Brendan O’Neill

JK Rowling has broken her silence on Emma Watson. And if I were the Harry Potter actress, I would lie low for a few months. In fact, I would go full hibernation and spend the rest of winter in some far-flung cottage sans internet. For Rowling’s critique of Watson and her lazy, luxury beliefs is devastating. It is one of the truest and most cutting takedowns of the blissful ignorance of moneyed moral poseurs I have ever read. Rowling’s critique of Watson and her lazy, luxury beliefs is devastating Once upon a time, Watson was known merely for playing Hermione in the film adaptation of Rowling's Harry Potter books. Of late, she has become a one-woman foghorn for the luxuriant moralism that passes for virtue in celebrity circles.

Imagine if, following the rape charges against Harvey Weinstein, a mob of angry people had rallied to his defence. Imagine if this smug, seething crowd had raged against the women who accused Weinstein of sexual offences. Imagine if they wagged their fingers in the women’s faces. Imagine they branded the women troublemakers. Imagine they went so far as to taunt the women by displaying banners saying: ‘Rich movie producers welcome here!’ Local women rallied around a girl, just 14, who had accused a man of sexually assaulting her. And those women were demonised We would have been appalled, right? Well, that very thing happened in Epping. Local women rallied around a girl, just 14, who had accused a man of sexually assaulting her. And those women were demonised.

Who does Keir Starmer think he’s kidding? There he is in that glossy video imperiously decreeing there should be a State of Palestine, yet he can’t even hold the British state together. Under his half-hearted purview our borders have become more porous, our state machinery has become more enfeebled, and the country has become the laughing stock of the civilised world. Forget playing fantasy states overseas, Sir Keir: fix the one you run. Here’s my question for the PM: when will you recognise the British state? Here’s my question for the PM: when will you recognise the British state? We have become a nation where you risk being branded far right if you fly the flag. Where it’s considered extremist to want better policing of the borders.

Has there ever been a lamer protest group than Led By Donkeys? I’m old enough to remember when protest was raucous, occasionally even sexy. The young and the angry rising up in fury against their irritant rulers. Now it’s four craft-beer bros from Stoke Newington whose idea of ‘rebellion’ is to titillate the middle classes with a naff projection about how awful Brexit is. Led By Donkeys have never exactly been daring The chattering class’s favourite faux troublemakers are back with another cunning stunt. This time they’re giving Brexit, Nigel Farage and Liz Truss a break and are aiming their macchiato-fuelled spleen at Donald Trump. I bet you’re shocked that this agitprop group that is basically a Guardian leader made flesh also suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

I have been lamenting Britain’s authoritarian turn for years. Yet even I was taken aback, physically repulsed in fact, by a news alert that pinged my phone today. It was from the Telegraph. It contained just 11 words — 11 words that ought to chill the blood of all who believe in liberty. This is what it said: ‘Graham Linehan arrested by five armed police officers for trans tweets.’ So this is England. A country where a once-beloved comedy writer can have his collar felt by cops over things he said on the internet. A country where a cultural legend can be treated like a common criminal simply for expressing his heartfelt beliefs. A country that seems hell-bent on mimicking China by dispatching its heavies to harass a writer for the ‘crime’ of thinking dissenting thoughts.

There are dark whispers on the internet about Britain’s coming ‘race war’. The protests outside migrant hotels prove the ‘native English’ have had a gutful of these ‘invaders’, say nefarious actors on X. Others foresee a civil war: a showdown between a haughty left and a resurgent right over the very soul of the kingdom. I see something different: a class war. ‘Racists’, some shouted at the little people. Well, they’re uneducated oiks who like to wave the flag of their country – they must be racist, right? Okay, maybe not a ‘war’. It’s not the Russian Revolution, or even a rerun of the Battle of Orgreave. But the class tensions in these clashes outside migrant hotels seem undeniable to me.

