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 are many grating phrases in modern British politics. ‘Best practice.’ ‘Fit for purpose.’ ‘Let me explain’ (just bloody well explain!). And that tendency of Labour politicians to preface pretty much everything they say with a schoolmarmish ‘Look’, as in ‘Look here’. As in: ‘You donuts know nothing, so I am going to put you
Faragephobia reached dizzy new heights on Sunday afternoon, when a bunch of thespians and circus freaks invaded Nigel Farage’s local pub and hounded him and his family out. Behaving with grating and probably knowing irony like small-minded Little Englanders, though dolled up as punkish outsiders, the protesters were basically saying to Nige: ‘Your sort aren’t
Most people, when they hear the word populist, will think of Marine Le Pen going mad about Muslim immigrants or a Ukipper saying he wouldn’t want an Albanian living next door. But yesterday we witnessed a different kind of populism: the deceptively right-on variety, which aims its black-and-white moralistic fury not at cash-starved people at
Poor Mohammed Emwazi. One day he’s your average ‘beautiful’ young man, nose buried in his computer studies books, looking for a job and looking for love. The next he’s being harassed by the security services, so intensely that — BOOM — he weeps and wails his way to the deserts of Syria where he changes
Has there ever been a more petulant mob of moaners than that which is currently hurling abuse at Peter Tatchell? On Twitter, which is where these people live, self-styled queers and gender-benders are insulting and even threatening to kill Tatchell, the man whose risk-taking and street-fighting over 40-odd years helped to secure their liberation, to
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_5_Feb_2015_v4.mp3″ title=”Brendan O’Neill and Cambridge Union president Tim Squirrell debate the new political correctness” startat=33] Listen [/audioplayer]Anyone who thought political correctness had croaked, joining neon leg warmers, mullets and MC Hammer in the graveyard of bad ideas from the late 1980s and 1990s, should think again. When even someone as gay-friendly and Guardian-hued as
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/8f1c0b97-698e-45c6-b50a-84e0e4b3773a/media.mp3″ title=”Brendan O’Neill and Harriet Brown discuss the rise of the Stepford student” startat=41] Listen [/audioplayer] Don’t be a Stepford student — subscribe to The Spectator’s print and digital bundle for just £22 for 22 weeks. Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_25_Sept_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Brendan O’Neill and Amelia Horgan discuss student sex” startat=1174] Listen [/audioplayer]The freshers heading off to university this month won’t only be bombarded with invites to join clubs and enough free Pot Noodles to sustain them till Christmas. They’ll also be swamped by advice on how to have sex. These young men and women,
Imagine you bought a ticket for the opera and then a copper told you how you may travel to the opera house. You absolutely may not drive there, he says, nor take public transport, nor walk. You must go on a licensed coach, crammed in with all the other opera-lovers, under the watchful eye of
In 2010, Brendan O’Neill suggested that Glastonbury had become an authoritarian, corporate pigpen. From the looks of things this year, nothing has changed. Here’s Brendan’s piece: Most people, when they hear the word Glastonbury, think of mud, drugs, drunkenness, moshing, free love, the lighting up of spliffs, and generally harmless experimentation in a field. Well,
Remember when masturbation was something everybody did but no one talked about? It was not most people’s idea of a conversation starter. Certainly nobody boasted about being a self-abuser. It was seen as a sorry substitute for sex, a sad stand-in for intimacy. Not any more. Masturbation has been reinvented as ‘self-love’, a healthy and
I wish people would stop trying to raise my awareness. I can’t so much as surf the web or stroll a high street these days without being accosted by one of the aware, who is always hellbent on making me as aware as he is, usually about some disease or, if you’re really lucky, the
Jerusalem Talking to Israelis feels a bit like talking to fans of Millwall FC. ‘No one likes us, we don’t care,’ sing Millwall fans. Israel is the undoubted Millwall of global affairs, loathed by almost every Westerner who considers himself decent and they’ve adopted a similar cri de coeur. ‘Europe doesn’t like us. Americans
There are lots of weird campaign groups around today, but none so weird as a band of unmerry men called ‘the intactivists’. If you’ve never heard of the intactivists and you’re a bit squeamish, or you are reading this while lunching on a sausage roll, then you might want to turn the page now. Intactivists
In the modern political firmament, is there any creature more ridiculous than the agitating intern? Interns are rising up. These one-time coffee-makers have reimagined themselves as history-makers, fancying that they are latter-day Wilberforces striking a blow against the ‘internship slave trade’. They’re demanding back pay, retrospective remuneration for all that hard graft in air-conditioned offices
It’s the funniest scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. A parable-seeking mob gathers outside Brian’s home. They think he’s the messiah and will dispense some wisdom they might live their lives by. Instead he tells them to think for themselves, because ‘You are all individuals’. ‘We are all individuals,’ the mob intones, robotically. ‘I’m
Last week, at the select committee on the same-sex marriage bill, a lawyer for the Christian Institute revealed that a teacher had been disciplined for refusing to read to her charges a book about gay penguins. It is par for the course to teach kids about adult stuff through animal tales. So it makes sense
When John Kelly was transported from Tipperary to Tasmania in 1841, for stealing pigs, he couldn’t have imagined that 170 years later there’d be an exhibition of paintings of one of his offspring at Dublin’s plush Museum of Modern Art (until 27 January). Yet here he is, Ned, the 19th-century Oz-born bushranger and cop-killer, as
There are many weird things about Las Vegas, from the truck that drives around offering ‘Hot Babes Direct To You’ to the entrepreneurial hard-up young man on the Boulevard who holds a placard saying: ‘Kick me in the nuts for $20. No joke. No protective cup.’ But the thing I find weirdest is that you
Two hundred years ago, the creepy Revd Thomas Malthus would take to his pulpit to rail against the copulating lower orders. Author of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Malthus was one of the first promoters of the overpopulation thesis. If people — especially poor people — didn’t stop having so many babies,
