Brendan O’Neill

At No 5 in the Spectator's most-read articles for 2015 is Brendan O'Neill's cover piece describing 'Stepford Students': those who want to shut down debate when it involves people they disagree with and arguments they don't like. Brendan spotted this phenomenon in 2014 but his article returned to our best-read list this year as more and more people cottoned on to the trend for 'safe spaces' and no-platforming in our universities. And it spawned a website edited by defiant Stepford Students. Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students.

If you hear any of your friends refer to the rise of Podemos in Spain as a revolution, please buy them a dictionary for Christmas. For far from representing the sweeping aside of the political establishment by a new, angry class in society — which is what a revolution is — the success of Podemos speaks to the emergence of simply a different kind of political elite. Let’s call them politico-academics, former inhabitants of the ivory tower, who are armed with PhDs rather than cudgels, and who are more likely to install a Dictatorship of the Professors than a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. This isn’t to distract from the enormity of what has happened.

These figures should send a chill down the spine of anyone who values basic human dignity: in England in 2013, 2,018 newborn babies were taken from their mothers and put into the care of the state. This represents a huge hike from five years earlier, in 2008, when 802 newborns were taken into care. To put it another way: in 2008, 0.1 percent of newborns were taken into the care system, while in 2013 it was 0.3 percent. What’s going on? Education secretary Nicky Moran says the figures, released today by researchers at Lancaster University, are ‘worrying’. She means it’s worrying that so many mums are so rubbish at parenting that their kids are being put at risk.

Just when you thought uptight, fun-dodging, thought-policing millennials couldn’t get any worse, they go and brand yoga as racist. Apparently, when white people bend themselves bonkers while humming or thinking happy-clappy thoughts, they’re not only being self-punishing saps: they are also ‘culturally appropriating’ a practice that has ‘roots in Indian culture’. That’s according to student leaders at the University of Ottawa, who put pressure on a yoga teacher at the uni’s Centre for Students with Disabilities to call off her yoga classes. She was told ‘there are cultural issues of implication involved in the practice’.

Just when you thought the self-important, ban-happy uber-bureaucrats who run student unions couldn't get any worse, they go and No Platform a guy who fought with the Kurds against Isis. Yes, not content with expunging lads’ mags from campus, crying for the censorship of everyone from Germaine Greer to Dapper Laughs, and wailing about Robin Thicke’s 'Blurred Lines' like outraged nuns at a school disco, now they have silenced someone who spent five months facing down the head-choppers of the Islamic State. Macer Gifford, a former student at University College London (UCL), was due to give a talk at UCL this week on his experiences with the YPG, the fighting units of Syrian Kurdistan who have valiantly stymied the spread of Isis.

If you want to know how crazy, even Kafkaesque, this young millennium has become, consider this: yesterday it was reported that a person with a penis — Caitlyn Jenner — will be named Glamour magazine's Woman of the Year, while over at Cardiff University a woman who has done more than most to secure the liberation of womankind — Germaine Greer — was denounced by a swarm of Stepford Students as ‘transphobic’, someone who should make all right-minded people feel ‘sick to [their] stomachs’. This is the world you live in, folks. One in which a bloke can be globally celebrated as an inspiring woman — and heaven help the brave soul who asks: ‘But is this strapping former athlete with testicles really a woman?

Another week, another famous dead person having his grave danced on with gay abandon. This time it’s the late, great Lou Reed’s turn to have his reputation trashed by scandal-sniffing vultures. Less than two years after he died — at least they waited for him to rot, which is something I guess — a new book has been published claiming he was a ‘monster’. It is testament to the 21st century’s feverish obsession with hounding dead heroes and exposing their wicked streak that my first response upon hearing this was: ‘Of course he was a monster. Everyone is, right?’ According to the book — Notes from the Velvet Undergound, by Howard Sounes — Reed was ‘a very unpleasant man’.

Imagine living in a country where a politician could not only force a newspaper to retract a report but could then make it publish an alternative report on its front page. That would be a bad place to live, right? It would be a place where the relationship between the press and politicians — where the former is supposed to keep in check the latter, not the other way round — had been twisted beyond repair. It would be a country in which pressmen and women would be always on edge, fearful that if they were too stinging or scurrilous about a political player then they, too, might be forced into a humiliating climbdown. And no one benefits when the press quivers before the powerful. Except, of course, the powerful.

I witnessed something genuinely disturbing at Trinity College Dublin last night: trendy, middle-class, liberal students cheering and whooping a man who had just given the closest thing I have yet heard to a justification for the massacre at Charlie Hebdo. It was as part of a debate on the right to offend. I was on the side of people having the right to say whatever the hell they want, no matter whose panties it bunches. The man on the other side who implied that Charlie Hebdo got what it deserved, and that the right to offend is a poisonous, dangerous notion, was one Asghar Bukhari of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee.

Finally, the Stepford Students, those safe-spaced, spoilt-brat censors of anyone who thinks differently to them, have had their comeuppance. Following an outburst of Twitterfury, Warwick Students’ Union (WSU) has backed down on its ban on Maryam Namazie, an Iranian-born secularist and stinging critic of Islamobollocks. Having initially said Ms Namazie could not darken Warwick’s campus with her dangerous arguments against, err, religious intolerance and in favour of liberty and democracy, WSU has now said she is welcome. Anyone who thinks universities should be sites of open and sometimes rowdy debate should welcome WSU’s climbdown as a strike for freedom and a blow against the stiff, prim, censorious misanthropes who govern 21st-century student life.