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.
Is it a crime now to tell rubbish jokes? The bizarre and frankly cruel treatment of Paul Gascoigne suggests it might be. Yesterday, at Dudley Magistrates Court, Gazza was found guilty of using ‘threatening or abusive words’ and fined £2,000. His crime was to say the following about a black security guard who had been
Prepare the stake, stoke the fire: someone has blasphemed against climate-change orthodoxy. The speech criminal in question is Nicolas Sarkozy. Yes, the former president of France, a man who really ought to know better, has wondered out loud if mankind is solely responsible for climate change. Cue media fury. Cue eco-outrage. Cue accusations that Sarkozy
Should it be a crime to hate women? This unfortunate question is thrown up by the news that misogyny might soon become a hate crime across England and Wales. Two months ago, Nottingham Police launched a trial ‘crackdown on sexism’, investigating cases of, among other things, ‘verbal harassment’ and ‘unwanted advances’ towards women. Now top
Democracy is hanging by a thread in this country. At the start of this year, if someone had told you that in eight months’ time there would be open calls for the thwarting of the people’s will, and marches demanding the crushing of public opinion, you’d probably have scoffed. ‘This isn’t some anti-democratic backwater, it’s
Why is everyone so chilled out about the threats to Brexit? Why isn’t there more public fury over the plotting of lords and academics and experts to stymie Brexit and thwart the will of 17.4m people? In all the years I’ve been writing about politics, I cannot remember a time when democracy has been treated
Britain is in the grip of an epidemic, apparently. An epidemic of hate. Barely a day passes without some policeman or journalist telling us about the wave of criminal bigotry that is sweeping through the country. It’s been bad for years, they say, but has become worse since the EU referendum. Police forces tell us
It turns out rock didn’t die when Elvis joined the Army in 1958, or when the Beatles accepted their OBEs in the 1960s, or when Vivienne Westwood went from making filthy t-shirts for punks to being dressmaker-in-chief to the filthy-rich bourgeoisie. No, it died last Thursday, outside Liverpool St, when an NME distributor shoved the
The alt-right, those anti-PC, bedroom-bound fans of Trump and strangers to sexual intercourse, have finally lost the plot. Consider their hounding of Leslie Jones. Jones is a very funny African-American comedian and the only good thing in the otherwise flat, weird and mirth-free Ghostbusters reboot. Yet for the past 48 hours she has been subjected
Who might save the Labour Party? That’s the question dividing dinner parties across London, causing spats at media soirees, getting socially conscious celebs scratching their heads. I have a different question. Why save the Labour Party? Save it to do what? To be what? To think what? The middle-class tussle over the future of Labour
Never mind bureaucracy. Forget technocracy. Put to the back of your mind the rising lawyerocracy, like those 1,000 puffed-up, demos-fearing lawyers who yesterday insisted that the EU referendum result is not binding. For there’s a worse ‘ocracy than those, one which has an even greater draining effect on politics, one which leeches the life and
Please, no, not Theresa May. Theresa the technocrat, who doesn’t do ideology, passion or even gossip, would be the worst PM for Britain right now. Post-Brexit Britain, where politics has become interesting again, after 17.5m souls gave an otherworldly establishment just the fright it needed, needs a leader who is properly political, up for debate,
A coup is underway. In Britain, in the 21st century, unelected forces have come together to try to thwart the will of the people. It’s a polite coup. Its weapons are legal challenges rather than guns, and it’s being led by businesspeople and retired politicians rather than moustachioed military men hungry for power. It’s a
The most striking thing about Britain’s break with the EU is this: it’s the poor wot done it. Council-estate dwellers, Sun readers, people who didn’t get good GCSE results (which is primarily an indicator of class, not stupidity): they rose up, they tramped to the polling station, and they said no to the EU. It
There’s a delicious irony to Remainers’ branding of Leave voters as confused individuals who have simply made a desperate howling noise, whose anti-EU vote was a ‘howl of anger’ (Tim Farron) or a ‘howl of frustration’ (JK Rowling). Which is that if anyone’s been howling in recent days, it’s them, the top dogs of the
Consider the magnitude of what has just happened. Against the warnings of experts, the pleas of the vast majority of MPs, the wishes of almost every capitalist, and overtures from Brussels, a majority of British people have said No to the EU. They’ve done the thing almost everyone with power and influence said they shouldn’t:
If you’ve heard a whirring noise in the background of today’s momentous vote, don’t worry: it’s just Tony Benn turning in his grave. Benn was one of Britain’s keenest, and most articulate critics of the European Union. He and other Labour grandees, along with top trade unionists, raged against the EU for being aloof and
Who is really poisoning public debate? Who is it that has turned what ought to have been a smart and deep discussion about Britain and the EU into a prejudice-fest? I know we’re meant to think it’s the Leave campaign, with its cries of ‘The Albanians are coming!’ and ‘Oh my God, Turkey!’. Leave stands
Yesterday, on the Thames, in a bizarre battle of political flotillas, we got a glimpse of the elite rage that motors much of the Remain camp. On one of the pro-EU boats, Bob Geldof, a knight, superbly well-connected, who has earned millions, made wanker gestures and gave a two-fingered eff-you to the people on the
Six weeks ago I was one of the 1.3 million Londoners who voted for Sadiq Khan as mayor. Boy do I regret it now. Because he’s just shown what he really thinks of us inhabitants of the capital: that we’re so mentally fragile, so pathetic, so vulnerable to the wicked charms of advertisers, that he
Something about the extension of the deadline for registering to vote in the EU referendum doesn’t add up. It even smells a bit fishy. Last night, the registration website crashed as tens of thousands of people tried to register before the midnight deadline; and in response, parliament today announced that it will pass emergency legislation
