaps, hell-bent on finishing Maggie’s task of putting coal miners out of work and shrinking social housing? A bunch of aristocrats and toffs, maybe, who are sick of their leafy living areas being swarmed by council-house residents and the precious countryside being blighted by such ghastly things as mines and factories? Nope, it’s environmentalists. It’s greens. It’s those eco-warriors who pose as super-progressive and claim to care about people.

It’s time for Ireland to stand up to the EU

Ireland’s political class is facing a moment of truth. Following yesterday’s extraordinary events — with the EU temporarily triggering Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol as part of its desperate effort to manage its self-made vaccines crisis — the Dublin elites have some serious soul-searching to do. They must now ask themselves if they are willing to be members of this institution that has just treated them with such contempt; which has just signalled in front of the entire world that it does not take Irish sovereignty or Irish democracy very seriously at all. Contempt is not too strong a word for what the EU has just done to Ireland. Let’s leave to one side what the EU’s overriding of the Brexit deal and temporary triggering of Article 16 tells us about its view of the UK.

No, Spike Lee: Donald Trump is not like Hitler

I wish people would stop comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. Not because I’m worried about Trump’s feelings — he’s big enough to look after himself — but because of the extraordinary damage these comparisons are doing to historical memory. All the loose, opportunistic, cheap-thrill talk about Trump being the new Hitler is trivialising the Nazi regime and the grotesque crimes of the 1930s. The latest celeb to jump on the Trump-Hitler bandwagon is film director Spike Lee. During an acceptance speech for a special prize from the New York Film Critics Circle, Lee said Trump would ‘go down in history with the likes of Hitler’. Trump and all ‘his boys’ will go down ‘on the wrong side of history’, Lee said, no doubt to enthusiastic head-nodding from the Hollywood set.

Shame on the ‘four lads’ meme snobs

We need to talk about the ‘four lads’ meme. Specifically we need to talk about the undercurrent of prejudice, and on occasion outright class hatred, that propelled these four unsuspecting young men from Birmingham and Coventry into the internet spotlight. Anyone who has been online in the past year will know about the four lads. It’s a photograph of four young men looking hyper-preened for a night on the town. Their trousers are painfully tight, their tattooed arms are bulging out of their short-sleeved shirts. This is the fashion among the male youths of aspirant working-class communities. They take pride in their appearance. They look good, and they know they look good. The photo was taken in Birmingham city centre last year.

The censorious war on lockdown sceptics

Britain at the start of 2021 doesn’t only have a Covid problem — it has a censorship problem, too. The germ of intolerance is spreading. Anyone who dissents, however slightly, from the Covid consensus will find him or herself branded a crank, even a killer. They will be hounded and demonised; online mobs will demand their expulsion from media platforms and from public life. I fear that this Salem-like hatred for sceptical voices will, like Covid itself, have a long-lasting and severely detrimental impact on this country. In recent days, the censorious fury over Covid scepticism has intensified. The pitchforks are out for experts and commentators who query the seriousness of the pandemic or who suggest that lockdown is not an ideal policy.

The school closures debate exposes Britain’s class divide

There have been many shocking sights in this cursed year. For me, one of the most shocking has been the sight of comfortably off, Oxbridge-educated experts and journalists agitating for the closure of schools even though they know this will hit poor kids hardest. This alarmingly cavalier attitude towards the education of the less well-off has exposed the class tensions that lurk behind the lockdown. Once again, depressingly, school closures are back on the agenda. SAGE says the only way we can get the current wave of Covid infections under control is by enforcing a proper lockdown, including the closure of schools and universities. Many in the media, long smitten with SAGE, agree. Teaching unions, who have perversely spent much of 2020 arguing for schools to be shut and kids to be kept at home, also want face-to-face learning to be put on hold.

