Brendan O’Neill | The Spectator Columnists & Writers

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.

Brendan O’Neill

Keir Starmer’s bizarre Black Lives Matter re-education

Brendan O’Neill

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.

Brendan O’Neill

We need to talk about Munira Mirza and Priti Patel

Brendan O’Neill

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.

Brendan O’Neill

The madness of censoring shows like Little Britain

Brendan O’Neill

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.

Brendan O’Neill

Toppling Colston’s statue was an act of intolerance

Brendan O’Neill

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.

Brendan O’Neill

The double standards of the London protestors

Brendan O’Neill

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.

Brendan O’Neill

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

Brendan O’Neill

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.

Brendan O’Neill

The real Dominic Cummings scandal

Brendan O’Neill

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.

Brendan O’Neill

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

Brendan O’Neill

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.

Brendan O’Neill

Liberate London from lockdown now

Brendan O’Neill

Liberate London from lockdown now

I know good news is not allowed in coronavirus Britain. Instead we're all meant to cower before the death stats, fume at photos of people on beaches, and nod along as Piers Morgan bursts yet another blood vessel over what a calamitous PM Boris is. Pessimism is your highest duty in this strange, fearful nation we have become. Optimism is tantamount to thoughtcrime. How else to explain YouTube's disgraceful decision to take down a video interview with Karol Sikora, the perky professor of medicine whose reason and hopefulness on the Covid crisis has helped to keep me, and many others I'm sure, sane over these past three weeks. Confidence in humanity must not be tolerated! Well, sod it. Here's some good news. Look away now, Piers.

Brendan O’Neill

Teaching unions, not Boris, are the reckless ones

Brendan O’Neill

Teaching unions, not Boris, are the reckless ones

The National Education Union, the largest teaching union in the UK, has branded Boris Johnson 'reckless'. What's he done now? He said Britain's schools should start to reopen in June. This is how weird politics has become in Covid-hit Britain. The 'Evil Tories' want working people, especially teachers, to get back to work, while the unions are saying: 'No, thanks. It's too dangerous.' Our apparently uncaring government wants kids to mix together once again and to get back to the incredibly serious business of learning. And the supposedly loving left is pushing back and pretty much insisting that schools should remain closed and kids should stay stuck at home. Political life has been turned upside down. Boris made his schools comment in his address to the nation on Sunday night, the one that Oxbridge-educated journalists across the land – well, in the London media bubble – pretended not to understand.

Brendan O’Neill

Why Boris bashers like Jacinda Ardern

Brendan O’Neill

Why Boris bashers like Jacinda Ardern

I'm starting to wonder if the people who unfavourably compare Britain's Covid experience with New Zealand's are being wilfully stupid. There's no other explanation. No reasonable person would compare the impact of a novel virus on these two nations without mentioning that we are starkly different countries. You see it all the time now. Praise is heaped on the sainted Jacinda Ardern for doing what Boris Johnson has failed to do: protect her people from sickness and death. New Zealand has had just 21 deaths related to Covid; Britain has had 30,000. Which proves, apparently, that women are better leaders than men when it comes to dealing with crisis and calamity. 'Women are better leaders – the pandemic proves it', says CNN, with a pic of Ardern, naturally.

Brendan O’Neill

The ridiculousness of the bookshelf police

Brendan O’Neill

The ridiculousness of the bookshelf police

‘People want to know why Michael Gove owns "racist" and "anti-Semitic" books’, reports the Independent’s website. By 'people' it actually means the time-rich Twitterati, who have discovered a new hobby: bookshelf policing. And the latest bookshelf to fail their purity test, to commit the sin of containing books these people disapprove of, is Gove's. Yes, not content with policing speech, tweets, jokes and even hairstyles (witness the screams of 'cultural appropriation' that greet any celeb who wears her hair in a way her race isn't meant to), now the offence-taking mob is policing bookshelves. The Shelf Stasi, we might call them, peruse the tomes in people's private book collections and bark 'Verboten!' if they spy something unacceptable.

