Tom Slater is the editor of Spiked.
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
‘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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
The politicisation of consumer products is one of the weirder developments of recent years. First, Oreos came out in support of gay rights. Then Nike extolled us to ‘believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything’, in its multimillion-dollar campaign with controversial former NFL star Colin Kaepernick. Now Gillette has launched a new advert
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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,
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
Did you see the Welsh Tory MP David Davies and a pro-Brexit protester arguing outside parliament, pointing cameras at one another? Davies was being interviewed for BBC Wales about why he had taken to wearing a body camera. Having been on the receiving end of abuse from both pro- and anti-Brexit protesters, he said he
From our UK edition
Did you see the Welsh Tory MP David Davies and a pro-Brexit protester arguing outside parliament, pointing cameras at one another? Davies was being interviewed for BBC Wales about why he had taken to wearing a body camera. Having been on the receiving end of abuse from both pro- and anti-Brexit protesters, he said he
From our UK edition
Kobi Marimi, the 27-year-old Tel Avivian singer, picked to represent Israel at this month’s Eurovision Song Contest, can’t stop smiling: ‘I love my country. I love Tel Aviv. To know that I’m achieving a dream of mine, to be a part of Eurovision, it’s amazing in itself’, he tells me, with an earnestness that could crack the
From our UK edition
One of the ironies of contemporary British politics is that many younger voters – some of whom are so opposed to eurosceptic baby boomers that they accuse them of ‘stealing their future’ – are also enamoured with Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour leader is, after all, a eurosceptic baby boomer who some still speculate might have secretly voted Leave
From our UK edition
The politicisation of consumer products is one of the weirder developments of recent years. First, Oreos came out in support of gay rights. Then Nike extolled us to ‘believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything’, in its multimillion-dollar campaign with controversial former NFL star Colin Kaepernick. Now Gillette has launched a new advert
From our UK edition
Brexiteers are occasionally depicted as being a little paranoid. If you listen to some elite critics of Brexit, you would think that a sizeable chunk of those who voted to Leave are sharing dodgy anti-George Soros memes long into the night. You might think, too, that a few Brexit voters see elite stitch-ups everywhere and never
From our UK edition
Campus censorship is a myth. That’s the new line being spun by student union officials and university leaders in response to the campaigners, commentators and politicians raising concerns about the increasingly censorious culture on British campuses. The extent of No Platforming, Safe Space censorship and newspaper bans, they say, is being exaggerated by right-wing hacks
From our UK edition
Vince Cable has succeeded by one measure at this year’s Lib Dem conference: he’s actually managed to make news. With his Boris-esque aside in his speech today, that Tory Brexiteers are guilty of inflicting ‘years of economic pain justified by the erotic spasm of leaving the EU’, he has, however briefly, drawn attention to a
From our UK edition
‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear,’ wrote George Orwell in his preface to Animal Farm. It is a line that has gone down as one of the great capsule defences of dissent, made all the more prescient by the fact that
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As Love Island enters its final fortnight and the ink dries on the annual moralising thinkpieces, decrying a younger generation happy to flaunt their bronzed bodies and sex lives before the viewing public, a new survey reminds us of the more depressing reality: that young people are less debauched than ever. According to the British
