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.
Who argues that a ‘shadow state’ controls Britain? That a gang of faraway, faceless suits ‘orchestrate public life from the shadows’, from their ‘yachts in the Mediterranean’? Who thinks people in ‘the shadows’, who always remain ‘hidden’, exercise a ‘poisonous, secretive influence on public life’? A spotty sixth-former who spends way too much time on
If you were in any doubt that we live in mean-spirited and vengeful times, then Complimentgate should put you straight. Complimentgate is the name I’m giving to the naming and shaming of a solicitor who had the temerity to say something nice about a woman’s looks. For doing this, for paying someone a compliment, he
Why do leftists care more about Muslims than they do about Jews? If that sounds confrontational, consider this: this week, the Met Police released the latest hate-crime figures for London. They show that offences against Jews have risen by 93% over the past year, while offences against Muslims have risen by 70%. And guess which
Have you seen the dead Syrian child yet? Look at his lifeless body. His head buried in the sand. His sad, resigned posture after he and his family made the treacherous journey from Syria to Turkey only to wash up dead on a Turkish beach. Isn’t this just the saddest photo you’ve ever seen? And gross too?
Harvey Proctor has done us all a favour. His press conference last week about the hysterical allegations being made against him by ‘Nick’ (an anonymous bloke) and the paedo-obsessed police has helped expose the medieval madness of the post-Savile paedophile panic. Proctor has been accused of torturing and murdering boys at wild Westminster sex parties that
Aping Isis, trans activists have defaced a historical monument to make a political point. They blacked-up — seriously, with spray paint and afro wigs — the Christopher Street Gay Liberation statue in New York, which commemorates the 1969 Stonewall riots and the birth of the modern gay-rights movement. Their beef? That the monument and a
Here’s a sentence I never thought I would write: I feel sorry for Hillary Clinton. Following months of scandal over her email shenanigans (in a nutshell: she’s been using a private email address rather than her government one) she’s just had to hand her email server to the FBI. And anyone who has so much
Nothing better sums up the out-of-touchness of public-health prigs than the debate about so-called binge drinking. To these teetotal, ciggie-dodging suits, for whom fun is the foulest of f-words, and who are such miserabilists that they’re made sad by the idea of happy hour, anything more than four units of booze a day for a bloke, and
The Lord Sewel scandal makes me feel proud to be British. For here, thanks to some glorious John Wilkes-style dirt-digging by the Sun — in your face, Leveson! — we have a proper political scandal. This ain’t no yawn-fest about MPs claiming the cost of a Kit-Kat or accidentally favouriting a gay-porn tweet: sad little
Not content with Facebooking our every foible, Instagramming the births of our children and live-tweeting our daily lives, more and more of us are now making a public spectacle of dying. We’re inviting strangers not merely to ‘like’ expertly filtered photos of our breakfasts, but to admire the way we peg out. Nothing better captures
Imagine if a Ukip politician wrote about being on an aeroplane that was ‘heaving’ with black people. Imagine if he described becoming suspicious of them, and assuming, on the basis of no evidence, just a hunch, that they must be flying overseas to get up to no good. Imagine if he complained to British police about
As a long-time Eurosceptic, I should be happy about the Johnny-Come-Latelys now swelling the sceptic ranks. Following Euro-institutions’ wicked treatment of Greece, many European liberals have finally realised that Brussels might not be the hotbed of liberalism, internationalism and bunny rabbits they thought it was. So, bit by bit, they’re becoming the thing they once
Aside from reports about terrorism, war and the Vatican cosying up to Naomi Klein, few news stories this year have upset me as much as the ones about TV Land cancelling re-runs of The Dukes of Hazzard. TV Land, an American cable channel, announced this week that it will stop showing the oh-so-1980s TV show about
The Vanity Fair photo of Bruce Jenner in a boob-enhancing swimsuit is being described as iconic. Bruce, one-time American athlete, now wants to be known as Caitlyn, having recently undergone some gender transitioning. And he’s using the cover of the latest Vanity Fair to make his ‘debut as a woman’. Next to the headline ‘Call
Imagine if Education Secretary Nicky Morgan went into a mosque and told the praying blokes to put their shoes back on. Or if she bowled into a Catholic school and said: ‘The look of anguish on Christ’s face in that crucifix hanging on your wall could upset children. Please take it down.’ We would be
I feel torn on pianist James Rhodes’ victory at the Supreme Court yesterday. On one hand, the lifting of the legal injunction preventing him from publishing his child-abuse memoir is a great strike for freedom of speech. But on the other hand — another child abuse memoir? Really? Rhodes had an injunction taken out against
If you think it’s tough being a Tory voter in 21st-century Britain, try being a ‘No’ voter in this week’s Irish referendum on gay marriage. Sure, Twitterati sneering at all things right-wing might have turned some Conservatives into Shy Tories, hiding their political leanings from pollsters. But in Ireland, to be a naysayer in relation
What’s Labour’s problem? Following its fantastic drubbing at the polls, the most common answer to that question is that the party has for too long ignored its traditional base: working-class voters. Among media Labourites in particular, those currently writing emotionally unhinged articles about how isolated they feel in this cruel new Britain — bless ’em
Forget Vince Cable. Forget, if you can, Ed Balls (and I know that’s hard, because what a joyous result that was). Expel from your mind the image of Nick Clegg crying into his cornflakes this morning while texting his old pals in the Euro-oligarchy to see if they will give him a new plush job
With just 48 hours to go before we get to vote in officially the most boring election in history, the great and good are fretting over the apathy of the little people. We’ve seen the emergence of Poets Against Apathy — a group of northern scribes keen to shake the public out of its anti-political
