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.
In my lifetime, I cannot remember any thing or idea or person getting as bad a press as Brexit has. It’s relentless. It’s not daily — it’s hourly, minutely, by the second. Open a newspaper, switch on the radio, browse the web, and there it is: more Brexit-fear, more predictions of economic calamity and national
This has got to be the own goal of the year. Millennials want people to stop calling them ‘snowflakes’ because it is an unfair term of abuse that damages their mental health. Get your head round that if you can. In response to the accusation that they’re soft, oversensitive and too easily wounded by words
The EU has no shame. It is a completely shame-free zone. How else do we explain the grotesque spectacle of EC President Donald Tusk cosying up to Ireland this weekend, and claiming to respect Irish sovereignty, as if the past 15 years of Brussels treating Ireland as a colonial plaything had never happened? As if
The engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is great news. Great news for them, of course, because they are clearly in love, and who doesn’t like to see a handsome young-ish couple in love? And it’s great news for republicans like me, too, because it confirms the monarchy has now completed its transformation from
Los Angeles stinks. Not just of the usual things: sex, money, suntan oil, hipster food, surfer wax — odours that I like. There’s a new whiff in town, and it’s a bad one. Weed. The smell of marijuana hangs over LA like an invisible menace. It’s an omnipresent fug. To walk from one end of
Here’s a law of politics that is about as cast-iron as a law of politics can be: people who hate tabloid newspapers are snobs. Every time. Scratch a Daily Mail basher or those people who seethe daily about the Sun and you will find someone who’s really just scared of the throng and of what
Morrissey, Smiths frontman turned solo crooner turned novelist, has long taken pleasure in rattling the establishment. From mocking the monarchy on the 1986 Smiths album The Queen is Dead, to his lovely ballad about how much he wanted Margaret Thatcher to die, to his frequent foot-stomping over the meat industry, the music industry and industry
The capitulation of the establishment to the politics of transgenderism has been astonishing. I’m struggling to remember any other time when a new and contested ideology has been so uncritically embraced by the powers-that-be. We have a Tory government pushing a Gender Recognition Act that would allow anyone to change his or her gender without
The political class has lost its marbles. This goes beyond Priti Patel failing to follow basic ministerial code or Boris Johnson’s blabbermouth making life a hell of a lot harder for an imprisoned Brit in Iran. There is also the increasingly deranged ‘Pestminster’ scandal. And their ongoing emotional meltdown over Brexit. And the Russian conspiracy
I am marvelling at the resilience of New York City. Yesterday afternoon a real monster visited Lower Manhattan, weaponising a truck in the foul Isis fashion to mow down scores of citizens, killing eight. Yet just a few hours later the streets of Manhattan were thronging with pretend monsters. With vampires, skeletons, witches, Leatherfaces and
If someone had told you 10 years ago that it would soon become tantamount to a speechcrime to say ‘Men cannot get pregnant’, you would have thought them mad. That would be like punishing someone for saying, ‘Humans need oxygen to survive’. And yet here we are, in 2017, where PC has spun so violently
Scotland is fast becoming the most strident, unforgiving nanny state in the West. A world leader in the policing of people’s beliefs and lifestyles. It has in recent years passed laws telling football fans what they’re allowed to sing and chant. It has banned smoking in cars and parks and said it wants to make Scotland ‘smokefree’ by
Politicians are always going on about ‘the voiceless’. By which they usually mean poor and working-class people. People who have been shunted from public life and never get to air their concerns. At the Conservative party conference Theresa May styled herself ‘voice of the voiceless’ (before, too ironically, becoming voiceless herself). Impeccably bred Corbynistas, all
In what kind of moral universe would it be considered acceptable for the authors of a war, the people who voted for a war, to get on their high horses over those who make daft or jokey comments about that war? For the people who green-lighted the bombing of a foreign nation to haughtily chastise
I know many Leave voters. Most of my family. Around half of my friends. Lots of the people in the immigrant community in London I grew up in. (We’re bad immigrants, being anti-EU, so we never feature in the migrant-sympathetic commentary of EU-pining hacks.) And not one of them has ever said they chose Brexit
Everyone needs to calm down about the EU Withdrawal Bill. The way anti-Brexiteers are talking about it you’d think Henry VIII himself had risen from his burial vault, sword in one hand, Anne Boleyn’s head in the other, come to crush parliament and the plebs beneath his velvet boot. The Tories’ use of ‘Henry VIII
Here they come, the eco-ghouls, feasting on another natural disaster. This time it’s the floods in Houston. No sooner had Hurricane Harvey caused terrifying waters to consume entire streets and trailer parks than the eco-set was rushing in to try to make moral mileage out of it all. This is climate change in action, they
In a few weeks, a new intake of students will arrive, all fresh-faced and excited, at universities around the country. They’ll be thrilled at the prospect of escaping the wagging finger of mum and dad, eager to absorb new ideas. But I’m afraid they are in for a rude awakening. Unless they’re very fortunate, they
It’s official: people who talk about the problem of Pakistani men abusing white working-class girls have no place in polite society. Raise so much as a peep of concern about Muslim grooming gangs and you’ll be expelled from the realm of the decent. You’ll be shushed, exiled, encouraged to clean out your polluted mind. That
Identity politics is turning violent. It’s been brewing for a while. Anyone who’s witnessed mobs of students threatening to silence white men or Islamists gruffly invading the space of secular women who diss their dogmas will know that, as with all forms of communalism, identity politics has a menacing streak. And at the weekend, in