Eddie Izzard and the denigration of women

I’m done with being white. It’s boring. From now on I choose to identify as black and I insist that you all refer to me as a black man. Please do not mis-race me. Of course I am not going to do this because it would be mad and also a tad racist. Clearly I am not black. And I expect that calling myself black would be an affront to actual black people, who would rightfully point out that I am as white as the driven snow. ‘You can’t just put on the black identity like a piece of clothing’, they’d say, and rational people everywhere would agree. So why, then, is it okay for Eddie Izzard to announce to the world that he is switching to ‘girl mode’? More than okay, in fact — since saying on a TV show last week that he wants to be referred to with female pronouns from now on, Izzard has won praise and accolades from newspapers and campaign groups.

In Liz Truss we trust

Finally, someone has said it. Someone has said that identity politics distracts our attention from the far larger issue of socioeconomic inequality. Someone has said that the fashionable and myopic focus on issues of race, sex and genderfluidity is diverting our gaze from the far more important issue of class. That someone is Liz Truss, the equalities minister, and she deserves our praise. Criticising identity politics is a risky business. Just ask JK Rowling, who is regularly threatened with rape and death for daring to make a very measured critique of transgenderism. Or ask any black commentator who bristles at the idea of critical race theory — he’ll be branded an ‘Uncle Tom’ or worse by armies of hateful Twitter identitarians.

Football fans are sick of being lectured

There’s a menace on the terraces. At football grounds across the land, there are fans who are ruining the beautiful game for everyone else. They’re bringing their prejudices into football. They think nothing of grunting and groaning at people they don’t like, at people they view as inferior. It’s becoming intolerable. No, I’m not talking about noisy, rowdy Millwall fans who do naughty things like boo the taking of the knee. I’m talking about the middle-class NuFootball mob. I’m talking about the Johnny-Come-Latelys to the beautiful game who turn up with the Guardian folded under their arm and a neatly cut sandwich in an eco-friendly stainless-steel lunchbox. These people worry me far more than the portly bloke shouting expletive-heavy abuse at the opposing team.

The disgraceful crusade against the LGB Alliance

In Britain, in 2020, a gay-rights group is being hounded for daring to promote the virtues of same-sex attraction. Mobs of angry people are trying to destroy it. They’ve branded it hateful, disgusting, dangerous. They have even tried to bankrupt it. For the ‘crime’ of saying it’s fine that people of the same sex are attracted to each other, this group has become the target of one of the most vicious campaigns of the year. Only it isn’t old-style homophobes with blue rinses and crucifixes who are waging war on this gay-rights group. It’s the PC left. It’s supposedly correct-thinking commentators, trans activists and others who pride themselves on being progressive and decent. What might once have been Bible-waving fundamentalists or homophobic skinheads is now right-on millennials.

The pathetic censorship of ‘Fairytale of New York’

There’s a surefire way to tell Christmas has arrived. Forget the Oxford Street lights. Forget the sudden appearance of stacks of selection boxes in your supermarket. Forget Noddy Holder’s pained cry, ‘It’s Chriiiistmaaas!’ No, these days it isn’t really Christmas until we have the annual handwringing over The Pogues’ song ‘Fairytale of New York’. And it’s here. It has arrived. As predictably as pine trees in your local garden centre and dads getting boxes of tinsel from the attic, the argument over Shane MacGowan’s ‘offensive’ lyrics is back. Happy Christmas, everyone! This year, the annual blizzard of snowflakery over MacGowan’s lyrical masterpiece has been started by the BBC. The Beeb has announced that Radio 1 will play a censored version of ‘Fairytale of New York’, while Radio 2 will play the original.

Joe Biden and the weaponisation of Ireland

Joe Biden loves Ireland. He wears his Irish heritage proudly. ‘The BBC? I’m Irish’, he quipped when Nick Bryant asked him if he had a quick word for the Beeb. Which is all very nice. It’s good when people take pride in their heritage, even if it does come off as a bit ‘Oirish’ when Irish-American politicians do it. Expect to see President Biden in a poky pub in Ireland sipping on a pint of the (non-alcoholic) black stuff in front of the world’s media within the year. ‘It’s grand!’, he’ll probably say. Everyone will cheer; I’ll cringe. But for all the harmless craic of powerful Americans being nice to the plucky Emerald Isle, I can’t help worrying about Biden’s much-professed Irishness. I have a feeling he’s going to use Ireland as a weapon against Brexit Britain.

