Brendan O’Neill

I have a confession to make: when those Maccabi Tel Aviv fans tore down a Palestine flag in Amsterdam a few weeks back, I let out a little cheer. Yes, I know the boisterous lads did other things in the Dutch capital that were definitely bad. The left never tires of telling us what thugs and brutes these young Israelis allegedly are. But that one act, that tiny revolt against the omnipresence of the Palestine colours in the cities of Europe – that I welcomed. If you want to be radical, wave the Israel flag For two reasons. First, because it made perfect sense to me that Israelis might feel vexed and possibly even distressed by the sight of this flag flapping from the balcony of every smug residence in the capitals of this continent.

My first thought upon seeing today’s revolt of the farmers was just how gloriously normal it looked. For more than a year London has been besieged by wild-eyed plummy leftists and fuming Gen X’ers screaming blue murder about the Jewish State. Now, for sweet relief, we get men and women in waxed jackets and sensible winter headwear taking to the streets, not to rage against a faraway land but to defend their own land from the grubby taxing of the Labour government. Now that’s proper protesting. It made me want a warm beer. A malady has infected the influential classes – we might call it farmerphobia What happened today was extraordinary. It was a revolt of the sensibles.

We need to talk about Dawn Butler. Following the election of the first ever black leader of a major party in this country, Ms Butler took to X not to congratulate but to sneer. Not to cheer this final breakthrough for racial equality in the UK but to share a poisonous description of the person who made the breakthrough as the ‘black face’ of ‘white supremacy’. It is one of the worst things a member of the ruling party has done since they came to power four months ago. Labour’s Dawn Butler retweeted tips for 'surviving a Kemi Badenoch victory' Yes, when Kemi Badenoch was announced as the new leader of the Conservative Party, Labour’s Butler took potshots.

I have a question for Sally Rooney. Why are you perfectly happy to engage with cultural institutions in the UK, despite the various mad wars us Brits have waged in recent years, but you dodge like the plague cultural institutions in Israel because Israel is fighting a war in Gaza? Rooney, the celebrated Irish author of chick lit for people with PhDs, has reportedly put her name to a letter calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions that are ‘complicit in genocide’. Hundreds of other writers with virtue to advertise have apparently signed too. Arundhati Roy, Percival Everett, Rachel Kushner and others all say they will forswear Israeli ‘publishers, festivals, literary agents and publications’ that are ‘complicit in violating Palestinian rights’.

It is one year since the Jews suffered the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Nazi era, and what is the British left doing? Raging against the Jewish state. Hitting the streets in their thousands to fume against the nation that was the victim of that carnival of racist killing. They’re protesting not against the pogromists of Hamas who unleashed such horrors on 7 October 2023, but against the country and the people they did it to. It’s a new low It’s a new low. As Jews in Britain and around the world ready themselves for the painful commemoration of the slaughter of more than a thousand of their people, demonstrators have poured on to the streets of London and other cities to damn Israel as a ‘genocidal’ entity. You couldn’t wait?

Is Robert Jenrick plotting to surrender our sovereignty to the Israelis? Is the Tory leadership frontrunner engaged in some nefarious scheme to plaster our ports with the flag of the Jewish State? You could be forgiven for thinking so following the swirling hysteria that greeted his comments about having the Star of David at Britain’s entry points. ‘He wants to make us an outpost of Israel!’, every time-rich radical with the Palestine flag in his social-media bio wailed online. It’s poppycock, of course. The Jenrick-bashers essentially told on themselves Jenrick made his remarks at a gathering of the Conservative Friends of Israel at the Tory conference in Birmingham.

There is a Christian preacher, a woman, who has suffered the most heinous persecutions. She has been chased by mobs, arrested, unlawfully jailed and even stabbed. Where did this hellish hounding of a follower of Christ occur? Afghanistan, perhaps? Somalia maybe? Actually it was right here, in Britain. An angry mob formed around her Her name is Hatun Tash. She is an ex-Muslim originally from Turkey. She’s now a Christian convert and colourful street preacher. She regularly gave impromptu sermons at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, where she’s been known to hold up a desecrated copy of the Koran while spreading the word of Christ. Her style is not to everyone’s taste, but so what?

When you describe what happened, you realise how ridiculous it was. A woman was dragged to court for holding up a placard that featured a drawing of a palm tree with coconuts falling from it. Superimposed on two of the coconuts were the faces of Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak, who was Prime Minister at the time. And that was it. Hauled before magistrates for carrying a daft illustration through the streets. Anyone who doubted that our liberty to speak is in peril has surely been shaken awake now. So, yes, I believe it is hateful. But should it be illegal? No This is the case of Marieha Hussain, a 37-year-old Londoner and secondary-school teacher. Well, until she held aloft the infamous placard, which caused her to lose her job.

Forget two-tier policing – we need to talk about two-tier healthcare. Jess Phillips, Labour MP and Home Office minister, has reportedly said she was whizzed through an overcrowded A&E unit on account of her pro-Gaza campaigning. If this is true, it raises some truly troubling questions about the NHS.  ‘The doctor who saw me was Palestinian’, and ‘he was sort of like, “I like you. You voted for a ceasefire.”’ It was at an event at the Kiln Theatre in North London that Phillips implied that she received preferential treatment in a publicly funded hospital because of her position on the Palestine question. According to the Daily Mail, she told the audience about a distressing medical episode where her lips turned blue and she couldn’t breathe properly.

Why is there not more disquiet over Yvette Cooper’s promise to crack down on ‘harmful’ beliefs? To my mind it ranks as one of the most chilling political pledges of the modern era. The thought of a Labour government, or any government, imperiously decreeing which ideas are ‘harmful’ and which are benign leaves me cold. It’s a first step to tyranny and it needs to be walked back. A war on ‘harmful’ beliefs would give the government a blank cheque to demonise views that are old-fashioned, possibly unpopular or just not very PC The Home Secretary has commissioned a rapid review of ‘extremist ideologies’ as part of a new government counter-extremism strategy. She has vowed to come down hard on people who push ‘harmful or hateful beliefs’.