Tom Slater is the editor of Spiked.
From our UK edition
When Keir Starmer’s Labour was flung into power by the implosion of the Conservatives, the chattering classes were gripped by almost comical levels of delusion. We were assured this assortment of third-rate managerialists were about to usher in a new age of calm, competence and principle. Surely, the Peter Mandelson scandal has finally put paid
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So they can control our borders after all. After the government presided over a near-record high for small-boats crossings last year, swinging open the doors of the nation’s hotels to anyone who can buy a spot on a dinghy, the British state has banned a Dutch right-wing activist who pals around with Tommy Robinson. Starmer’s government presides
The internet suddenly went down in Iran last night, as courageous Iranians continued to rise up against the Ayatollah. The UK government was apparently inspired. Not by the rebels, whose plight the Prime Minister has remained remarkably quiet about – but by the mullahs’ digital crackdown. Call me a conspiracy loon, but I dare say
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Publicly mocking a man who has just died from falling off a ladder. This is what the ‘compassionate’ left has been getting up to on social media in recent days, in between retweeting conspiracy theories about the Bondi terror attack. ‘That knucklehead Paul Lumber who died putting up flags looks exactly like u imagined. The
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Would someone please think of the luvvies? While the rest of the nation is furious about our out-of-control borders and the heinous crimes committed by those who should never have been allowed to stay here in the first place, the Great and Good are furious that the government is taking even modest steps to try to clean up this
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The fash must be bricking it. Paloma Faith, Fontaines D.C. and Lenny Henry are among the musicians, comedians and celebs who have just launched a new alliance, Together Against The Far Right. They’ve got a statement. And a demonstration planned for March next year. Far-right thugs, meet your match. The luvvies are reclaiming the streets. You
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We’ve become grimly accustomed to people throwing around the phrase ‘far right’. But seeing it flung at Labour home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s asylum reforms has felt particularly barmy – a new low from the liberal-left midwits who we all hoped couldn’t sink any lower. Mahmood’s punchy announcements this week, in which she laid out plans
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Has the vibe shift finally hit the publishing world? There might just be some hope that one of the industries most captured by woke scolds, by the nonbinary heirs of Mary Whitehouse, has finally clocked which way the cultural winds are blowing – away from cancel culture and identity politics and towards something freer and
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Is Jess Phillips okay? I can’t be the only one wondering. The safeguarding minister’s increasingly erratic, shirty performances at the despatch box would suggest she is crumbling under the scrutiny. Scrutiny that she and her government have brought entirely on themselves. This week, she lashed out at Tory and Reform MPs for daring to criticise
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28 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Tom Slater says that Britain is having its own gilet jaunes moment; Justin Marozzi reads his historian’s notebook; Iben Thranholm explains how Denmark’s ‘spiritual rearmament’ is a lesson for the West; Angus Colwell praises BBC Alba; and, Philip Womack provides his notes on flatmates. Produced and presented by Patrick
From our UK edition
45 min listen
First: an economic reckoning is looming ‘Britain’s numbers… don’t add up’, says economics editor Michael Simmons. We are ‘an ageing population with too few taxpayers’. ‘If the picture looks bad now,’ he warns, ‘the next few years will be disastrous.’ Governments have consistently spent more than they raised; Britain’s debt costs ‘are the worst in
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‘I heard you want your country back. Ha, shut the fuck up!’ So yelped rap-punk duo Bob Vylan on stage at Glastonbury in June. That televised set became notorious for other reasons – for Vylan’s chant of ‘Death, death to the IDF’, which cost the group their agent, a string of shows and, presumably, another
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‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government & politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.’ Britain’s free-speech wars are
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Protest works. That will be the take-home message to activists across the country, now that Epping Forest District Council has been granted a temporary High Court injunction blocking asylum seekers from being housed at the Bell Hotel in the leafy Essex market town. Thousands have demonstrated outside the Bell in recent weeks, sparked by the charging
From our UK edition
39 min listen
First: the new era of censorship A year ago, John Power notes, the UK was consumed by race riots precipitated by online rumours about the perpetrator of the Southport atrocity. This summer, there have been protests, but ‘something is different’. With the introduction of the Online Safety Act, ‘the government is exerting far greater control
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That sound you hear is the penny finally dropping in Downing Street. Having spent the year since the horrific post-Southport riots blaming unrest over migration and asylum solely on misinformation and far-right groups, Labour appears to be realising the rot runs much deeper. Government officials, reports the Times, have warned the cabinet that Britain is ‘fraying
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You can tell the environmentalists are on the back foot. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband is issuing doomsday proclamations in parliament, branding Reform and the Tories ‘unpatriotic’ for refusing to go along with his deranged Net Zero policies. And now Labour donors are also calling for ‘climate denial’ to be criminalised. Because nothing says ‘we’re winning the
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Fair play to Draco Malfoy. (Now there are five words I never thought I’d write.) Tom Felton, who played Harry Potter’s platinum-blond nemesis in the films, has done what so many of his young co-stars have failed to do: he has defended the woman to whom he owes his career. Tom Felton, who played Harry
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Thom Yorke has done us all a great service by exposing how unhinged, intolerant and, frankly, bigoted much of the supposedly ‘pro-Palestine’ set is. The Radiohead frontman and bandmate Jonny Greenwood have for years now been locked in a bitter beef with Israelophobic fans and fellow musicians, due to their dogged refusal to treat Israelis
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Andrew Lawrence has some claim to being Britain’s most-cancelled comedian. For more than a decade now, the 37-year-old stand-up has been losing himself work, friends and representation due to his wilfully offensive style of comedy / commentary. In a 2014 Facebook post, he took aim at BBC panel shows on which ‘aging, balding, fat men,
