Brendan O’Neill is Spiked's chief politics writer
A rock band’s tour cancelled after one of the band members made a tasteless joke. A working-class cashier sacked from her job at the behest of an online mob who were horrified by something she said on Facebook. A schoolteacher suspended after being dogpiled for a daft remark she made online. Has the left-wing digital
Does anyone else feel like they’re living through a simulation of democracy? All the apparatus of democracy has been laid out before us today. The polling booths, the ballot papers, the boxes to stuff them in. But the stuff of democracy, the substance of it, feels oddly, sadly absent. We’re being canvassed, but not engaged.
This morning we witnessed BBC cant at its finest. It came in the form of an exposé of the Tory candidate Miriam Cates. This self-styled voice of conservative reason was once a trustee of a church that promoted ‘conversion therapy’ for gay people, the Beeb reports. It spares no detail. Ms Cates’ old church carried
Behold the exquisite hypocrisy of the Labour MP Dawn Butler. This is a politician who has raised the alarm over the verbal abuse received by female MPs. And yet now she’s gleefully telling anyone who will listen that she agrees with the preening luvvie David Tennant who said Kemi Badenoch should ‘shut up’ and, better
Is it still okay to ‘Punch a Nazi’? I’m asking for a friend. In fact, I’m asking for many friends who watched those violent protests outside a synagogue in Los Angeles over the weekend and wondered to themselves if that old left-wing slogan about walloping bigots still holds. If it was acceptable to punch alt-right
So now we know: nowhere is safe from the entitled fury of the Just Stop Oil mob. Not even Stonehenge. That prehistoric wonder, one of the oldest monuments of humankind, has been showered with orange powder paint by JSO’s loons. They say they want to ‘raise awareness’ of the climate crisis. All they’ve really raised
Here’s the tragedy of Diane Abbott. She entered British politics as a trailblazer for black Britons and now she leaves public life on the sour note of insulting Jewish Britons. She started out as a warrior against racism but ended up seeming to minimise racism. She devoted her political career to standing up for beleaguered
Every now and then you see an event and you think to yourself: ‘This will go down in history.’ Last night’s revolt of the Jews of London against a ‘pro-Palestine’ mob is one such event. Jews and their allies gathered at the Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley to defend its showing of a film about
This is what people must mean by the phrase ‘adults in the room’. After seven months of left-wing hotheads damning Israel as the source of every ill in the Middle East – if not the world – finally we have a cool, still voice venturing an alternative take. Perhaps, the voice says, Hamas is the
Just imagine if, following the killing of Jo Cox, some right-wing media outlet had said: ‘Well, she was a divisive figure, and very pro-Remain, so it’s not surprising something like this happened.’ We’d be horrified, right? We would have looked upon such low commentary as excuse-making for murder, as a borderline justification for an utterly
I see JK Rowling is being cruel again. Her nasty streak is off its leash. She’s bullying random people and engaging in ‘unedifying’ behaviour. What monstrous utterance has she issued this time? What fresh bigotry has spewed from her tweeting fingers? Brace yourselves: she called a man a man. Yes, hold the front page: a
A young Israeli woman warned to stay in her hotel room. A baying mob on the streets outside hollering slogans and abuse. Death threats piling up. Bodyguards working round the clock to make sure no protester gets inside to where the woman has taken refuge from their fury. I’m sorry, is this a political protest
David Cameron has got some front. The Foreign Secretary is haranguing Israel over its tragic unintentional killing of seven aid workers in Gaza, and yet he oversaw a war in which such ‘friendly fire’ horrors were commonplace. In fact, more than seven people were slain in accidental bombings under Cameron’s watch. Terrible accidents happen in
Shame on the ghouls who spread lies and rumours about the Princess of Wales. And the idiot conspiracy theorists who wondered if she might be dead or getting divorced. And the tragic social media sleuths who squealed ‘That isn’t her!’ when a video showed her shopping at a farmers’ market. And all the rest of
Remember when Irish singer Róisín Murphy was set upon by the mob last year? Her crime: she criticised puberty blockers and said we should stop dishing them out like candy to vulnerable kids. The blowback was furious. Armies of activists damned her as a transphobe, a bigot, a bitch. They pronounced her ‘over’, which is
Well done everyone for ruining Mother’s Day for the Princess of Wales. I hope you’re proud of yourselves. A young-ish mum posts a lovely photo of herself surrounded by her beaming kids and instead of saying ‘Ahh’ you pore over it like lunatic sleuths for signs of villainous photoshopping. End result: mum issues an apology.
There’s a new movement in town: Philistines for Palestine. Not content with traipsing through the streets every other weekend to holler their hatred for Israel, now ‘pro-Palestine’ activists are taking aim at art. Witness yesterday’s fevered attack on the painting of Lord Balfour at Cambridge university – an act of petulant, self-satisfied philistinism that will
I don’t understand right-wingers who spend most of their time on the internet. Often they’re found tut-tutting over what they view as the haughty refusal of Muslims to integrate into British society. And yet when it is proposed that we build a monument to the Muslims who fought with us in two world wars –
‘William: Fighting in Gaza must be brought to an end’, bellows the Daily Telegraph‘s front page today, next to an image of a distressed-looking Prince of Wales. Call me a Cromwellian, but what century are we in? I thought the days of British royals haughtily issuing moral instructions, least of all to foreigners, were behind
So Labour still has cranks in its ranks. The party remains a haven for conspiracy theorists. For all Keir Starmer’s claims to have rooted out the ‘anti-Zionist’ hotheads that swarmed the party in the Corbyn years, there still seem to be a fair few around. Consider the Azhar Ali affair. Mr Ali is the Labour
