Tom Slater is the editor of Spiked.
Is Mock the Week sexist? It’s a question that has haunted the BBC’s topical comedy panel show for much of its 15 years. And one of its most prominent female former panellists has just reignited the debate by claiming the show practises a kind of ‘pedestal feminism’, giving a few female comics a go to
The mini cultural revolution unleashed by the Black Lives Matter movement, this campaign of cleansing society of any reminder of a more racist past, has been remarkable in its speed and scope. Statues have been toppled. Sitcom episodes have been memory-holed. Actors have been forced into grovelling apologies for once playing a non-white character. Now,
We’ve done it. We’ve solved racism. And who’d have thought that all it would take was a few judicious edits to a much-loved British sitcom? This is the news that UKTV, a BBC-owned streaming service, has removed and is reviewing an episode of Fawlty Towers because it contains racial slurs. ‘We regularly review older content
It’s official: criticising Black Lives Matter is now a sackable offence, even here in the British Isles, thousands of miles away from the social conflict currently embroiling the US. As protesters again fill the streets of a rainy London on Saturday, as part of a now internationalised backlash against the brutal police killing of George
Time was that toys would be recalled, removed from sale or quietly had their advertising pulled if they were covered in lead paint, defective, or in the case of Disney’s hilariously misjudged 1999 ‘Rad Repeatin’ Tarzan’ doll, appeared to be masturbating. Today all it takes is for them to be potentially perceived by someone, somewhere,
When this chapter in America’s history of its struggle against racism is written, two names will stand out among all the others: Ben and Jerry. Or at least that seems to be what the ice-cream company hopes, given the somewhat bizarre statement that it issued this week. In response to the brutal killing of George
So we’re now three weeks into our coronavirus lockdown and we’ve had a glimpse of what a very British police state might look like. The picture that has emerged is one as comical as it is terrifying. From the off, it seemed many police officers had not bothered to read or even tried to get
Do you know who hasn’t had a good corona war so far? Celebrities. Throughout this crisis, many of them seem to have gone out of their way to prove our worst prejudices about them right: namely that they are narcissistic, entitled people, completely cut off from the concerns of ordinary people and yet possessed by a
Not for the first time since the coronavirus crisis began, controversy has hit Derbyshire. While the other week it was the county’s finest sending up drones to spy on and shame people walking in the Peak District, this week it’s a Labour councillor who has had the whip withdrawn and lost her job at a
A small victory for common sense was chalked up this morning when actors’ union Equity apologised for denouncing the anti-woke actor Laurence Fox. After Fox’s appearance on Question Time in January – in which he scandalously suggested that maybe Britain isn’t a rotten, racist country that had driven out the wonderful Meghan Markle – the
I’m old enough to remember when the people who students wanted to shut down on campus were real pieces of work: Nick Griffin, Anjem Choudary, fascists or Islamists who, given half the chance, would turn Britain into a bigoted, authoritarian backwater. How quaint that feels now. So low has the bar for censorship on campus sunk,
Plenty of people are pretending this morning that they actually knew who Dave was the day before yesterday. The Streatham rapper made headlines at the Brits last night for calling Boris Johnson ‘a real racist’ during a performance of his song ‘Black’. Suddenly, he’s the toast of Twitter, liberal-lefties and assorted other Boris-loathers, who eagerly shared
The 2020 Oscars will go down in history for two things: Bong Joon-ho’s brilliant film Parasite becoming the first foreign-language film ever to win Best Picture. And Joaquin Phoenix talking about artificially inseminating cows. Yes, in a crowded field of un-self-aware, right-on speeches and stunts during this year’s awards season – Natalie Portman’s Dior cape
‘You can’t change sex – biologically, that is impossible.’ That, by most people’s standards, is a simple observable truth. But by the standards of campus activists, it is tantamount to hate speech, deserving of merciless retribution. The quote above is from Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at the University of Oxford. And for
Are you a student at the university of Sheffield looking for work? Do you have an incredibly thin skin and a passion for policing other people’s conversations? Are you willing to work for £9.34 per hour? Then have I got the job for you. The university is hiring 20 students to challenge offensive language on
Not that long ago, the sorts of views that were verboten on a university campus were genuinely out-there and nasty: fascism, racism, radical Islam, that sort of thing. It was generally accepted that university was the place to air and interrogate even the most eccentric ideas. Many people still had their limits, but those limits
Many Brits still bristle at the importation of Halloween. It’s easy to see why. It is an American holiday that involves grown adults dressing up and children begging for food from strangers. But there is one upside to it that we can all enjoy: woke campus officials losing their minds over ‘offensive’ costumes. It’s hilarious,
Student politics these days is frequently self-parodying. The Gandhi Must Fall campaign at Manchester university is a perfect case study. Manchester city council has approved plans for a nine-foot statue of Mahatma Gandhi outside Manchester Cathedral. The idea is to promote peace in the wake of the horrific Manchester Arena attack. Who could possibly object
Extinction Rebellion (XR) has announced it will finish its ‘Autumn Uprising’ earlier than planned in order to make way for the People’s Vote march on Saturday. The two groups have been in informal discussions for some time aimed at avoiding getting in one another’s way, according to a report in the Times. Even if the
Is it a crime to mock a criminal’s unfortunate hairstyle? Police in South Wales seem to think so. Last week, Gwent Police posted on Facebook calling for any information on the whereabouts of 21-year-old Jermaine Taylor, a convicted drug dealer from Newport who had breached his license conditions. They put up the obligatory mugshot, in which Taylor sports his