Brendan O’Neill

In praise of old white men

Brendan O’Neill

In praise of old white men

Remember when it was fashionable to hate old white men? Of course you do. It was only a few weeks ago. In the era of BC – Before Coronavirus – there was no hipper prejudice than to loathe old white men. If you were pale, male and stale, you were bad. You were to blame for everything. Trump, Brexit, sexism, every misfortune that befalls the millennial generation: it was all the fault of old blokes with white skin. As Simon Jenkins said, PSMs (pale, stale males) became the last social group it was 'OK to vilify'. How things have changed. Now, deservedly, the hero of the moment is Colonel Tom Moore, the former British army officer who raised more than £30m for the NHS's Covid-fighting fund by walking around his garden.

Brendan O’Neill

In praise of old white men

Brendan O’Neill

In praise of old white men

Brendan O’Neill

‘Protect the NHS’ has become a dangerously effective message

Brendan O’Neill

‘Protect the NHS’ has become a dangerously effective message

There was an interesting moment at the government's daily Covid-19 press briefing a couple of weeks ago. Angela McLean, the Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser, was reiterating the government's core message. 'What really matters', she said, 'is that people stay home, protect lives and save the NHS'. Then, a look of confusion, possibly even concern, took over her face. She raised a finger to her mouth and said: 'Or is it the other way around...?' In short, she couldn't remember, for a moment, which message was most important: protecting lives or saving the NHS. She did have the message wrong. The government's latest public-health adverts make clear what the moral priorities are in Covid-hit Britain: 'Stay Home. Protect the NHS.

Brendan O’Neill

5G conspiracy theories didn’t come out of the blue

Brendan O’Neill

5G conspiracy theories didn’t come out of the blue

There’s a dark irony to the scorn being poured on 5G conspiracy theorists right now. Which is that a lot of the ridicule is coming from those sections of society that have done more than their fair share to stoke up conspiratorial thinking in recent years. Whether it is the unhinged idea that Russian bots made us vote for Brexit, or the obsession with Zionist power and its malign influence on British politics, conspiracy theories have become positively fashionable in the UK over the past five years. And such warped thinking has been promoted by the very people — Twitter leftists, supposedly sensible Remainers — who are now getting their rocks off by mocking the handful of 5G nutters. The 5G conspiracy theory is mental.

Brendan O’Neill

Yes, we need experts. But let’s not politicise expertise

Brendan O’Neill

Yes, we need experts. But let’s not politicise expertise

For some people, it isn’t enough that we have locked down our daily lives. They want us to lock down our brains, too. Raise so much as a peep of criticism about the shutdown of society in response to Covid-19 and you will be raged against. And the cry is always the same: ‘Are you an expert? No. So shut the hell up.’ Only experts are allowed to speak at the moment, apparently. The rest of us — us lowly, non-expert plebs — must simply sit at home and await our instructions from on high. Those daily coronavirus news briefings feel, at times, like sermons from the mount. It is there, often from the mouths of people none of us ever voted for, that we discover how we must conduct our everyday lives and how long we will remain under house arrest.

Brendan O’Neill

Yes, we need experts. But let’s not politicise expertise

Brendan O’Neill

Yes, we need experts. But let’s not politicise expertise

Brendan O’Neill

Derbyshire police should leave those dog walkers alone

Brendan O’Neill

Derbyshire police should leave those dog walkers alone

The vast majority of Brits are behaving sensibly in this Covid-19 lockdown. It’s a shame the same can’t be said for some police forces. Some coppers are using this extraordinary emergency to throw their weight around and treat the public like aberrant schoolkids in need of a scolding. There’s a Stasi feel to some of the excessive policing of the lockdown. Consider Derbyshire police’s use of drones to spy on people walking in the Peak District. Like jumped-up busybodies, the Derbyshire force posted a tweet yesterday saying its drone unit had been flying over ‘beauty spots across the county’ capturing images of people taking a stroll. Despite posts yesterday highlighting issues of people still visiting the #PeakDistrict despite government guidance, the message is still not getting through.

