Brendan O’Neill

What happened in Portsmouth last night was extraordinary. Citizens waded into the bitter sea to try to prevent the arrival of foreign men who were all but ferried in by the authorities. Ordinary people stepped up as reluctant, unpaid border guards while actual border guards rolled out the red carpet for a hundred blokes from heaven knows where. Everyday Brits stood vigil over our shores while the state threw those shores open to all-comers. The last frontier of our kingdom’s hard-won sovereignty is a ragtag line of fuming Portsmouth locals How do we even define this? What do we call it? The media has reached for that small, familiar word “protest”, as if this were a mere outburst of public anger over government policy. It was so much more than that.

I see even national treasures aren’t safe from the petulant, punitive tantrums of the irritant left. Witness the travails of Maureen Lipman. Two actors you’ve never heard of have flounced out of a stage production with Dame Maureen, citing her views as the cause of their ideological pant-wetting. And what are her criminal beliefs? She supports the existence of a Jewish state. Oh Lord, grant me the confidence of a bit-part actor getting on his high horse over a dame who’s been entertaining the nation for six decades Dame Maureen will be appearing in Right Before I Go at the Soho Theatre in London in a few days’ time. It’s a play that draws on real suicide notes left by public figures and everyday people. Its aim is to illuminate suicide’s horrors.

What sounds more like a mob to you? Reporters asking questions about a professor’s CV and backstory? Or swarms of the perpetually offended damning those reporters as racists, fascists, scum, even murderers? It’s the latter, isn’t it? This is the bleak irony of the Jason Arday tragedy: his self-styled defenders decry the media mob while forging their own frothing mob. They accuse journalists of destroying a man’s life even as they hound those journalists, and libel them as ‘lynchers’, and demand that they face the kangaroo justice of a public shaming. Arday’s death was a ‘modern-day lynching’, say self-styled anti-racists The people with blood in their nostrils are not the newspapermen who only did their jobs and asked probing questions about a public figure.

Behold the human wreckage of the cult of diversity. The tragedy of Jason Arday is that he was both built up and destroyed by the ruthless machinery of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). The academy made him into the golden boy of its philistine project of ‘decolonisation’ and gave not one thought to what the consequences might be if his thin story unravelled, as it inevitably would. No one can deny it now: wokeness makes false gods and real tragedies. Journalists found a story and they told it. It was the academy and Arday’s colleagues who failed to do their jobs The death of Arday is not only dreadful – it is enraging. It feels like a catastrophe foretold.

When did progressives become so staggeringly cavalier about the safety of women? Just look at the big stories of “silly season”. Thousands of blokes from God knows where have landed on our shores and working-class women and girls are told to put up and shut up. There was talk of letting rapists, including the diabolical “grooming gangs”, out of jail early. And now activists are barking at women to let fellas into their WCs on pain of being branded a bigot. The gender ideologues of the messed-up left are raging You heard them, ladies. Welcome into your community those 800 gruff men from countries where women are treated like cattle. Throw open your intimate spaces – your loos, your changing rooms, your rape shelters – to any man who says he’s a woman.

If you want to stay sweet with the cultural establishment, never say anything nice about Jews. That’s the sick lesson of the Boy George storm. The Culture Club legend has released a song in which he croons “I stand with the Jews” and defends the right of the Jewish state to push back against the armies of anti-Semites that dream of its destruction. And for that, for refusing to hate Jews, he’s been savaged and ostracised. Most daringly of all, he refuses to bow to that falsest of false religions: the digital delirium that says Israel is committing genocide It’s been an extraordinary spectacle. The song’s called “We Will Dance Again”.

Pakistan is laughing at us. Over the past three years, they’ve deported a staggering 2.4 million Afghans. It was one of the largest expulsions of human beings in history. Yet when we ask Pakistan if they will please take back one poxy bloke, they say “Nope”. They are allowed to kick out undesirables, you see, but we are not. Already Guardianista voices are being raised to say it would be “problematic” to tweak Britain’s laws The case of Shabir Ahmed, the Rochdale rape-gang leader let out of jail this month, gets more enraging every day. Pakistan is now flat-out refusing to take back its criminal citizen. In my eyes that is an act of hostility, and it should be treated as such by our government.

