Brendan O’Neill is Spiked's chief politics writer. His new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, is out now.
By now we’re all used to being lectured by woke hypocritical celebs. But Lewis Hamilton’s suggestion that we all turn vegan in order to save the planet takes the biscuit. This is a man who zooms around a track in gas-guzzling speed-machines for a living and he wants the rest of us to eke out
Sadiq Khan has got some front. He is complaining about the government’s voter ID plans, claiming it will lead to ‘voter suppression’. And yet he is engaged in the most explicit and awful act of voter suppression in the living memory of this country — the elitist effort to suppress the votes of the 17.4m
It’s tempting to laugh at Extinction Rebellion. I do it myself frequently. Those yoga sessions on Westminster Bridge. The amateur dramatics of wandering around in naff crimson-red outfits to symbolise ‘the common blood we share with all species’. That lame rave-style dancing they do as some bloke in an overlong beard plays the drums while
All of the following things are true. Naga Munchetty, co-host of BBC Breakfast, is a very good TV journalist, one of the BBC’s best assets in fact. That tweet Donald Trump sent in July telling the non-white, female members of the Democratic ‘Squad’ to ‘go back’ to the countries they came from was racist. The
Rarely has there been such a flagrant display of hypocrisy and cant as there was in the House of Commons last night. Opposition MPs stood up one after the other to denounce Boris Johnson for his use of apparently toxic and dangerous words like ‘surrender’ and ‘sabotage’. Such language is polluting the public sphere and
These days everyone in politics is obsessed with ‘optics’, with making sure they never do or say anything that might look bad to the public. Which makes Emily Thornberry’s European Union outfit all the more extraordinary. Thornberry paraded around Brighton in a blue-and-gold EU dress like some wide-eyed devotee of the cult of Brussels. What
If you live by the sword of wokeness, you might die by it too. Justin Trudeau is about to find this out. The painfully right-on PM of Canada, this undisputed master of the virtue-signal, this morally unassailable possessor of Pride socks and correct opinions on everything, looks set to be cancelled, to use woke parlance.
The Lib Dems are now the most extremist party in the UK. They might not look like extremists, being made up of mostly nice, middle-class people from the leafier bits of the nation. But they have just adopted a policy that is arguably more extreme, more corrosive of British values, more counter to the great
Anyone who doubted that John Bercow is an arrogant blowhard who harbours a seething contempt for Brexiteers will surely have been disabused of their doubts last night. After he announced his resignation as Speaker, and received a fawning and utterly unparliamentary round of applause from his fellow Brexitphobes on the Opposition benches, Bercow lost it.
I have a real problem with the term ‘Tory rebels’. Because it’s questionable, to put it gently, that either of these words apply to the Conservative Party MPs who are threatening to side with Labour and the Lib Dems in tonight’s parliamentary battle against no deal. They don’t sound much like Tories. And rebels? Do
Who is allowed to be part of the #MeToo movement? I ask because on Friday five men were found guilty of horrific sexual crimes against eight girls and yet the case hasn’t trended on Twitter. There have been no hashtags. The girls’ suffering hasn’t been widely talked about. There have been very few declarations of
This morning, a petition demanding ‘Do not prorogue Parliament’ is doing the rounds. At the time of writing, more than 1.4 million people have signed it. Remainers are very excited. They’re holding the petition up as proof of a mass outpouring of democratic disdain for Boris Johnson’s decision to suspend Parliament for a few more
Not content with agitating against democracy with his relentless Remainer shenanigans, now Tony Blair appears to be aiming his fire at freedom of speech. Seriously, is there no civilisational liberal value this man doesn’t want to take down? A new report for Blair’s think-tank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, says hard-right groups should
Gillette has learned the hard way that if you annoy your customer base, your business will suffer. Ever since it released its woke men-bashing ad earlier this year, its sales have slumped. Who’d have thought it? Telling men they’re disgusting bullies and sexual harassers — as Gillette’s ad did — will not endear you to
We have to talk about the schoolgirl who was disqualified from a GCSE exam on the grounds that she had made ‘obscene racial comments’ about Islam. This bizarre incident is being chalked up to overzealous wokeness on the part of some GCSE examiners. But it’s more than that. It tells us a bigger story about
My faith in rock music has been temporarily restored. According to the manager of The 1975, the execrable essay/song that his band recorded with diminutive doom-monger Greta Thunberg had previously been rejected by other bands. By ‘bigger artists than The 1975’, he says. He means this as a criticism. Like, ‘How dare these artists turn
Are we allowed to criticise the niqab yet? This question crossed my mind as I watched that viral clip of a niqab-clad woman hurling homophobic invective at a Pride marcher in Walthamstow in London. Surely now it will become acceptable to raise questions about this medieval garment (banned in several Muslim countries) and about the
Last night’s ‘F**k Boris’ demo in London really was an extraordinary spectacle. It felt almost historic. For what we had here was a gathering of radicals raging against a new Tory PM for threatening to upend the political status quo. Yes, these supposedly edgy, rebellious, pink- and blue-haired haters of Conservatism were essentially pleading with
In Canada right now, a group of female workers, at least one of whom is a migrant, are coming under attack. One has already lost her job. The others fear losing their jobs too. And yet the leftish types who’d normally yell and tweet their backing for such marginalised workers haven’t raised a peep of
There is something really ugly in Sadiq Khan’s description of stabbings in London as the ‘human cost of austerity’. What’s he saying? That being poor makes you a violent maniac? That being hard-up increases your likelihood of wanting to take a knife from the kitchen drawer and use it to slice some kid’s face? Does
