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.
If you want to know how crazy, even Kafkaesque, this young millennium has become, consider this: yesterday it was reported that a person with a penis — Caitlyn Jenner — will be named Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year, while over at Cardiff University a woman who has done more than most to secure the
So, it isn’t only the hammer-wielding nutters of Isis who destroy ‘immoral art’. So do we, in supposedly civilised Britain. A judge’s order that the artworks of convicted child abuser Graham Ovenden be destroyed, on the basis that they do not reach our ‘standards of propriety’, is an act of medievalism to match any of the statue-smashing
Another week, another famous dead person having his grave danced on with gay abandon. This time it’s the late, great Lou Reed’s turn to have his reputation trashed by scandal-sniffing vultures. Less than two years after he died — at least they waited for him to rot, which is something I guess — a new
Imagine living in a country where a politician could not only force a newspaper to retract a report but could then make it publish an alternative report on its front page. That would be a bad place to live, right? It would be a place where the relationship between the press and politicians — where
I witnessed something genuinely disturbing at Trinity College Dublin last night: trendy, middle-class, liberal students cheering and whooping a man who had just given the closest thing I have yet heard to a justification for the massacre at Charlie Hebdo. It was as part of a debate on the right to offend. I was on
A Jamaican official has called on David Cameron to ‘personally atone’ for the slave trade, and especially for his ancestors’ involvement in it. I hope Cameron tells this guy to do one. The PM has nothing to apologise for, far less self-flagellate for. He bears no more guilt for the slave trade than Justin Bieber
Finally, the Stepford Students, those safe-spaced, spoilt-brat censors of anyone who thinks differently to them, have had their comeuppance. Following an outburst of Twitterfury, Warwick Students’ Union (WSU) has backed down on its ban on Maryam Namazie, an Iranian-born secularist and stinging critic of Islamobollocks. Having initially said Ms Namazie could not darken Warwick’s campus
Corbynistas are always banging on about how we need fewer posh politicians and more politicians who look and sound like ‘ordinary people’. So who has Corbyn appointed as his shadow secretary for environment, food and rural affairs? Kerry McCarthy — a vegan! A member of the snootiest tribe of all, who sustain themselves by nuts
Let’s assume that it’s true – that what an anonymous MP told Lord Ashcroft about the young Cameron and a pig is actually true. For what a brilliant blow it would be against the New Prudes, against those booze-dodging, speech-policing, lad-hating media moralists and Twitterbores. I don’t know why Cameron’s PR people are going into meltdown. If
Who argues that a ‘shadow state’ controls Britain? That a gang of faraway, faceless suits ‘orchestrate public life from the shadows’, from their ‘yachts in the Mediterranean’? Who thinks people in ‘the shadows’, who always remain ‘hidden’, exercise a ‘poisonous, secretive influence on public life’? A spotty sixth-former who spends way too much time on
If you were in any doubt that we live in mean-spirited and vengeful times, then Complimentgate should put you straight. Complimentgate is the name I’m giving to the naming and shaming of a solicitor who had the temerity to say something nice about a woman’s looks. For doing this, for paying someone a compliment, he
Why do leftists care more about Muslims than they do about Jews? If that sounds confrontational, consider this: this week, the Met Police released the latest hate-crime figures for London. They show that offences against Jews have risen by 93% over the past year, while offences against Muslims have risen by 70%. And guess which
Have you seen the dead Syrian child yet? Look at his lifeless body. His head buried in the sand. His sad, resigned posture after he and his family made the treacherous journey from Syria to Turkey only to wash up dead on a Turkish beach. Isn’t this just the saddest photo you’ve ever seen? And gross too?
Harvey Proctor has done us all a favour. His press conference last week about the hysterical allegations being made against him by ‘Nick’ (an anonymous bloke) and the paedo-obsessed police has helped expose the medieval madness of the post-Savile paedophile panic. Proctor has been accused of torturing and murdering boys at wild Westminster sex parties that
Aping Isis, trans activists have defaced a historical monument to make a political point. They blacked-up — seriously, with spray paint and afro wigs — the Christopher Street Gay Liberation statue in New York, which commemorates the 1969 Stonewall riots and the birth of the modern gay-rights movement. Their beef? That the monument and a
Here’s a sentence I never thought I would write: I feel sorry for Hillary Clinton. Following months of scandal over her email shenanigans (in a nutshell: she’s been using a private email address rather than her government one) she’s just had to hand her email server to the FBI. And anyone who has so much
Nothing better sums up the out-of-touchness of public-health prigs than the debate about so-called binge drinking. To these teetotal, ciggie-dodging suits, for whom fun is the foulest of f-words, and who are such miserabilists that they’re made sad by the idea of happy hour, anything more than four units of booze a day for a bloke, and
The Lord Sewel scandal makes me feel proud to be British. For here, thanks to some glorious John Wilkes-style dirt-digging by the Sun — in your face, Leveson! — we have a proper political scandal. This ain’t no yawn-fest about MPs claiming the cost of a Kit-Kat or accidentally favouriting a gay-porn tweet: sad little
Not content with Facebooking our every foible, Instagramming the births of our children and live-tweeting our daily lives, more and more of us are now making a public spectacle of dying. We’re inviting strangers not merely to ‘like’ expertly filtered photos of our breakfasts, but to admire the way we peg out. Nothing better captures
Imagine if a Ukip politician wrote about being on an aeroplane that was ‘heaving’ with black people. Imagine if he described becoming suspicious of them, and assuming, on the basis of no evidence, just a hunch, that they must be flying overseas to get up to no good. Imagine if he complained to British police about