Brendan O’Neill

Boris should be praised for his reluctance to send in the police

Brendan O’Neill

Boris should be praised for his reluctance to send in the police

There was an extraordinary moment in the government’s Covid-19 news briefing yesterday. Boris Johnson was asked: ‘Prime Minister, people aren’t acting responsibly, so when are you going to bring in the police?’ Boris was aghast. ‘Bring in the police?!’, he said, looking, as one would hope he would, horrified by the prospect of the UK becoming a police state that arrests people for going outside and strolling in parks. Guess which side in this telling Q&A got the most flak? Yep, not the journalist wondering out loud when cops are going to step in, but the PM who has an instinctive loathing of such an authoritarian prospect. This is the world we live in now: one where wanting a police state makes you a better person than those who think this might be an excessive and unnecessary step.

Brendan O’Neill

The closure of pubs makes this a dark day for Britain

Brendan O’Neill

The closure of pubs makes this a dark day for Britain

For surreal moments, this will take some beating: I’m in a pub watching the prime minister announce the closure of pubs. It was my first instinct when I saw an online news report saying all pubs would be forced to close as of this evening: to leave my office and get into a pub. I need one more pub pint. I need one more pub memory to sustain me through the dark months of tragic home-boozing that lie ahead for all of us. The first thing I saw when I arrived was a gaggle of tipsy blokes staring at a TV that had its volume cranked right up. Boris was solemnly announcing the regrettable cancellation of every freeborn Englishman’s right to go to the pub. I couldn’t tell if was being jokey or not. But no one in here is laughing.

Brendan O’Neill

Youngsters are ill-equipped to cope in this time of coronavirus

Brendan O’Neill

Youngsters are ill-equipped to cope in this time of coronavirus

We’re all worried about older people right now. But I’m worried about the young too. I fear they lack the social nous and moral muscle to deal with a crisis as profound as the Covid-19 pandemic. I fear that the cult of fragility is so widespread among the youth that some will struggle to rise to the occasion of facing down this wolf at the door of our society. Our first priority must be the elderly, of course. We know Covid-19 is more dangerous for them than it is for other age groups. (Though I wish the media would stop giving the impression that every old person who catches it dies. That isn’t the case. To spread fear among the old is its own kind of disease, causing moral and mental harm to people who often feel isolated enough as it is.

Brendan O’Neill

Labour will regret its shameful treatment of Trevor Phillips

Brendan O’Neill

Labour will regret its shameful treatment of Trevor Phillips

Many of us suspected the Labour party was on a suicide mission. Now we know for sure. The party’s suspension of Trevor Phillips over allegations of Islamophobia feels like a turning point. It is surely one of the final nails in the coffin of irrelevance that has been enveloping this party for a few years now. The casting out of Phillips confirms two things about Labour under the baleful, Stalinist rule of the Corbynista left. First, that they will brook no dissent. No questioning of their deathly creeds of identitarianism and multiculturalism — a questioning Phillips has pursued with great clarity and purpose in recent years — will be tolerated. Dissenters from woke orthodoxy will be punished, branded ‘phobic’, erased from the party record like those old commissars who irritated the big boss.

Brendan O’Neill

Priti Patel and the ugly prejudice of her critics

Brendan O’Neill

Priti Patel and the ugly prejudice of her critics

Isn’t it amazing how all the woke rules for how to talk about women and people of colour go flying out the window when it comes to Priti Patel? You can say anything you like about Patel and the PC set won’t bat an eyelid. In fact they will cheer you on. Patel is possibly the only female, Asian-heritage public figure in the UK who enjoys absolutely none of the protections of political correctness. It’s always open season on Priti. So for years we have been told that we shouldn’t call successful women ‘bossy’ or ‘bitchy’. Those are sexist insults against women who have simply shown the kind of resolve and determination that men are celebrated for, feminists say. And they have a point. But this rule against calling powerful women bitches never applies to Patel.

