Tom Slater is the editor of Spiked.
The eco-activists of Just Stop Oil have often been caricatured as a group of middle-class students with too much time on their hands. Their latest stunt at the British Library today shows how wrong that is. Middle-class pensioners with too much time on their hands are also well represented in this group, it seems. The
Blaming Brexit for everything has become a kind of tic among the great and good. Like the buck-passing politicians who used to blame everything on Brussels, the cultural elites have taken to blaming all manner of ills on the British people’s revolt against the EU back in 2016. Economic stagnation? Brexit! Covid deaths? Brexit! Poor
The case of the ‘paraglider girls’ just keeps getting worse, exposing a criminal-justice system that seems to have become riddled with bias and Israelophobia. A mixture of bias, ignorance and cowardice has been exposed at every level of the criminal-justice system On Tuesday, a judge at Westminster Magistrates Court essentially let three women – Heba
The triumph of green ideology within our institutions, corporations and public life is staggering. Notions that would have once been confined to meetings in the back of a Brighton bookshop are now the common coin of government, big business and, of course, the cultural elites. All of them now seem to agree that cheap and
Does the Tory party have a death wish? It’s a question we have been prompted to ask again and again over recent years, as the supposed natural party of government has self-immolated before the electorate’s eyes. But if an interview with education secretary Gillian Keegan on Sky News over the weekend is anything to go
Now the environmentalists are going after the Mona Lisa. Because of course they are. Just when you thought you couldn’t dislike these apocalyptic irritants anymore, now they’ve gone and pelted soup at another priceless artwork, the most famous artwork in the world no less, because they think their fever dreams about climate change are more important
Armando Iannucci is a bit of a mystery to me. With shows like The Day Today and The Thick of It, he created some of the most astute political satire of the 1990s and 2000s. And yet put him in front of a microphone now and the man will display all the political insight of a draught excluder.
Well, that didn’t take long. We’re not even 48 hours into the latest Twitterstorm about upstart anti-woke news channel GB News – this time sparked by presenter Laurence Fox’s sexist, on-air comments about journalist Ava Evans – and it’s already become abundantly clear that all the outrage and fury isn’t really about those comments at
We must have the most unprincipled, illiberal crop of politicians ever to grace Westminster. Within hours of the House of Lords passing the Online Safety Bill, clamping down on freedom of speech online, Caroline Dinenage, chair of the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, seemingly decided that due process should be next on
There are many reasons why someone might want to throw a cream pie at Michael O’Leary, the motormouth boss of budget airline Ryanair. Usually, the only satisfying thing about a Ryanair flight is the price. (And even then prices have been going up.) Then there’s his one-note Remoanerism, his contemptuous comments over the years about Brexit-voting
Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Americans, apparently. Or at least that’s the conclusion Vintage US seems to have drawn. The publishing house has slapped a new edition of Woolf’s 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse, with a trigger warning, alerting US readers to its potentially upsetting content. (Vintage UK hasn’t followed suit.) The warning, reported in
What is it with environmentalists and the Holocaust? Barely a month goes by without some prominent green or another outrageously invoking the greatest crime in human history when promoting their plans for eco-austerity. Step up Dale Vince, green entrepreneur and donor to both the Labour party and pongy activist troupe Just Stop Oil. In an interview with
Give Jonny Bairstow a knighthood. Whatever else happens at the Ashes, or indeed throughout the rest of his cricketing career, the England wicketkeeper has already earned his place in history, with his quick-thinking response to a Just Stop Oil activist who tried – and failed – to disrupt play at Lord’s this morning. Immediately after
It doesn’t take much to get you censored these days. You don’t even need to be that controversial. Believing in biological sex is usually enough. Gender-critical feminists have not only been sacked from jobs and cancelled on campus, but also arrested and dragged through the courts. Sticking up for free speech these days often means
Is Mark Zuckerberg losing his touch? Having just thrown tens of billions at his weird virtual-reality ‘metaverse’, only to see it flop with users, the Meta CEO and co-founder of Facebook appears to be spying another questionable new venture. It’s reportedly called Threads, a cloying techspeak name for what is essentially a rip-off of Twitter.
Should ‘misgendering’ someone be a disciplinary offence? One Oxford college seems to think so. Yesterday, Regent’s Park College posted a ‘Trans Inclusion Statement’, burnishing its existing bullying and harassment policy. On a long list of ‘inappropriate behaviour’ that might warrant punishment is ‘consistently using incorrect titles, pronouns or names to refer to a trans person’
Just Stop Oil has finally hit the fossil-fuel barons where it hurts: the World Snooker Championship. Last night, play was disrupted when one JSO activist climbed on to a snooker table and covered it in orange powder paint, leading the match between Robert Milkins and Joe Perry to be suspended. Another activist tried – and failed
Hollywood actor Guy Pearce has apologised for posting a pro-trans tweet. That’s where we’re at now with the culture war. The Twitterstorms don’t even need to make sense anymore, as the bizarre case of the LA Confidential star’s recent comments about trans actors has made abundantly clear. Pearce took to Twitter earlier this week and
Has comedian Frankie Boyle become the latest victim of the BBC’s ‘right-wing purge’? Frankie Boyle seems to think so. Following news this week that his BBC Two show, Frankie Boyle’s New World Order, has not been renewed for a seventh series, he took to Twitter, where he implied the cancellation was down to the rightward
The story of Harry and Meghan has often been portrayed as a clash of values between Britain and America. Between British stiff-upper-lip and Californian emotional incontinence. Between stoicism and the new woke victim politics. But I’m pleased to see that our American cousins – having been lumbered with the transatlantic royal couple since 2020 –