Donald Trump and the death of identity politics

Wow, for a white supremacist Donald Trump has done very well among black and Latino voters. Literally Hitler, as some woke agitators loved to call him after he won the election in 2016, seems to have boosted his support among black men and black women and, most strikingly, among Latinos, who appear to be swinging things for Trump in some areas. Not bad for a president who, as the correct-thinking section of society constantly insisted, cares only about white folks. The results from the US are still unclear. Joe Biden might very well end up in the White House. But the stronger-than-expected showing for Trump has delivered an almighty body blow to pollsters and pundits who predicted a Biden landslide and to those who had been praying this election would repudiate Trumpism once and for all.

Prince Harry needs to stop lecturing us

Prince Harry has seen the light. His awokening is complete. Yesterday, in a video chat hosted by GQ magazine, he confessed to the sin of ‘unconscious bias’ and instructed the rest of us — the unwoke throng — to ‘educate yourself’. And there you have it: this duke, sixth in line to the British throne, is now indistinguishable from those irritating campus activists who scream ‘EDUCATE YOURSELF’ at anyone who has the temerity to demur from their worldview. Harry was having a chat with Patrick Hutchinson, the personal trainer who was photographed carrying a counter-protester to safety during clashes with BLM activists over the summer. Harry trotted out all the woke lines. ‘Ignorance is no longer an excuse’, he said, no doubt to those still in denial about the unwitting hatred that lurks in their hearts (that’s essentially what ‘unconscious bias’ means).

Why are bishops meddling in the Internal Market Bill?

What century is it? I ask because, this morning, the five most senior bishops in the country publicly rebuked our democratically elected government and effectively called on the unelected peers of the House of Lords to rebel against a Bill passed by the House of Commons. Bishops throwing their spiritual weight around to try to force political representatives to change course? I feel like I’ve just stepped out of a time machine into the 15th century. In a letter published in the Financial Times today, the Archbishops of Canterbury, York, Wales and Armagh, as well as the Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, laid into the Internal Market Bill. As the Bill arrives in the Lords to be pored over by people none of us voted for — the madness of it! — these meddling men of the cloth have made their feelings known.

The collapse of the Cambridge Analytica conspiracy theory

So there you have it. Cambridge Analytica was ‘not involved’ in the 2016 EU referendum. The digital marketing firm that Remainers love to hate did not swing the British electorate towards Leave, as we were constantly told. In the words of the Guardian, no doubt uttered through gritted teeth, Cambridge Analytica did not ‘directly misuse data to influence the Brexit referendum’. These are the conclusions of the Information Commissioner’s extensive three-year investigation into Cambridge Analytica. Throwing a big bucket of cold water on the chattering-class belief that Cambridge Analytica stealthily and probably illegally harvested people’s online data in order to manipulate our minds and make us vote Leave, the Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said yesterday that, in truth, CA was not a significant player in the referendum, ‘beyond some initial enquiries’.

The Oscars’ woke McCarthyism is a step too far

Normally the best response to political correctness at the Oscars is to laugh at it. Whether it’s Lady Gaga singing a song about campus rape culture or Leonardo DiCaprio taking a break from his lovely, fossil-fuelled, jet-setting life to lecture the billion-strong TV audience about the scourge of climate change, a chuckle is usually enough to puncture the Academy’s woke windbaggery. But not this time. As of today, PC at the Academy Awards has become a genuine problem and a genuine threat to artistic freedom. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, to give it its full name, has announced that movies hoping to compete in the Best Picture category will, from 2024, have to conform to certain ‘criteria’. They will need to be sufficiently ‘diverse’ before the Academy will consider them.

