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.
There’s a surefire way to tell Christmas has arrived. Forget the Oxford Street lights. Forget the sudden appearance of stacks of selection boxes in your supermarket. Forget Noddy Holder’s pained cry, ‘It’s Chriiiistmaaas!’ No, these days it isn’t really Christmas until we have the annual handwringing over The Pogues’ song ‘Fairytale of New York’. And
Joe Biden loves Ireland. He wears his Irish heritage proudly. ‘The BBC? I’m Irish’, he quipped when Nick Bryant asked him if he had a quick word for the Beeb. Which is all very nice. It’s good when people take pride in their heritage, even if it does come off as a bit ‘Oirish’ when
Wow, for a white supremacist Donald Trump has done very well among black and Latino voters. Literally Hitler, as some woke agitators loved to call him after he won the election in 2016, seems to have boosted his support among black men and black women and, most strikingly, among Latinos, who appear to be swinging
Prince Harry has seen the light. His awokening is complete. Yesterday, in a video chat hosted by GQ magazine, he confessed to the sin of ‘unconscious bias’ and instructed the rest of us — the unwoke throng — to ‘educate yourself’. And there you have it: this duke, sixth in line to the British throne,
What century is it? I ask because, this morning, the five most senior bishops in the country publicly rebuked our democratically elected government and effectively called on the unelected peers of the House of Lords to rebel against a Bill passed by the House of Commons. Bishops throwing their spiritual weight around to try to
So there you have it. Cambridge Analytica was ‘not involved’ in the 2016 EU referendum. The digital marketing firm that Remainers love to hate did not swing the British electorate towards Leave, as we were constantly told. In the words of the Guardian, no doubt uttered through gritted teeth, Cambridge Analytica did not ‘directly misuse
Normally the best response to political correctness at the Oscars is to laugh at it. Whether it’s Lady Gaga singing a song about campus rape culture or Leonardo DiCaprio taking a break from his lovely, fossil-fuelled, jet-setting life to lecture the billion-strong TV audience about the scourge of climate change, a chuckle is usually enough
Multi-millionaire virtue-signallers Ben and Jerry are at it again. Once again the ice-cream capitalists are doing their woke schtick in the hope that even more of the right-on middle-classes will buy their expensive tubs of cream and sugar. This time they’re taking aim at Priti Patel, lecturing her on Twitter about immigration. Thanks, but no
So there you go. There is still no hard evidence that Russia interfered in the EU referendum. What’s more, it would be ‘difficult — if not impossible — to prove’ the existence of Russian meddling. Can we now, please, put the Russia-Brexit conspiracy theory to bed? The quote above comes from the Intelligence and Security
Is Banksy a Tory propagandist now? His latest juvenile stunt suggests he might be. On the day the government announced that it will soon be mandatory to wear face masks in shops, Banksy released a video showing himself daubing a Tube train carriage with pro-mask slogans and images. Way to stick it to the man,
So now we know what happens if you criticise Black Lives Matter. You’ll be packed off for re-education. You will be sent to have your mind cleansed of foul, dissenting thoughts. You will be reminded of the First Commandment of the strange year of 2020: Thou Shalt Not Question BLM. That’s the lesson of Keir
We need to talk about Priti Patel. Specifically we need to talk about what happened to her last week. In an emotional statement in the House of Commons, Patel talked about some of the racist abuse she has experienced, from being called a ‘P**i’ in the school playground to being depicted as a cow with
Cancel culture is out of control. Over the past 24 hours Little Britain, The League of Gentlemen and Chris Lilley’s brilliant comedy shows have been shoved down the memory hole by Netflix and the BBC. Why? Because the kangaroo court of correct-thinking has found these comedy classics guilty of offensiveness. Punish them, purge them, cast them
As they tore down the statue of the 17th-century merchant and slaver Edward Colston in Bristol yesterday, protesters were behaving like a woke Taliban. Just as Taliban extremists smashed huge carvings of Buddha that offended them, and just as Isis nutters took hammers to ‘idolatrous’ monuments in the cities of Palmyra and Nimrud, so British
So now we know. All the things said about Dominic Cummings – that he shattered the lockdown, that he thinks it’s one rule for him and another for everyone else – are far truer of those protesting at the big Black Lives Matter demo in Trafalgar Square on Sunday, than they are of Cummings. The
Is Durhamgate over now? It must be. Surely. With a simmering revolt in Hong Kong, riots in Minneapolis, heightened border tensions between India and China, and Twitter censuring the president of the United States, British journalists can’t still be obsessing over whether Dominic Cummings stopped at a petrol station on a drive to Durham. If
The media’s Dominic Cummings story has completely collapsed. He did NOT go to Durham a second time, which was reported on the front page of the Sunday Mirror and the Observer. He did NOT have any physical contact with family members. The police did NOT talk to the Cummings family about the Covid lockdown guidelines.
The Dominic Cummings story is deeply disturbing. No, not the fact that Cummings and his wife, Mary Wakefield, took what they considered to be essential steps to ensure the welfare of their young child, but the fury and the bile that have been heaped upon them for doing so. It really is something. For the
I know good news is not allowed in coronavirus Britain. Instead we’re all meant to cower before the death stats, fume at photos of people on beaches, and nod along as Piers Morgan bursts yet another blood vessel over what a calamitous PM Boris is. Pessimism is your highest duty in this strange, fearful nation
The National Education Union, the largest teaching union in the UK, has branded Boris Johnson ‘reckless’. What’s he done now? He said Britain’s schools should start to reopen in June. This is how weird politics has become in Covid-hit Britain. The ‘Evil Tories’ want working people, especially teachers, to get back to work, while the