Brendan O’Neill

Dawn Butler’s transgender madness

Brendan O’Neill

Dawn Butler’s transgender madness

Imagine if a politician went on TV and said ‘The Earth is flat’. Or ‘Man didn’t really land on the Moon, you know’. We would worry about that politician’s fitness for public life. Well, Dawn Butler has just done the trans equivalent of that. She appeared on Good Morning Britain yesterday and said babies are born without a sex. That is easily as loopy and anti-scientific as saying the Earth isn’t a sphere. Butler, the Labour MP for Brent, was taking part in another discussion about Labour’s interminable slide down the trans rabbit hole. Labour has completely lost the plot on this issue. Last week, a group called the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights issued a purge-like document insisting that everyone in the Labour party bow down to the mantra that ‘trans women are women’ and ‘trans men are men’ or risk being branded a transphobic bigot and booted out of the party.

Brendan O’Neill

Leo Varadkar has paid the price for banging on about Brexit

Brendan O’Neill

Leo Varadkar has paid the price for banging on about Brexit

There has been a revolt in Ireland. Not a huge one. It isn’t a Brexit-sized rebellion. It isn’t an all-out populist protest against the establishment of the kind we have seen in the US and various European countries in recent years. But still, the result of Saturday’s general election is a brilliant blow against the Irish establishment and its obsessively pro-EU, anti-Brexit leanings. People are talking up the election result as a humiliation for Taoiseach and Fine Gael leader, Leo Varadkar. It certainly is that. Varadkar’s attempt to make the election about Brexit — and about his apparently brave efforts to frustrate Brexit — fell spectacularly flat. But Varadkar isn’t the only one who failed to make Brexitphobia the organising principle of Irish political life.

Brendan O’Neill

Spare us Nish Kumar and the BBC’s anti-Brexit sneering

Brendan O’Neill

Spare us Nish Kumar and the BBC’s anti-Brexit sneering

Friday was Brexit day. The day that the largest act of democracy in the history of this country was finally enacted. The day when the wishes of 17.4m people finally became a reality. And how did the BBC, the national broadcaster, mark this extraordinary democratic day? With a sneer, of course. A smug, aloof, bitter sneer at the entire country. Not only did BBC reporters huff and moan at the mass pro-Brexit gathering in Parliament Square, coming off like anthropologists who had happened upon some bizarre, exotic tribe. It also chose that day to push out anti-Brexit nonsense via its kids’ wing, CBBC. Yes, even children must now be subjected to the media elite’s Brexitphobic claptrap. On iPlayer and Twitter, Auntie pumped out old Horrible Histories clips to remind people that Britain is actually a bit of a naff nation.

Brendan O’Neill

Ignore the Brexit day party poopers – it’s time to celebrate

Brendan O’Neill

Ignore the Brexit day party poopers – it’s time to celebrate

Don’t gloat. Don’t be too triumphalist. Don’t wave your flags too boisterously. Don’t say or do anything that might offend sad, pained Remainers, who will be huddled in their homes, looking with bemusement and concern upon the terrible new world that will be born at 11pm tonight. All of these warnings are being issued to Leavers today as we gear up for our Brexit Day celebrations. Be humble, we’re told. Be magnanimous. Be quiet. And the party-pooping isn’t only coming from Europhiles who think the end of our membership of the EU is tantamount to the End of Days. Like London mayor Sadiq Khan, who has expressed concern that after Brexit Day we might see a rise in xenophobic hate crimes. Yes, that’s right, Sadiq: us Leavers are a racist pogrom in waiting, just one Nigel Farage speech away from becoming deranged lunatics.