Tom Slater is the editor of Spiked.
‘There’s more than one way to burn a book’, wrote Ray Bradbury, in a coda to the 1979 edition of his anti-censorship classic, Fahrenheit 451. The case of Kate Clanchy, the Orwell Prize-winning author, currently rewriting her book after a particularly strange fit of identitarian pique, shows us just how true that is. The story of
When a top Edinburgh school announced earlier this month that it would stop teaching To Kill a Mockingbird, citing the novel’s ‘white saviour motif’ and use of the n-word, the response ranged from uproar to bafflement. We may be living in increasingly censorious times, it seems, but banning books, even just on a school’s curriculum,
When you think of the Israel-Palestine conflict, ice cream doesn’t usually come up. But that may be about to change. Ben & Jerry’s has finally broken its silence, announcing yesterday that it will ‘end sales of our ice cream in the occupied Palestinian territory’. Perhaps in the years ahead we’ll come to see this depriving
So it’s finally happened. Cancel culture has come for Mumford and Sons. Winston Marshall, former banjo player in the hugely successful group, has left the band after becoming embroiled in a Twitterstorm earlier this year, during which he was essentially smeared as a hard-right lunatic. It seems that the culture war can now leave no
Cancel culture is a reflection of our society’s cowardice. The more institutions bow to the demands of an intolerant fringe, the more powerful these unrepresentative bores become. The GB News boycott is a perfect example of this. A handful of tweeters, ginned up by the censorious hate group Stop Funding Hate, tweeted their dismay at
GB News, the UK’s first new news channel in decades, launched on Sunday night with a monologue from the estimable Andrew Neil, setting out the channel’s philosophy. ‘We will puncture the pomposity of our elites and politics, business, media and academia and expose their growing promotion of cancel culture for the threat to free speech
Librarians aren’t known for causing trouble. But at our elite universities, in the grip of an increasingly unhinged culture of offence-taking, it doesn’t take much to cause trouble nowadays. This is the news that a library director at King’s College London has been forced to make a grovelling apology for emailing around a photo of
The strange tale of Pimlico Academy, the central London school roiled by ‘anti-racist’ protests, shows us that the culture war now consumes all before it. No institution or arena of life can carry on unmolested by our overheated discussions about race and identity. The politicisation of absolutely everything has, perhaps inevitably, reached the playground. Daniel
The next time someone tells you campus censorship is a myth, made up by right-wing tabloids and leapt upon by a Tory government keen to wage a ‘culture war’ against the left, tell them to Google ‘Lisa Keogh’. Keogh is a 29-year-old law student at Abertay University in Dundee. She is currently being investigated by
‘Why do you lot hate Harry and Meghan so much?’ It’s a question the formerly royal couple’s supporters often ask whenever the pair trend on Twitter, as a clip of the Sussexes’ latest pronouncement, or news of their latest corporate deal, goes viral. They think they already know the answer of course: it is sexism,
The past year has accelerated all kinds of trends that were already moving through our societies. Social atomisation, the decline of the high street and communities, the rise of the nanny state — Covid and lockdown have brought all of these to the fore. Among the most concerning is the rise of Big Tech censorship,
God save Johnny Rotten. The former Sex Pistols frontman, real name John Lydon, gave a beautiful interview recently. It’s a moving portrait of his life now, caring full-time for his wife, Nora Forster, who is tragically suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. And it is also a reminder that, despite his newfound responsibilities – and despite being almost
The radicalisation of the Ben & Jerry’s PR department has been one of the stranger spectacles of recent years. After all, for all its hippyish origins and homespun shtick, Ben & Jerry’s is a corporate giant flogging expensive ice creams with wacky names like Cherry Garcia and Truffle Kerfuffle. And yet it has become remarkably
Remember Apu, the kindly Indian shopkeeper from The Simpsons? Well, in the time since most people have stopped watching that 32-year-old show, past its prime for at least two of its three decades, the world has come around to deciding that he is actually a really racist character, perhaps even a 2D agent of white
At the tender age of 36, Prince Harry has got his first job since leaving the royal family. Congratulations to him. As most teenagers will know it is both a liberating and formative experience. Paper boy, shopfloor dogsbody, chief impact officer – the roles can be unglamorous, but they’re almost always worth it. Harry’s big
In the age of Zoom lectures and distance learning, it is almost comforting to know that students’ unions are still up to their mad censorious antics. The new normal cannot dent their zealotry, as a recent story from the University of Aberdeen attests. The Telegraph reports today that Elizabeth Heverin, a 19-year-old history and politics
Amid the ongoing fallout from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s explosive Oprah interview, Charlie Hebdo seems to have done the impossible: it has united Team Queen and Team Meghan in outrage against it. In response to Markle’s claims that she was pushed out of the royal family by racism, the fearless French satirical magazine published
It’s not been a good year for any of us. But it certainly hasn’t been a good year for Nish Kumar, alleged comedian and voice of perma-smug Britain. Last year, sensing a gap in the market for anti-Trump material, Kumar tried to break America with a topical Daily Show-style show hosted on some weird new
It is the duty of journalists and broadcasters to be sceptical, particularly to claims made by the rich and powerful. Before yesterday that wasn’t a controversial point. But the pushing out of Piers Morgan from Good Morning Britain, purely because he says he doesn’t believe a word that comes out of Meghan Markle’s mouth, suggests
Another pillar of the patriarchy has fallen. His name is Mr Potato Head – or rather, it was Mr Potato Head. US toy giant Hasbro has decided to make the branding for this nearly 70-year-old range gender-neutral, so it will just be Potato Head from now on. According to Hasbro, this is all part of
