Brendan O’Neill

It is often on the back of public fury that dangerous new precedents are set. Authoritarianism can sneak in when we’re all hopping mad about something or someone. So mad that we don’t even notice that society’s rules are being rewritten in an illiberal way. I fear it’s happening again, with YouTube’s demonetisation of Russell Brand. This is a risky thing to say. The climate is febrile right now. Criticise any aspect of the censure of Brand, following the publication of very serious allegations against him, which he strongly denies, and you risk being damned as a Brand defender. Worse, his weird online army, that ‘scamdemic’ mob that views Brand as a Jesus-like slayer of ‘the Covid regime’, might mistake you for a fellow traveller. Guys, please don’t.

Imagine if the Mayor of London was a Tory and his website featured an image of a black family alongside the words: ‘Doesn’t represent real Londoners.’ Imagine if this right-leaning mayor had weird rules on ‘branding’, one of which was that images of young black families should not be used in mayor-related publicity because these people, with their dark skin, are not reflective of ‘our’ vision of London.  If someone can explain how judging a family on the basis of their whiteness is any better than judging a family on the basis of their blackness, I would be most grateful There would be uproar, possibly protests, and rightly so.

Every time I cross paths – or swords – with a cranky student activist, I have the same thought: ‘Oh God, these people are going to be running the country one day.’ I have tormenting visions of these blue-haired censors, these giddy blacklisters of the un-PC, in parliament, drawing up laws, wagging a collective finger at the wrong-thinking throng. Those privileged fuming youths who once blocked my path to the Oxford Union; that offence-seeking mob that tried to prevent me from giving an after-dinner speech at Queen’s College, Oxford – they’re going to be in charge soon, I always fret, and then we’re screwed. We’ll all be under the thumb of that eccentric intolerance that has stalked so many campuses of late. Well, bad news – it’s happening.

On Saturday, in Trafalgar Square, a man called for violence against women. Specifically, it seems, intellectually curious women, those unruly harridans who refuse to bow down to certain beliefs. Punch them ‘in the fucking face’, he bellowed into a mic. The heaving mob around him cheered. An electric current of hate seemed to flow through their ranks. Some punched the air, others laughed, taking delight in their leader’s invitation to hit ‘bad’ women. It had the vibe of a witch-hunt. This is what medieval mob gatherings must have felt like, when pious, pitchfork-wielding men headed out to apprehend ‘demonic’ women. Only this 2023 mob were not wearing witchfinders’ hats or waving the Bible about.

So Jolyon Maugham loses again. The crusading barrister is now almost as famous for losing cases as he is for battering to death a defenceless fox. And he hasn’t disappointed with his latest legal shenanigans. The appeal against the LGB Alliance’s charitable status, which was spearheaded by troubled trans charity Mermaids and backed by Maugham’s Good Law Project, has been comprehensively dismissed. Clearly the gays are not as easy to beat as a fox. We must be grateful for every flash of sanity in these strange times. And the tribunal's decision not to rescind the LGB Alliance’s charitable status is very sane indeed.

Imagine if, in 1868, when the TUC was founded, someone had told those warriors for workers’ rights that one day they would be referring to biological males as ‘mothers’. And what’s more that they would be publicly scolding anyone who dared to dissent; anyone who said: ‘Hold on – surely only women can be mums?’ They would have thought you mad. We’re a reasoned, rational organisation concerned only with improving the pay and conditions of working people, they’d have insisted. Well, fast forward to 2023, and what do you know: the TUC, the big beast of union politics, has openly declared that men can be mothers too. A curious thing happened this week. ITV News ran an item on the problem of soaring water bills.

The mob has claimed another scalp. This time it’s Howard Donald’s. The Take That star has been found guilty of likecrimes. That is, he liked some ‘problematic’ tweets, including a tweet that said – brace yourselves – ‘Only women have periods’. For this, for giving his approval to a statement of biological fact, he’s been damned as a vile bigot and dumped from July’s Nottingham Pride Festival. Next time someone tells you cancel culture is a myth, point them to the unpersoning of Howard Donald. For here we have a good bloke, a veteran of the boyband era, being publicly shamed not even for anything he said but simply for using his thumbs to signal agreement with other people’s ideas. And what were those scandalous ideas?

There is something faintly ridiculous about the Privileges Committee’s report on partygate. Sixteen pages in, you encounter the following sentence: ‘We have evidence that trestle tables were set up for drinks to be laid out.’ You have barely caught your breath from this nightmarish vision of a trestle table being erected in the Downing Street garden before you are informed that there is evidence that, at another get-together, ‘a cake and alcohol were provided’. It gets worse. In the annex to the report we learn of ‘platters of sandwiches’. Was there no end to the Bacchanalian debauchery of the Boris Johnson regime? Surely I am not alone in thinking this is all a tad absurd? It’s hardly the Marquis de Sade, is it? It’s not even Profumo.

For a month that’s supposed to be all about love and acceptance, Pride has a pretty nasty streak. Maybe that’s what one of the mysterious colours on its indecipherable flag represents: the cruelty community. Consider Oxfam’s Pride animation, which it tweeted out earlier this week. Alongside all the usual Pride platitudes – we must love and respect LGBTQIA+ people, the cartoon characters say – the video went in for some Terf-bashing too. If Pride is about love, why does it feel so intimidating? 'Terf' stands for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’, but really it means ‘witch’. It’s a slur hurled at women who think sex is real. Who think people with penises are men, not women. You know – women who understand reality. Ready the stake!