Brendan O’Neill

This is a shameful week for Scottish nationalism. Let us state plainly what has happened: the government in Westminster has had to intervene in Scotland to save women’s rights. Central government has had to use its legal powers to defend women’s safety and liberty from Scotland’s devolved nationalist government that seems to have diminishing regard for such things. Nicola Sturgeon’s reputation deserves never to recover from this. This is the news that the government intends to block Scotland’s Gender Recognition Bill. This is the bill that would make it easier for people in Scotland to legally change their gender. It would also lower the age at which they can do so, from 18 to 16.

I’m just going to say it: I’m Team William. In that scrap that Prince Harry says happened at Nottingham Cottage, where Prince William allegedly lost his rag and pushed Harry to the floor, I’m cheering Will. Everyone who has a brother — I have five — knows they sometimes need a clip round the lughole. And I trust Will made the right decision when he physically reprimanded his little bro. There are many reasons I’m in the Cambridge camp. The Sussexes are just saps, aren’t they? I’m far more shocked that Harry called his therapist after William allegedly attacked him than I am by the incident itself. After having an altercation with his brother? Harry really went from killing radical Islamists in Afghanistan to phoning his life coach because his brother broke his necklace?

Donald Trump is done for. Trumpism too. That’s the main takeaway of the Midterms. Many of the candidates Trump backed performed badly and Trump’s own incessant meddling in the Republican campaign seems to have turned voters off. That curious, manic, sometimes amusing little epoch in modern Western politics – the Trump era – is over. But anyone who thinks this means populism is over is kidding themselves. Those folk of a more technocratic bent who are currently clinking their glasses of champagne at the prospect that populism is heading for the graveyard of bad ideas are in for a rude awakening. For there’s another takeaway from these Midterms – Trumpism might be dead, but populism lives. Trump’s humiliation is undeniable.

This week, on BBC radio, I made a confession: I am a denier. Not a climate-change denier – an apocalypse denier. I thought it was a clever point – to distinguish between my acceptance that climate change is happening and my scepticism that it will imminently bring about the fiery destruction of Earth. Apparently not. You should have heard the intakes of breath. Apparently even apocalypse denialism is unacceptable in polite society now. It was on Nicky Campbell’s show on 5 Live. I was up against a spokesperson for Just Stop Oil and the question was whether that movement’s art-splattering and road-blocking antics are justifiable. I made my point – that Just Stop Oil strikes me as an out-of-touch movement that is mad to agitate for less energy production during an energy crisis.

I don’t normally vote Tory. But I did in December 2019. And for one reason only. Because I wanted Brexit ‘done’, properly. I wanted a Brexit-leaning government after those two long years of the Remainer parliament and its various efforts to frustrate our leaving of the EU. Millions of people, especially in Red Wall areas, took a punt on Boris’s Tories for the same reason. Because they believed it was time Britain had a government that better reflected, or at least tried to better reflect, the views of ordinary people, especially the much-maligned masses in those ‘left-behind’ Brexit-backing areas. Fast forward nearly three years and I find myself in a country run by Remainers. Everyone agrees that Jeremy Hunt is the de facto PM.

There are no two groups more different than climate protesters and striking workers. The former are mostly plummy layabouts, posh road-blockers whose chief aim seems to be to inconvenience working people. The latter are working people. Their concern is not with the fantasy eco-apocalypse that so bothers the pretty heads of Extinction Rebellion agitators but rather with how to ensure that wages are good and working conditions are top-notch. The climate change alarmists live in a land of make-believe, in which an Armageddon of man’s own making is just around the corner and the only way to hold it at bay is by stopping oil, stopping coal, stopping everything basically. Striking workers, by contrast, live in a world of real things: living standards, money, stuff.

Is silence still violence? I’m just wondering because this week Graham Norton was asked about the deluge of hateful slurs and threats that are frequently fired at JK Rowling and he dodged the issue. Instead he rambled on about how celebs should not comment on difficult topics like transgenderism. So was his silence on the misogynistic monstering of JK Rowling an act of violence? ‘Silence is Violence’ is the radical slogan du jour. It was popularised by Black Lives Matter. There were moments over the past couple of years when you couldn’t browse the internet for five minutes without encountering a post saying that anyone who keeps schtum on hatred and violence is helping to compound that hatred and violence. But it seems this judgment is not equally applied.

There was a truly electric moment at the Morrissey gig at the Palladium in London last night. Moz was introducing his new song, ‘Bonfire of Teenagers’. It’s about the Manchester Arena bombing in which 22 people were killed. He looked out at the audience and asked us a question. How come you know the name Myra Hindley but many of you won’t know the name of the man who bombed the Manchester Arena? People looked stunned. I believe some looked a little ashamed. It is rare indeed for hush to fall at a Morrissey concert, but it did then. It’s a question that demands an answer. Sounding a little emotional, Morrissey described the 2017 arena bombing as one of the worst things that has ever happened to Manchester, his hometown.

What drives someone to do something as morally depraved as throw human faeces on a monument to Captain Sir Tom Moore? The video allegedly showing a climate-change campaigner dousing a likeness of Sir Tom, in what was reportedly a mixture of urine and excrement, is deeply chilling.  The person in the video is part of a pressure group called End UK Private Jets. The woman allegedly executed the vile stunt in order to raise awareness about the polluting impact of private jets. Quite how defiling a monument to a national treasure in such an appalling way is going to raise the public’s eco-awareness is anyone’s guess. It’s far more likely to make people feel sick, and angry.

I know we’re all meant to be quaking over the election result in Italy. That we’re all supposed to be gnashing our teeth over the ‘first far-right politician since Mussolini’ to lead the Italian people. That is how much of the media is referring to Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy party and now on course to become Italy’s first female Prime Minister following the victory of the right-wing bloc in Sunday’s elections. And yet I find myself far more concerned – troubled, in fact – by the behaviour of Brussels than by anything that has happened in Italy. Consider the comments made by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.

The left needs to shake off its ‘bourgeois environmentalism’. It needs to distance itself from the ‘bourgeois environmental lobby’ and make the case for fracking and the building of new nuclear power stations. Who do you think said this? Some contrarian commentator? A right-winger irritated by eco-loons? Nope, it was Gary Smith, the general secretary of the GMB trade union. In an explosive intervention in left-wing discourse, Smith has accused Labour of a ‘lack of honesty’ and of ‘not facing reality’ on the energy question. We are living through a severe energy crisis and yet still Labour is sniffy about fracking and down on nuclear power, he says.