Spare us Ben & Jerry’s lecture on the Channel migrant crisis

Multi-millionaire virtue-signallers Ben and Jerry are at it again. Once again the ice-cream capitalists are doing their woke schtick in the hope that even more of the right-on middle-classes will buy their expensive tubs of cream and sugar. This time they’re taking aim at Priti Patel, lecturing her on Twitter about immigration. Thanks, but no thanks — we don’t want vast corporations butting into our democratic politics. Ben & Jerry’s UK gave Patel a haughty ticking-off in a Twitter thread published yesterday. In response to Patel’s promise to reduce the number of migrant boats crossing the English Channel, B&J said the ‘real crisis’ is ‘our lack of humanity for people fleeing war, climate change and torture’. They went on to remind Patel that, according to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the fact that someone crosses a border illegally should not impact on their right to claim asylum.

Can we finally put the Russia-Brexit conspiracy to bed?

So there you go. There is still no hard evidence that Russia interfered in the EU referendum. What’s more, it would be ‘difficult — if not impossible — to prove’ the existence of Russian meddling. Can we now, please, put the Russia-Brexit conspiracy theory to bed? The quote above comes from the Intelligence and Security Committee’s long-awaited Russia report, published this morning. Some people, especially hard-line Remainers, have been waiting for this report with bated breath. They hoped it would back up their conviction that the mass vote for Brexit in 2016 was essentially the handiwork of pesky Ruskies who infiltrated our public life and brainwashed the electorate into voting Leave. This ‘Russia Did Brexit’ lobby is likely to be disappointed by the report.

What’s up with Banksy’s mask propaganda?

Is Banksy a Tory propagandist now? His latest juvenile stunt suggests he might be. On the day the government announced that it will soon be mandatory to wear face masks in shops, Banksy released a video showing himself daubing a Tube train carriage with pro-mask slogans and images. Way to stick it to the man, Banksy! Banksy's latest act of politicised vandalism really sums him up. He dressed up as a cleaner, went Underground, ordered Tube passengers to move out of the way, and then got to work on his latest sneer at the masses. He stencilled rats inside the Tube carriage. One rat is sneezing. Another is struggling to put on a surgical mask. Another is clinging to a bottle of anti-bacterial gel. That's us, that is: rats.

Keir Starmer’s bizarre Black Lives Matter re-education

So now we know what happens if you criticise Black Lives Matter. You’ll be packed off for re-education. You will be sent to have your mind cleansed of foul, dissenting thoughts. You will be reminded of the First Commandment of the strange year of 2020: Thou Shalt Not Question BLM. That’s the lesson of Keir Starmer’s bizarre confession this morning that he will submit himself for unconscious bias training after he dared, ever so mildly, to criticise a few aspects of the BLM worldview. Last week Starmer referred to the BLM protests of the past few weeks as a ‘moment’. That was crime No. 1. In reducing this movement to a moment, Starmer, according to the warriors against anti-BLM blasphemy, was being dismissive of the incredibly important events that have taken place since the brutal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

We need to talk about Munira Mirza and Priti Patel

We need to talk about Priti Patel. Specifically we need to talk about what happened to her last week. In an emotional statement in the House of Commons, Patel talked about some of the racist abuse she has experienced, from being called a 'P**i' in the school playground to being depicted as a cow with a ring through its nose in the Guardian. (Patel is a Hindu, and the cow is a sacred symbol in Hinduism.)She did so in response to the claim made by Labour MP Florence Eshalomi that the government doesn't understand the problem of racial inequality. After recounting her run-ins with prejudicial hatred, Patel said: 'I will not take lectures [on racism] from the other side of the House.'How did the supposedly anti-racist left respond to Patel's comments? Did they offer her solidarity as a victim of racism? Did they cheer her for bravely discussing some of the racist bile that has been thrown her way? No.