There you have it: in certain parts of England it’s easier to fly the Palestine flag than the English flag. Take Tower Hamlets in London. The Palestine colours fluttered from lampposts there for months in the aftermath of Hamas’s 7 October pogrom. Yet when patriots tried to hoist up the St George’s flag this week, they found themselves surrounded by officious council workers. Their flags were unceremoniously yanked down. Seems English pride is haram in modern London. The flag wars in Tower Hamlets are so telling. There was a period when the Palestine flag was omnipresent there. It was untouchable. That perhaps wasn’t surprising: the council is led by Lutfur Rahman of the pro-Palestine Aspire party.

For a man who wrote a book called How To Be Right, James O’Brien sure gets a lot wrong. Consider the message from one of his listeners that he read out on his LBC radio show yesterday. It said Jewish kids in the UK are taught to loathe Arabs and see them as ‘cockroaches to be crushed’. This is not only untrue, it is grossly libellous and possibly dangerous. Will Mr Right fess up and apologise? It’s 2025 and people are still spreading libels about the Jews What possessed O’Brien to so solemnly read on air a blatant falsehood about Britain’s Jews? The message came from someone called ‘Chris’ from Oxford. From the get-go his comment was creepy and should have got alarm bells clanging at LBC. ‘Warped views’ about Arabs ‘are not just an Israeli problem’, it said.

Labour was dead right to suspend Diane Abbott. Britain is experiencing one of the worst eruptions of anti-Jewish hatred in decades. Jewish schoolkids are being roughed up. Synagogues have been desecrated. Plots to murder Jews have been uncovered. The internet overflows with the effluent of Jew-hating invective. Any MP who minimises anti-Semitism in such febrile times deserves the shortest of shrift. It is a staggeringly naive thing for Abbott to say Abbott will say she was not minimising anti-Semitism, she was just saying it is different to the racism experienced by black people. Okay, let’s look at what she said. It was in an interview with the BBC’s James Naughtie. She said there are ‘different types of racism’.

So now we know. Now we know that Bob Vylan’s sick chant at Glastonbury was not a colourfully worded call for the ‘dismantling’ of a military force, as the band’s leftish apologists claimed. No, it appears that this punk act really does want the soldiers of the Jewish nation to die. A new clip shows the lead singer saying ‘Death to every single IDF soldier out there’. There it is, as clear as it is vile: they want the hundreds of thousands of men and women who serve in the Israeli Defence Forces to perish, to be wiped out without mercy.

They’re chanting for the death of Jews at Glastonbury. Yesterday a swaying mob of faux-virtuous poseurs blithely howled for ‘Death, death to the IDF’. They’ll say they were being political. ‘It was an anti-war cry, not an anti-Jew cry’, they’ll insist today, as the hangover lifts and the horror of their noisy clamour for the death of those they hate finally dawns on them. But such thin excuses won’t wash, not this time. That’s what Glastonbury felt like yesterday: a woke Nuremberg rally It was the punk rap act Bob Vylan that appeared to whip the crowd into a frenzy of Israelophobia. The lead singer first got them chanting ‘Free, free Palestine’, the mandatory holler of every bourgeois youth who’s determined to prove his virtue to his peers.

I’m old enough to remember when it was neo-Nazis who smashed up Jewish-owned businesses. Now it’s so-called progressives. Not long ago, a Jewish business in Stamford Hill in London had its windows smashed and its doors kicked in and red paint sprayed all over its walls. Only it wasn’t Combat 18 or the oafish dregs of the National Front that carried out this mini-Kristallnacht – it was Palestine Action. Israelophobia is the safest, most celebrated political position in Britain Yes, the lobby group that is gushed over by Sally Rooney in today’s Guardian, and which is cheered by every bourgeois leftist with an X account, wielded its hammers against a Jewish-owned company. It was on 28 May.

‘When history is written as it ought to be written’, said the great Trinidadian Marxist CLR James, ‘it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity’. On no historical calamity is this truer than the rape-gang scandal. When future scribes look back at this violent tear in the British social fabric, it is the forbearance of the public they will marvel over. It will dazzle them. These vile prejudices were the fuel of this scandal The spectre of public volatility has stalked this scandal from the start. The establishment’s irrational dread of the feral masses shaped its yellow-bellied decision-making.