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.
This week, national treasure David Attenborough joined the post-Brexit pile-on of the plebs. Should the little people really be trusted to make decisions about complicated matters like the EU, he asked? You know the answer: of course we shouldn’t. We’re too dim. We don’t have as many degrees as him. The point of parliamentary democracy, he
If you thought the public shaming and punishment of people for ridiculing religion was a thing of the past — a dark past when you’d be put in the stocks, or worse, for failing to bend your knee to certain gods and beliefs — then think again. Just look at the treatment of Olympian gymnast
Being an out-and-proud Brexiteer, someone who would go to the barricades for Brexit, someone who might even take a bullet for Brexit, I often get emails from people who feel the same way but feel they can’t express their Brexitphilia in public. This week, in response to my Big Issue column on, yes, the beauty
How long before Silicon Valley drags its nerdy workers one by one into a dark room and demands of them: ‘Are you now or have you ever been a supporter of Donald Trump?’ Say ‘No, of course not!’ and you’d be allowed to stay; say ‘Yes, I’m backing his campaign for the presidency’ and you’d
How did mocking Islam become the great speechcrime of our times? Louis Smith, the gymnast, is the latest to fall foul of the weird new rule against ridiculing Islam. A leaked video shows Smith laughing as his fellow gymnast, Luke Carson, pretends to pray and chants ‘Allahu Akbar’. Smith says something derogatory about the belief
Last week, students at York University staged a walkout from the sexual consent classes organised by their student union women’s officers. A quarter of the freshers decided they didn’t want to be lectured to by union worthies about when it’s OK to have sex. So they got up and left. ‘These talks are inherently patronising
Brexit, they say, has emboldened the hateful. It has given people permission to spout their prejudices, to pollute public life with their weird, rash dislike of anyone who is different to them. And it’s true, Brexit has done this. Only not in the way they think. The most visible hatred in the three months since
Just when you thought the trigger-warning trend on campus couldn’t get any more bonkers it’s reported that archaeology students are being allowed to dodge discussions of ‘traumatic’ historic events. Yes, students whose entire academic mission is to dig up bones, pore over old stuff and work out what the hell mankind was doing / thinking
Is it a crime now to tell rubbish jokes? The bizarre and frankly cruel treatment of Paul Gascoigne suggests it might be. Yesterday, at Dudley Magistrates Court, Gazza was found guilty of using ‘threatening or abusive words’ and fined £2,000. His crime was to say the following about a black security guard who had been
Prepare the stake, stoke the fire: someone has blasphemed against climate-change orthodoxy. The speech criminal in question is Nicolas Sarkozy. Yes, the former president of France, a man who really ought to know better, has wondered out loud if mankind is solely responsible for climate change. Cue media fury. Cue eco-outrage. Cue accusations that Sarkozy
Should it be a crime to hate women? This unfortunate question is thrown up by the news that misogyny might soon become a hate crime across England and Wales. Two months ago, Nottingham Police launched a trial ‘crackdown on sexism’, investigating cases of, among other things, ‘verbal harassment’ and ‘unwanted advances’ towards women. Now top
Democracy is hanging by a thread in this country. At the start of this year, if someone had told you that in eight months’ time there would be open calls for the thwarting of the people’s will, and marches demanding the crushing of public opinion, you’d probably have scoffed. ‘This isn’t some anti-democratic backwater, it’s
Why is everyone so chilled out about the threats to Brexit? Why isn’t there more public fury over the plotting of lords and academics and experts to stymie Brexit and thwart the will of 17.4m people? In all the years I’ve been writing about politics, I cannot remember a time when democracy has been treated
Britain is in the grip of an epidemic, apparently. An epidemic of hate. Barely a day passes without some policeman or journalist telling us about the wave of criminal bigotry that is sweeping through the country. It’s been bad for years, they say, but has become worse since the EU referendum. Police forces tell us
It turns out rock didn’t die when Elvis joined the Army in 1958, or when the Beatles accepted their OBEs in the 1960s, or when Vivienne Westwood went from making filthy t-shirts for punks to being dressmaker-in-chief to the filthy-rich bourgeoisie. No, it died last Thursday, outside Liverpool St, when an NME distributor shoved the
The alt-right, those anti-PC, bedroom-bound fans of Trump and strangers to sexual intercourse, have finally lost the plot. Consider their hounding of Leslie Jones. Jones is a very funny African-American comedian and the only good thing in the otherwise flat, weird and mirth-free Ghostbusters reboot. Yet for the past 48 hours she has been subjected
Who might save the Labour Party? That’s the question dividing dinner parties across London, causing spats at media soirees, getting socially conscious celebs scratching their heads. I have a different question. Why save the Labour Party? Save it to do what? To be what? To think what? The middle-class tussle over the future of Labour
Never mind bureaucracy. Forget technocracy. Put to the back of your mind the rising lawyerocracy, like those 1,000 puffed-up, demos-fearing lawyers who yesterday insisted that the EU referendum result is not binding. For there’s a worse ‘ocracy than those, one which has an even greater draining effect on politics, one which leeches the life and
Please, no, not Theresa May. Theresa the technocrat, who doesn’t do ideology, passion or even gossip, would be the worst PM for Britain right now. Post-Brexit Britain, where politics has become interesting again, after 17.5m souls gave an otherworldly establishment just the fright it needed, needs a leader who is properly political, up for debate,
A coup is underway. In Britain, in the 21st century, unelected forces have come together to try to thwart the will of the people. It’s a polite coup. Its weapons are legal challenges rather than guns, and it’s being led by businesspeople and retired politicians rather than moustachioed military men hungry for power. It’s a
