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.
I can forgive many of the sins of the Trump-is-Hitler, Brexit-is-Beelzebub lobby. I mean, we all lose the plot occasionally. We’re all susceptible to freaking out. One day you’re a paragon of measured political chatter and the next you’re on Twitter at 3am screaming ‘FASCIST!’ at eggs and plotting to make Hampstead a republic so
The Twitter-cheering for John Bercow, the transformation of him into a Love, Actually-style hero of British middle-class probity against a gruff, migrant-banning Yank, could be the most grotesque political spectacle of the year so far. Not because it’s virtue-signalling, as claimed by the handful of brave critics who’ve raised their heads above the online orgy
The movement for free speech on campus was born at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964. Last night it died there. In the intolerant screams, smashed glass and fire — actual fire — of the Berkeley protesters who successfully prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking, the ideal of free speech on campus was dealt a
I don’t like Donald Trump. I think his executive order barring travel from certain countries is rash and illiberal. And yet I cannot get behind the hyperbolic, Holocaust-citing protests against him. I cannot line up with the idea that he’s a uniquely bad president, possibly the worst ever; that he’s an ‘aberration’, ‘abnormal’, someone we
During the massive, impressive Women’s March in London on Saturday, in which thousands of noisy women, men and children stuck it to Trump, the organisers tweeted the following: ‘We are the people.’ Wait — it’s okay to say ‘the people’ again? Since Trump’s victory in November, and even more so after the Brexit Revolt in
It happened because you banned super-size sodas. And smoking in parks. And offensive ideas on campus. Because you branded people who oppose gay marriage ‘homophobic’, and people unsure about immigration ‘racist’. Because you treated owning a gun and never having eaten quinoa as signifiers of fascism. Because you thought correcting people’s attitudes was more important
The angrier, snootier sections of the Remain camp have done many bad things since 23 June. Some have suggested Brexit should be overthrown. Others have issued terrible libels against Leave voters, branding them ‘low information’ and xenophobic. Witness Nick Clegg in this Guardian video published this week having a good old laugh at Sheffield people
Many mad things are happening on campuses. Fancy-dress parties are banned lest the costumes offend minority groups. Saucy pop songs are forbidden lest they turn male students into marauding sex machines. Controversial speakers are No Platformed. But perhaps the worst thing is the rekindling of the racial imagination, the return of judging people by race.
Is there nothing Jeremy Corbyn can’t screw up? This week his advisers whispered to the press that their leader was about to do a Donald, be more populist, try to connect with the man and woman in the street who might think of him as a bit stiff and aloof and stuck in the Seventies. And
The response to Milo Yiannopoulos getting a big-bucks book deal with Simon & Schuster has been nuts. Even by today’s standards. The cry has gone up that S&S — or SS, amirite? — is endangering the wellbeing of women and gays and blacks and other minorities that have felt the sting of Milo’s camp polemics. Please.
Today’s Fabian Society paper on the state of the Labour Party — and what a state it is — has put Labourites and the leftish Twitterati into a spin. Aptly titled ‘Stuck’, the paper says just over half of the people who voted Labour in 2015 support the party today. And if an election were
Nothing better sums up the aloofness of the chattering class, their otherworldliness in fact, than their blathering about 2016 being the worst year ever. It’s the refrain running through every Brexitphobic column, every historically illiterate comparison of Trump to Hitler, every tear-sodden list of the big-name celebs who’ve died this year. 2016 is ‘the f–king
We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 2: Brendan O’Neill’s blog post in which he argues that the response to Trump’s victory in the US election reveals exactly why ‘The Donald’ won in the first place If you want to know why Trump won, just look at the
It’s rare that an opinion poll brings a tear to my eye. But this week one did. It was the CNN/ComRes poll published on Monday. It found that 47 per cent of British adults would vote Leave if the EU referendum was held today, and 45 per cent would vote Remain (eight per cent said
The worst thing about 2016 — an otherwise bracing year of political upset and oligarchical tears — has been the mainstreaming of the insult ‘fascist’. Anyone who sticks it to the status quo, whether by rejecting the EU or plumbing for Trump over Clinton, risks being smeared with the F-word. Even the normally measured New
The one good thing about Twitterstorms is that they tend, witlessly, to prove the point of the person they’re hounding. In the very act of whipping up fume and fury against someone who’s said something you’re not meant to say, these virtual pitchfork gangs confirm that person’s point, which was normally something like: ‘Have you
Wounded Remainers in Britain and the Hillary set in the US love banging on about ‘post-truth politics’. Lies are everywhere, they say, falling from Trump’s weird mouth, plastered on the side of Brexit buses. And apparently these lies invaded voters’ minds and made us do the unimaginable thing of voting against the EU and failing
Of all the barbs fired at us Brexiteers, the one that’s irritated me most is ‘Little Englander’. The suggestion is that pro-EU people are broad-minded Europhiles while Brexiteers are petty nationalists who want to dismantle the Chunnel and while away our days drinking tea and slagging off Germans. It couldn’t be more wrong. In fact,
The Twitch-hunters, those antsy, intolerant guardians of what it’s permissible to say on Twitter, have claimed another scalp. Eric Bristow’s. The former darts champion, lovably known as the Crafty Cockney, will now probably be better known as hate-speaker thanks to the offence-taking army that took umbrage at his tweets about child abuse. For this quarrelsome
Here’s a tip for judges, businessmen, peers, politicians and former PMs who don’t like being called ‘enemies of the people’: stop behaving like enemies of the people. This week it is reported that Tony Blair is polishing his toothy grin to make a comeback into British politics, potentially as thwarter, or just tamer, of the ‘catastrophe’
