Brendan O’Neill

People are saying the Gorton and Denton by-election will be a showdown between the Greens and Reform. Between Zack Polanski’s barmy army of End is Nigh graduates and Nigel Farage’s insurgent movement of people peeved with the old order. I hope they’re right, for that really would illuminate the new battlelines in British politics. The Greens will seek to build an Islamo-left alliance. A union of Muslim voters and middle-class graduates who are as one in their curious loathing of Israel As Labour loses the will to live, and the Conservatives wither one defection at a time, it feels like the east Manchester seat will fall to one of those upstart parties. The area has been a Labour stronghold since before the Second World War.

There have been two huge victories for workers’ rights over the past week. And yet the left is schtum. No champagne corks are popping. No raised fist emojis have appeared on lefty social media. I bet no Labour-backing luvvie has plans to make a tear-jerking movie about this stirring triumph for working people. No Labour-backing luvvie plans to make a tear-jerking movie about this stirring triumph for working people We all know why. It’s because the victors are women, and more importantly they’re women who demanded that most scandalous right – the right to their own spaces, the right to undress away from men. The left is saying nowt – and in fact is probably seething – because it hates nothing more than an uppity broad who says sex is real and women matter.

Over the years, on the streets of London, I have heard so much praise for the Iranian regime and its brutish proxies. I’ve seen witless radicals cry: ‘We are all Hezbollah!’ I’ve seen leftists cheer the Houthis, that avowedly anti-Semitic army that does the mullahs’ bidding in Yemen. I’ve seen Islamists with placards featuring the face of Ayatollah Khamenei, praising him for being ‘on the right side of history’, as if he were some kind of god rather than a ruthless religious dictator. There is a silent majority here that is sickened by Islamist tyranny. On Sunday, that silent majority will make some noise Every time, I have felt mortified. Mortified that my city, this great, sprawling, modern metropolis, could be stained by such sick love for Islamist tyrants.

I’m starting to feel sorry for progressives who are schtum about the revolution in Iran. My contempt for them is giving way to pity. Imagine watching women fling off their hijabs in glorious defiance of the cruel mullahs who rule over them and feeling nothing. Imagine seeing brave youths swarm the streets to confront the tyrants who oppress them and just looking the other way. The extraordinary valour of the young in Iran has exposed the moral bewilderment of the young in the West Imagine seeing that young man in London this weekend scaling the walls of the Iranian Embassy to yank down the flag of a ruthless regime and saying: ‘Well, it’s complicated.

‘Top priority.’ Those two words in Keir Starmer’s tweet about Alaa Abd el-Fattah stung the hardest. What an affront to the country. On Boxing Day, as people came down from Christmas revelry that they could ill-afford, here was their prime minister prioritising the wellbeing of an Egyptian loudmouth most Britons couldn’t name. Rarely has the PM’s remoteness been so starkly exposed. ‘I’m delighted that Alaa Abd el-Fattah is back in the UK,’ Starmer wrote on X, following the arrival of the Egyptian activist who was jailed by the Sisi regime for spreading ‘fake news’. He will come to regret this gushing tweet. Abd el-Fattah is the author of racist tweets about Jews and whites, and he once called Brits ‘dogs and monkeys’.

It’s hard, in 2025, to call out anti-Semitism. You’ll find yourself besieged by digital armies of apologists for bigotry. ‘It’s just criticism of Israel!’, they’ll wail if you express alarm about someone calling the Jewish State a ‘Nazi entity’ or protesters carrying a Jew effigy complete with horns and bloodstained mouth. It’s all the rage these days to see racism everywhere. But anti-Semitism? You spot that at your peril. How many of those sweaty music fans clocked the horror of what was happening on stage? Yet surely no one will defend what Primal Scream did at the Roundhouse in Camden on Monday? Surely even those craven excuse-makers for Jew-baiting, the people who always doll up anti-Semitism as ‘anti-Zionism’, will admit this was naked bigotry?

Everything about that rape of a 15-year-old girl in Leamington Spa is horrifying. First and foremost, the barbaric act itself. It took place on 10 May. Just after 9pm the girl was separated from her friends and abducted by Jan Jahanzeb, a 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker. He frogmarched her to a darkened park with the intention of sexually assaulting her. If officialdom had done what voters have begged it to, and properly policed our borders, these young men might not have made it here Then there was Jahanzeb’s sickening phone call to his friend, Israr Niazal. ‘Come quick’, he said. Come and help me rape this girl – that’s what he was saying. Niazal rushed to the scene. They forced the girl to perform oral sex on them. They’d been in the UK just a few months.

The scandal of the Maccabi Tel Aviv ban keeps getting worse. Now we discover that West Midlands Police (WMP), in their report calling for the barring of Maccabi fans from the football game against Aston Villa last month, cited an entirely fictitious football match. Their report said the last time Maccabi played in the UK was against West Ham in 2023. But no such clash took place. Which begs the question: what else in their Maccabi-mauling report was made up? The fictitious match came to light during the grilling of Craig Guildford, WMP’s chief constable, at the home affairs select committee yesterday. Lord Mann, the government’s adviser on anti-Semitism, pointed out that Maccabi Tel Aviv have never played West Ham.

Now Ireland is erasing its Jewish history. This week Dublin City Council will vote on a proposal to change the name of Herzog Park in the south of Dublin. The park was named for Chaim Herzog, the Belfast-born, Dublin-raised Jew who later became the sixth president of Israel. ‘Following consideration, the Committee agreed… that the name “Herzog” should be removed from the park’, says the council’s chilling proposal. Scrubbing the name of a Jew from a public park? Tell me that isn’t anti-Semitism. For two years now, Herzog Park has been the focal point of that spittle-flecked Israelophobic fury that is so commonplace in modern Ireland.

It’s back. The lie that led to the slaughter of so many Jews has returned to public life. The calumny that caused so much anti-Jewish persecution, expulsion and bloodshed has stirred, zombie-like, from its historic slumber. Jews drain the blood of Christians and use it to make bread – incredibly, unconscionably, this most appalling falsehood has returned. It is obscene that such words are being uttered on a university campus in 2025 At University College London (UCL) this week, a lecture was given in which it was allegedly suggested that Jews murder Gentiles and use their blood in perverse rituals. The comments were made by Samar Maqusi, a US academic. She was speaking with UCL’s Students for Justice in Palestine. Some of what she allegedly said was positively medieval.

The rot at the BBC is worse than people think. It’s far more serious than the occasional twisting of facts to get one over on a politician the Beeb hates, like Donald Trump – an act of journalistic malpractice for which director-general Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness have now resigned. This scandal exposes a great truth of our time – that the elites are often more susceptible to fallacy and hysteria than the rest of us The deeper problem is that the BBC has been so corrupted by faddish ideology that it is now content to burn truth itself in the service of that ideology. It has supped so heartily on the Kool-Aid of correct-think that it is even willing to promote such delirious untruths as ‘male breastmilk’ in order to stay sweet with its fellow ideologues.

His name was Wayne Broadhurst. He was 49 years old. He reportedly worked as a refuse collector. He was by all accounts well liked in his local town. And yesterday his life was ended in the most savage manner imaginable. He was stabbed to death as he walked his dog on a brisk, bright Tuesday afternoon. The suspect is a 22-year-old Afghan national, who came to Britain on the back of a lorry in 2020 and was subsequently granted asylum. Which politicians will say Wayne Broadhurst’s name today? Which of them will say his life mattered? The attack took place in chill, suburban Uxbridge, a part of outer London I know well. A 45-year-old man and his 14-year-old son were also stabbed. This barbarism in suburbia will leave so much horror and sorrow in its wake.