Brendan O’Neill

The response to Milo Yiannopoulos getting a big-bucks book deal with Simon & Schuster has been nuts. Even by today's standards. The cry has gone up that S&S — or SS, amirite? — is endangering the wellbeing of women and gays and blacks and other minorities that have felt the sting of Milo’s camp polemics. Please. It’s a book, not a bomb. It’s words, sentences, ideas, not fire and pogroms. Everyone needs to calm down. Milo is the Breitbart editor turned darling of the agitated, anti-PC right, given to manicured fuming against feminism, Islam, censorious students, 'Black Lives Matter' and other things that apparently threaten Western civilisation.

Today’s Fabian Society paper on the state of the Labour Party — and what a state it is — has put Labourites and the leftish Twitterati into a spin. Aptly titled ‘Stuck’, the paper says just over half of the people who voted Labour in 2015 support the party today. And if an election were called right now Labour could expect to win a measly 200 seats: 40 fewer than in 2015 and 70 fewer than in 2010. Most strikingly, Labour has lost four times as many Leavers as Remainers.

Nothing better sums up the aloofness of the chattering class, their otherworldliness in fact, than their blathering about 2016 being the worst year ever. It’s the refrain running through every Brexitphobic column, every historically illiterate comparison of Trump to Hitler, every tear-sodden list of the big-name celebs who’ve died this year. 2016 is ‘the f--king worst’, says Brit comic in America John Oliver. These people don’t know what they’re talking about. The worst? 2016 has been one of the best years yet for humankind. This year it was announced that global life expectancy is increasing at a faster rate than at any time since the 1960s.

It’s rare that an opinion poll brings a tear to my eye. But this week one did. It was the CNN/ComRes poll published on Monday. It found that 47 per cent of British adults would vote Leave if the EU referendum was held today, and 45 per cent would vote Remain (eight per cent said they didn’t know how they’d vote). This means, as the CNN headline put it, that ‘Six months on, Brits stand by EU referendum decision’. Leavers haven’t budged. Regrexit is a myth. Even after months of being branded as idiots, libelled as racists, and charged with bringing about a hike in hate crime and possibly the end of decent politics as we knew it, Leavers remain devoted to their choice, convinced of their cause.

Wounded Remainers in Britain and the Hillary set in the US love banging on about ‘post-truth politics’. Lies are everywhere, they say, falling from Trump’s weird mouth, plastered on the side of Brexit buses. And apparently these lies invaded voters’ minds and made us do the unimaginable thing of voting against the EU and failing to vote for Hillary. We was hoodwinked by falsehoods! All of which would be a tad more convincing if it wasn't for one thing: it’s actually the Remainer and Hillary cliques that have gone full post-truth, even descending into the cesspit of conspiracy theory.

Of all the barbs fired at us Brexiteers, the one that’s irritated me most is ‘Little Englander’. The suggestion is that pro-EU people are broad-minded Europhiles while Brexiteers are petty nationalists who want to dismantle the Chunnel and while away our days drinking tea and slagging off Germans. It couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, the most wonderful thing about Brexit — glorious, rebellious Brexit — is the new European unity it is forging. Far from giving an English two-fingered salute to the continent, the Brexit bug is helping bring the continent together, uniting peoples who’ve had a gutful of the technocrats. The overthrow of Matteo Renzi is 2016’s latest ballot-box revolt against the new managerial elites.

Here’s a tip for judges, businessmen, peers, politicians and former PMs who don’t like being called ‘enemies of the people’: stop behaving like enemies of the people. This week it is reported that Tony Blair is polishing his toothy grin to make a comeback into British politics, potentially as thwarter, or just tamer, of the ‘catastrophe’ of Brexit.

Being an out-and-proud Brexiteer, someone who would go to the barricades for Brexit, someone who might even take a bullet for Brexit, I often get emails from people who feel the same way but feel they can’t express their Brexitphilia in public. This week, in response to my Big Issue column on, yes, the beauty of Brexit, a correspondent tells me that, like me, he voted Leave for liberal, democratic reasons, not Little Englander ones, but such has been the ‘name-calling’ and ‘toxicity’ in response to his decision that he's had to slink off social media and keep his head down. It’s awful.

Last week, students at York University staged a walkout from the sexual consent classes organised by their student union women’s officers. A quarter of the freshers decided they didn’t want to be lectured to by union worthies about when it’s OK to have sex. So they got up and left. ‘These talks are inherently patronising of both genders,’ said Ben Froughi, a third year accounting student at York, who had stirred up sex class dissent by handing out leaflets telling students the classes were optional and they didn’t have to attend. But sex consent classes are mandatory at some universities, including Cambridge and Oxford. Young people are being chaperoned through the minefield of sexuality, often against their will.