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.
Gary Lineker is coming to save Britain. From what, I hear you ask? From you. And me. And the rest of the dim-witted electorate who screwed up the nation with our pesky vote to leave the EU. The football commentator turned crisps advertiser turned spokesman for the weeping Brexitphobic Twitterati has announced that he is
Remember when leftists and liberals were against capitalists throwing their weight around in the political sphere? ‘Just because you’re filthy rich doesn’t mean you should have more clout than the rest of us’, they might say. No longer. Now they love it when the boss class tut-tuts about democracy and wonders out loud if we
Remember when leftists and liberals were against capitalists throwing their weight around in the political sphere? ‘Just because you’re filthy rich doesn’t mean you should have more clout than the rest of us’, they might say. No longer. Now they love it when the boss class tut-tuts about democracy and wonders out loud if we
So this is what a principled politician looks like. They can be hard to spot these days, but last night, in parliament, we saw four of them in action. Kate Hoey, Frank Field, John Mann and Graham Stringer. Four Labour MPs who, despite knowing they would get flak from both Corbynistas and centrists, despite knowing
There is so much euphemistic reporting about Scarlett Johansson’s decision to drop out of a film in which she would have portrayed a trans man. Ms Johansson ‘quits role’, headlines tell us. She has ‘stepped away’ from ‘trans role’, we are informed. It all makes it sound like she had a simple change of heart,
There has been a Remainer coup. Remainers now inhabit virtually all of the highest offices in the land. Overnight, adherents to this minority political viewpoint seized the final levers of political power. This is the one downside — and what a downside it is — to the belated outbreak of principle among the cabinet’s Brexiteers:
There has been a Remainer coup. Remainers now inhabit virtually all of the highest offices in the land. Overnight, adherents to this minority political viewpoint seized the final levers of political power. This is the one downside — and what a downside it is — to the belated outbreak of principle among the cabinet’s Brexiteers:
Stop it. Stop saying we can’t be sure why people voted for Brexit. Stop saying it was just a screech of rage against politicians and so must now be tempered and made into sensible policy. Stop saying it’s fine for Theresa May in her Chequers showdown to ‘soften’ Brexit and keep us entangled in a
Oh so you all love Danny Dyer now? The turnaround in Dyer’s fortunes over the past 12 hours has been extraordinary. He’s gone from being the butt of posh tweeters’ jokes to a celebrated political sage. From a ridiculous uber-lad whose cosying up to football’s hard men and promiscuous use of words like ‘slags’ and
Fifa is worried. It is freaking out over the possibility that England fans will take a Brexit-related swipe at Belgian fans in tomorrow’s game. Our boys face the Belgians at Kaliningrad tomorrow evening. And given that a great many England fans are a) fond of Brexit and b) known to have a few pints ahead
Imagine the industrial levels of brass neck it must require for EU-supporting MPs to present themselves as defenders of parliamentary sovereignty. That’s what they’re doing today, on ‘Brexit Super Tuesday’, as they start voting on the Lords’ amendments to the government’s Brexit Bill. They say they are backing the amendment that would give MPs a
It’s always good to remind Sadiq Khan that Brexit is more popular in London than he is. Khan loves to play the role of Mayor of Remainia, the political figurehead of this oh-so-clever capital city that can see through the folly of Brexit that those strange inhabitants of Essex, the North and Wales voted for.
Listening to the Archbishop of Canterbury praise the EU as ‘the greatest dream realised for human beings’ for more than a thousand years, and as the gracious deliverer of ‘peace’ and ‘prosperity’ to the peoples of Europe, I felt like reminding him of one of the Ten Commandments: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before
It’s always good to remind Sadiq Khan that Brexit is more popular in London than he is. Khan loves to play the role of Mayor of Remainia, the political figurehead of this oh-so-clever capital city that can see through the folly of Brexit that those strange inhabitants of Essex, the North and Wales voted for.
Andrew O’Hagan of the London Review of Books did something very valuable this week: he re-complicated Grenfell. His 60,000-word piece ‘The Tower’, which takes up the entire current issue of LRB, wrestles the Grenfell calamity from the infantile moralising of Corbynistas and much of the commentariat, and reminds us that this was a strange and
So referendums are good now? The turnaround has been astonishing. The very people who have spent the best part of two years in moral meltdown at the fact that Britons were given a referendum on membership of the EU are now beside themselves with joy over the abortion referendum in Ireland. ‘You know who loved
It’s good to see that for all their bickering over Brexit and war of words over austerity, the Tories and Labour are firmly united on one point of view: that the poor must be saved from themselves. That the wretched are incapable of making sensible choices and therefore their betters must step in and make
Imagine referring to a whole section of society as meat. As mere flesh, bereft of sentience. It used to be hardcore racists who did that, to black people. Now it’s Corbynistas who do it, to that swarm of people they despise more than any other: lower middle-class or working-class white men, usually of middle age,
The Lords have lost it. They’re out of control. They have taken a wrecking-ball to the government’s plans for Brexit 14 times in recent weeks, putting themselves on a war footing with the people we actually elect. They are behaving like they did in the first decade of the 20th century when they arrogantly vetoed
So, the government has finally come up with a solution to the scourge of yellow-bellied censoriousness that has swept university campuses in recent years: it is going to ban it. Yes, it is going to ban banning. It is going to No Platform the No Platformers. It is going to force universities to be pro-free