The madness of censoring shows like Little Britain

Cancel culture is out of control. Over the past 24 hours Little Britain, The League of Gentlemen and Chris Lilley's brilliant comedy shows have been shoved down the memory hole by Netflix and the BBC. Why? Because the kangaroo court of correct-thinking has found these comedy classics guilty of offensiveness. Punish them, purge them, cast them out into the wilderness of 'problematic' culture. The speed with which the justifiable, righteous anger over the police execution of George Floyd in Minneapolis has turned into yet another culture war against offensive art is staggering. And terrifying, to be frank. One minute people are taking the knee in solidarity with a black man murdered by ruthless cops; the next they're saying: 'Remember when David Walliams dressed up as a fat black woman on Little Britain? Let's get him!' It feels kind of deranged, like censoriousness on steroids.

Toppling Colston’s statue was an act of intolerance

As they tore down the statue of the 17th-century merchant and slaver Edward Colston in Bristol yesterday, protesters were behaving like a woke Taliban. Just as Taliban extremists smashed huge carvings of Buddha that offended them, and just as Isis nutters took hammers to 'idolatrous' monuments in the cities of Palmyra and Nimrud, so British protesters are now waging war on historical statues that they claim are 'hurtful' to ordinary people. It was the glee with which they tore down Colston's statue that was most unnerving. They yanked him down and started cheering and screaming as they stomped on his head. He was then taken to the nearby harbour and thrown in the Avon river. Another rousing cheer. It was as if evil had been defeated.

The double standards of the London protestors

So now we know. All the things said about Dominic Cummings – that he shattered the lockdown, that he thinks it's one rule for him and another for everyone else – are far truer of those protesting at the big Black Lives Matter demo in Trafalgar Square on Sunday, than they are of Cummings. The demo’s message was clear. It shouted to the nation that the virtuous and right-thinking are more important than the rest of us. Their views and their rights count for more than ours. So while people will be shamed for sitting on a beach or taking part in VE Day celebrations, those who have the right opinions can press the flesh in a huge public gathering with seeming impunity. Politically, the gathering on Sunday was a confused affair.

What the fury about Cummings’s road trip is really about

Is Durhamgate over now? It must be. Surely. With a simmering revolt in Hong Kong, riots in Minneapolis, heightened border tensions between India and China, and Twitter censuring the president of the United States, British journalists can't still be obsessing over whether Dominic Cummings stopped at a petrol station on a drive to Durham. If they are, it rather makes a fantastic irony of the fact that these are the kind of people who often refer to the rest of us at Little Englanders. If – as so many of us hope – Durhamgate is finally fading away, now might be a good time to survey the wreckage. To look back on these feverish seven days in which journalists have thought and talked about little else other than the question of where Cummings self-isolated when ill, and ask what on earth it was all about.

The real Dominic Cummings scandal

The media’s Dominic Cummings story has completely collapsed. He did NOT go to Durham a second time, which was reported on the front page of the Sunday Mirror and the Observer. He did NOT have any physical contact with family members. The police did NOT talk to the Cummings family about the Covid lockdown guidelines. Cummings did NOT carry on doing things that everyone else had stopped doing — he even missed the funeral of his uncle who died from Covid. He did NOT leave his London home for leisure reasons — he left it because he was receiving death threats as a result of media demonisation. He was very ill, his wife was ill, and at one point his child was taken to hospital in an ambulance in Durham. His family has had a really rough time and the media have told lie after lie about him.

What’s more disturbing: Cummings’ behaviour - or the mob pursuing him?

The Dominic Cummings story is deeply disturbing. No, not the fact that Cummings and his wife, Mary Wakefield, took what they considered to be essential steps to ensure the welfare of their young child, but the fury and the bile that have been heaped upon them for doing so.It really is something. For the entire weekend the media and the Twitterati have been raging against two parents who were ill, or at risk of falling ill, and who did what they thought was best for their kid in this situation: drove from London to Durham so that family members could assist with childcare if necessary. Parents taking measures to protect their child is perfectly normal. What isn't normal, and in fact raises serious questions about the media's moral compass, is the depiction of such parents as reckless and uncaring.