Brendan O’Neill

Six weeks ago I was one of the 1.3 million Londoners who voted for Sadiq Khan as mayor. Boy do I regret it now. Because he’s just shown what he really thinks of us inhabitants of the capital: that we’re so mentally fragile, so pathetic, so vulnerable to the wicked charms of advertisers, that he must censor allegedly sexist ads on our behalf and protect us from offence. In proposing a blanket ban on bus and Tube ads that make people feel bad about their bodies, Sadiq has revealed his authoritarian, paternalistic contempt for the people who swept him to power. I’m amazed there isn’t more fury about his extraordinary proposal. He has instructed Transport for London to stop running ads that indulge in body-shaming.

Every wet leftie has been paying tribute to Muhammad Ali over the past 72 hours. Which is kind of weird considering Ali embodied everything they loathe. Male bravado, urban swagger, cockiness, masculinity by the bucketload: the things that made Ali great are the things his right-on mourners normally agitate and commentate against. Their hailing of Ali is as mad as a bunch of zebras turning up to the funeral of a lion. Nothing rattles today’s liberal-leftists more than the idea of the powerful bloke. Especially cocksure poor ones who are mouthy and — oh my God — use their muscle to get ahead in life. Indeed, this week’s New Statesman is devoted to the problem of masculinity.

We all know that the Remain camp has peddled the politics of fear. But what is the object of their fear? What’s the thing that makes them so scared, so convinced that a litany of social and political horrors will befall Blighty if we pull out of Brussels? It’s you, and me; all ordinary people. It’s the public. It’s our unpredictable passions. When the pro-EU lobby frets about a post-EU Britain having Boris as a PM, becoming a right-wing cesspool, getting rid of workers’ rights, becoming less eco-friendly, and / or becoming vulnerable to neo-fascistic forces, what they’re saying is: ‘You can’t trust the public. You can’t leave politics to ordinary people alone. Some politics must be done in the cooler forum of the EU.

The dream of internet freedom has died. What a dream it was. Twenty years ago, nerdy libertarians hailed the web as the freest public sphere that mankind had ever created. The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, written in 1996 by John Perry Barlow, warned the ‘governments of the industrial world’, those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’, that they had ‘no sovereignty where we gather’. The ‘virus of liberty’ was spreading, it said. Now it seems that the virus has been wiped out. We live our online lives in a dystopian nightmare of Twittermobs, ‘safety councils’, official procedures for ‘forgetting’ inconvenient facts, and the arrest of people for being offensive.

The dream of internet freedom has died. What a dream it was. Twenty years ago, nerdy libertarians hailed the web as the freest public sphere that mankind had ever created. The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, written in 1996 by John Perry Barlow, warned the ‘governments of the industrial world’, those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’, that they had ‘no sovereignty where we gather’. The ‘virus of liberty’ was spreading, it said. Now it seems that the virus has been wiped out. We live our online lives in a dystopian nightmare of Twittermobs, ‘safety councils’, official procedures for ‘forgetting’ inconvenient facts, and the arrest of people for being offensive.

So now we know: the right and the respectable left are just as good at PC purges as potty, radical students are. In fact they’re better. The effective exiling of Ken Livingstone from polite society; yesterday’s almost hourly toppling of Labour councillors who once tweeted or Facebooked something ugly about Israel; the scouring of social media in search of Zionist-haters we might expose and shame and crush… all this zealous speech-policing, this crusading against people who said the unsayable, has made the intolerant, No Platforming student left look like amateurs in comparison. The right is out-PCing the left.

Normally, Twitterstorms, those unhinged uprisings against a politician or celeb who has dared to make an outré utterance, are best treated like tantrum-throwing two-year-olds. Stand back, let them do their foot-stomping, and wait for them to exhaust themselves. But the storm over Boris’s ‘part-Kenyan’ remark in relation to Obama is different. This Twitterstorm has been so dumb, and so destructive, that it cannot simply be allowed to pass and take its place in the bulging book of Times People Went Unnecessarily Crazy About Something. No, we need a reckoning with this Twitterstorm. We need to take stock. As a keen watcher of Twitterstorms, I’m struggling to remember any that have been as batty and as immune to factual information as the Boris one.

Sometimes, the internet is just the worst. To use the hyperbolese that is common in internet culture, especially in the arch, self-satisfied, Buzzfeeding world of meme-makers and tweeters’n’shakers for whom everything is either ‘literally the worst thing that ever happened’ or ‘everything you need in your life right now’, the internet is the absolute pits sometimes. Take the victory of Boaty McBoatface in the poll to find a name for a new polar research ship. This literally makes me want to eat my computer so that I never have to look at anything on the internet ever again.

He has recanted! The blasphemer, the thoughtless pricker of moral orthodoxy, has backtracked! Rejoice! Yes, novelist Ian McEwan, who had the temerity to question the transgender ideology has now clarified his comments. He has declared that transgenderism is actually something to be ‘respected and celebrated’. He has seen the light. He has been corrected. He has ‘acknowledged the hurt’ he caused, says Stonewall, by which it means his foul mind has been given a moral spring-clean. If you want to see what illiberal times we live in, and how profoundly punishing the politics of identity can be, look no further than this mad McEwan story.

After terrorist outrages like the one in Brussels, our leaders always say the same thing: ‘We must defend European values against these evil killers.’ It seems the Metropolitan Police didn’t get the memo. For they have just arrested someone — actually arrested someone — for tweeting something unpleasant about the Brussels attack, in the process trampling their coppers’ boots all over what is surely, or at least ought to be, the most important European value of all: freedom of speech. The arrested man is one Matthew Doyle. He went viral after tweeting about a run-in he had on the day of the Brussels attacks: ‘I confronted a Muslim woman yesterday in Croydon. I asked her to explain Brussels. She said “Nothing to do with me”.

Which of us who grew up in the thrall of Paul Daniels' magic, under the spell of his Saturday-night humour and charm, could have imagined he would spend his latter years as a kind of sexual outlaw? Not many of us, I would wager. But that's what happened. When, in 2012, he bravely criticised the hysteria over the sexual behaviour of 1970s light entertainers, Daniels went from being viewed as a sweet, ageing refugee from the era of old-fashioned entertainment to being treated as a kind of magician version of the Marquis de Sade. One of the classiest purveyors of light-hearted, family-oriented TV culture in the late 20th century became positively countercultural in the 21st. It was his greatest magic trick, and I'm sure I'm not the only person who loved him for it.