Brendan O’Neill

Imagine living in a country so religiously uptight that even making a smudge on a copy of the Quran could turn into a police matter. A country so nervous of offending Islam that even kids could be punished for allegedly disrespecting that religion. A country so determined to ringfence certain religious beliefs from scrutiny or mockery that you might hear actual politicians denouncing as ‘provocative’ and ‘terrible’ any slight against those beliefs. Well, if you’re in the UK then you live in that country. Forget Iran. Never mind Afghanistan. It’s right here in Blighty, a supposedly free, mostly secular nation, that all of the above recently happened. Let’s call it 'Qurangate'. And let’s talk about just how messed up it is.

The vandals have come for Roald Dahl. His books for children are to be cleansed of their ‘offensive’ content. Sensitivity readers – what we used to call censors – have been employed to pore over his works and expurgate any word or passage that might hurt a kid’s feelings. If you weren’t worried about cancel culture before, surely this egregious assault on some of the best-known children’s books of the modern era, this posthumous purging of an author’s output, will change your mind. Dahl is being well and truly Ministry of Truthed. Puffin essentially tasked the sensitivity readers with morally improving his stories so that no child will ever feel affronted by their fruity, judgemental language. Some of the changes are crazy.

The crusade to erase JK Rowling continues. The latest ruse of the Rowlingphobes is to scrub her name from her own books. Yes, they now want to make even the Harry Potter universe a Rowling-free zone. A ‘book artist’ in Toronto by the name of Laur Flom has set himself the task of memory-holing Rowling. He is rebinding Harry Potter books, giving them new covers that make no mention of the witch’s name, and even removing her name from the copyright and title pages inside. The aim, he says, is to ‘help out’ people who are fans of Harry Potter but who have an ethical issue with Ms Rowling. ‘The project is spurred by her transphobia’, he says. In short, Rowling believes in biological sex, and thus she must be unpersoned.

So, are you Team Tate or Team Thunberg? Do you side with the muscled misogynist who has convinced tragic TikTok incels that he’s a ‘real man’? Or with the pint-sized prophetess of doom famous for scaring the world witless about the coming climate apocalypse? I say neither. I can’t be the only person who finds both of them annoying. The world will be a better place in 2023 if we hear less from woman-hating Tate and future-fearing Greta and their clashing armies of wide-eyed followers. Dogmatic devotion to a leader is never a good idea. Which is why the Tate mob and the Thunberg mob unnerve me equally This is the news that Andrew Tate, a bald pick-up artist, has had a Twitter run-in with Greta Thunberg, a Swedish doom-monger. What a Christmas gift for the Very Online!

There is always a tipping point in Twitterstorms. A moment at which the digital hysteria over something somebody said becomes far more offensive, and far more dangerous, than what that person said. You can feel when it happens, when the shift takes place, when it is the behaviour of the howling mob that becomes the truly shameful and anti-social thing, far more than the utterance that so outraged the mob in the first place. We have reached this tipping point, already, in the fury over Jeremy Clarkson’s comments about Meghan Markle. The clamour for Clarkson’s head is now a far graver insult to decency and liberty than the thing Clarkson himself wrote in the Sun. I don’t like what Clarkson wrote, for the record.

The latest Twitter Files revelations are the most disturbing yet. They show how the employees of this private company, not voted for by a single American, conspired to censor the democratically elected President of the United States. It was nothing short of corporate tyranny, a sinister assault on public life by social media suits most people had never heard of. It should be front page news. The newest report is written by Bari Weiss, who examines the decision-making process behind Twitter’s banishment of Donald Trump in January last year, a couple of days after the 6 January riot on Capitol Hill. We all know Twitter’s official story: two tweets written by Trump incited those bozos to commit their violent acts – and thus he had to be silenced forever.

Is anyone else starting to feel harassed by Harry and Meghan? There’s no escaping them. Open Spotify and there they are. Browse Netflix and you’ll be invited to hear ‘their truth’. The one we already heard on Oprah? Not again. The line the Sussexes love to spin is that we’re intruding into their lives. In truth they’re intruding into ours. They won’t leave us alone. I half expect to wake up one morning and find Meghan outside my apartment with a megaphone telling me yet again about the time a senior royal wondered what colour her baby would be. Guys, give us a break. Stop washing your dirty laundry in our personal spaces. It’s feeling a little stalkerish. We’re expected to be disturbed by the stiff upper lip of the old-world royals.

On the Lady Susan Hussey affair – is anyone else more horrified by the Palace’s behaviour than Lady Hussey’s? Yes, it seems Lady Hussey was a tad blunt in her interaction with charity boss Ngozi Fulani. At a reception at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday, she reportedly asked Ms Fulani where she is ‘really from’, repeatedly, even after Ms Fulani explained that she’s a Brit, like her. Oh dear. The royals come off as far nastier than Lady Hussey in this strange scandal But for the Palace to banish Lady Hussey almost instantly, despite the fact that she devoted her entire adult life to the institution, is far more callous. It’s cruel, in fact. Lady Hussey might have been clumsy in her chat with Ms Fulani, but give me clumsiness over cruelty any day.

David Baddiel could not have asked for better evidence for his thesis that ‘Jews don’t count’ than the online reaction to it. Channel 4 broadcast his intelligent and touching documentary this week with that very title – Jews Don’t Count – and instantly there was an explosion of Baddielphobia. It was almost as if people were determined to prove his point. There’s a blind spot among progressives when it comes to anti-Jewish hatred, said Baddiel. And – boom – there it was, right away, in hateful comment after hateful comment: the blind spot, clear as anything. Baddiel first made his case in his sharp polemical book Jews Don’t Count, published last year.

Here’s my question for Stephen Fry after he said his trans friends had felt ‘deeply upset’ by some of the comments made by J.K. Rowling: why didn’t you just say to them, ‘So what?’ Fry used to be all about saying ‘So what?’ to people who went on about feeling offended by words. His irritation with offence-takers has even become a meme. ‘It’s now very common to hear people say, “I’m rather offended by that”. As if that gives them certain rights’, he once said. ‘It’s actually nothing more… than a whine. “I find that offensive.” It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. “I am offended by that.” Well, so fucking what?’ He’s changed his tune.