So now we have two-tier grieving. Progressives are allowed to mourn lost colleagues, but populists are not. How else to explain the media mauling of Nigel Farage merely for venting his sorrow over the death of Ann Widdecombe? He’s been branded a pantomime mourner, a death exploiter, a weeper of insincere tears. It’s been obscene, and frankly cruel. When Farage lays a wreath and voices his fear of violence, he’s tarred as a death-supping opportunist Even by the standards of the Farage Derangement Syndrome that’s been gathering pace these past few weeks, the attacks on him for lamenting the killing of a colleague have been mad. He’s “exploiting” her death for “political propaganda”, howls the leftish press.

So this is what people mean when they say “Uniparty”. They mean supposed rivals reading from the same corporate script. They mean political parties behaving more like a cartel than separate democratic entities. They mean parties abandoning even the pretense of competition in order to hunt in a pack. That’s what I see in the political class’s haughty refusal to stand in Clacton – an act of sinister collectivism that grates against every principle of democracy. The chattering classes are having a good old laugh at Nigel Farage The chattering classes are having a good old laugh at Nigel Farage. His triggering of a by-election in his own constituency of Clacton has descended into “farce”, they crow.

Someone shouting “Fuck you, Jews”. Another telling the Jews they’re baby-killers. A man suggesting the Jews should “go back” to their homeland. A bloke telling Jews they’re “the most hated people in the world”. Where did this verbal mauling of Jews occur? At a neo-Nazi parade, perhaps? Actually it was at Pride in London. Yes, the Pride parade on Saturday was scarred by what the Metropolitan Police are calling “anti-Semitic verbal abuse”. The rainbow-coloured shindig that claims to be all about “tolerance” was shockingly intolerant of Jews. Pride London will show that “love always triumphs over hate”, said London mayor Sadiq Khan. Tell that to the gay Jews who were subjected to gross outbursts of hateful invective.

When does a crime against the individual become an assault on an entire nation? This is the harrowing question at the heart of the Riad Bouchaker case in Ireland. Found guilty this week of despicable violence against young children, Bouchaker did more than shatter innocent lives – his act of barbarism felt like a hate crime against Ireland itself. Bouchaker is a 52-year-old Algerian national. He had been living in Ireland for 20 years. On 23 November 2023, armed with a foot-long kitchen knife, he carried out a frenzied attack at an after-school crèche in Parnell Square in Dublin. In a flash of monstrous violence, he stabbed three children, leaving one girl with permanent brain damage. He also stabbed childcare worker Leanne Flynn, who heroically shielded the kids with her body.

Finally we have an answer to the question: ‘How popular is Rupert Lowe’s party Restore?’ The answer is: ‘Less popular than the BNP.’ Despite swarming Makerfield with aggy canvassers barking ‘Nigel Farage is controlled opposition’, the party won just 6.8 percent of the vote. Back in the 2010 general election the oafish BNP got 7.4 per cent in Makerfield. Oh dear. Taxi for Rupert. Back to your cushy pad down south, sir. That’s what happened to Restore in Makerfield: the collective hallucinations of the very online right crashed against the normalcy and decency of working-class Britain The self-delusion of Restore’s digital minions felt almost malarial. Every day they made ever more feverish predictions about their imminent ascension to power.

I see Jerry Seinfeld has got the pompous left sobbing into their keffiyehs. His sin? He refused to buckle to their neo-religious mantra ‘Free Palestine’. The comedy legend was accosted by a YouTuber outside Madison Square Gardens in NYC last week. ‘Free Palestine’ feels like a jeer designed to taunt Jews “Can we get a ‘Free Palestine’?”, the streamer asked as he shoved his mic towards Seinfeld’s gob. Seinfeld smirked. He held his tongue. No ‘Free Palestine’ passed his lips. It gets better. He then proceeded to shut down his chirpy interrogator with three words. “It doesn’t exist”, he said. He was talking about Palestine. Cue fury from the Gazaholics. This was “racist rhetoric”, cried the cranks at the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

So ‘Sophie of Dundee’ has been vindicated. The Scots girl who was so sickeningly defamed by the digital left stands exonerated. ‘Liars!’, cried creeps across the internet when the girl and her friends said they had no choice but to defend themselves from a foul-mouthed, abusive migrant male. Yet now we know they were telling the truth. Others insulted the girls. Armies of haters said it was ‘Sophie’ who was the brute. They called her a chav The image of this girl that went viral really was extraordinary. The events took place on a street in Dundee in August 2025. A grainy still from smartphone footage showed one of the girls holding up a knife and an axe. Her face is etched with terror. This was clearly a child in distress.