Brendan O'Neill: For the love of God, stop the boats

It is a crime against sovereignty that hundreds of men are permitted to intrude on British soil every week.

Nine hundred and eleven. That’s how many people have illegally intruded into our country since Sunday. Just shy of a thousand foreigners, mostly blokes, sailed on to our shores and met not so much as a cough of opposition from border guards. An unresisted tide of newcomers washing upon a sleeping nation. It is intolerable. It is a grotesque insult to the hard-won liberty of this kingdom that armadas of men from distant, regressive lands are permitted to come, week after week after week. For the love of God, stop these boats.

Brendan O'Neill: Who would take up arms for Broken Britain?

A survey has found that only six per cent of Brits would fight for the nation. I hate that I understand why.

Putin will be over the moon. Caves in Iraq will echo with the laughter of whatever remains of ISIS. For a new poll has found that a measly six per cent of Britons would take up arms if we faced an ‘imminent invasion’. Armies of mad Islamists could be amassing on our beaches and just one in 17 of us would ask for a gun. ‘We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be’, said Churchill. Not anymore, we won’t.

Brendan O'Neill: It is not ‘Islamophobic’ to stand up for Jews and Western civilisation

A new report accuses me and other Spectator writers of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’. It is a grotesque lie.

I’ve had a lot of flak in my career. But I never imagined I’d be condemned for expressing horror at the parading of an emaciated Jew through the streets by a mob of anti-Semites. I never thought I would get it in the neck for using the word ‘medieval’ to describe a swarm of men who surrounded and jeered at a terrified half-starved Jewish woman. And yet here we are.

Brendan O'Neill: Andy Burnham’s shameful pandering to anti-Israel bigots

His pompous, fact-lite sermon on Gaza is a transparent effort to win back Muslim voters and the keffiyeh classes.

Here he comes, pandering Andy Burnham. The King of the North throwing out the red meat of Israelophobia to keep certain voters sweet. The incoming PM yapping piously about Israel’s possible ‘war crimes’ in a bid to win back restive Muslim voters and the keffiyeh classes who’ve abandoned Labour for the crackpot Greens. That’s what I saw in Burnham’s staggeringly pompous digital sermon on Gaza – not an act of geopolitical conviction but a masterclass in demographic toadying.

Brendan O'Neill: How Britain’s cops became the armed wing of wokeness

From arresting critics of Muhammad to mistreating white men, the police have become the enforcers of woke tyranny.

Insulting Muhammad. Criticising a local councillor. Being a white lad who gets punched in the head by a gang of black kids. In Britain in 2026, these are the ‘crimes’ that get the cops off their a***s. They might not be able to find the lowlifes who burgled your home or the gang members who groomed your daughter. But they’ll come running if you diss Islam or have a pop at a Green politician or commit the heinous sin of being white and male on a night out. Welcome to your two-tier tyranny.

Brendan O'Neill: Nigel Farage lays down the gauntlet

In triggering a by-election in Clacton, he has disarmed the media elites and empowered working-class people.

With righteous indignation, Nigel Farage has resigned today as MP for Clacton, triggering a by-election that he intends to fight. He’s giving up his seat in the hope he’ll win it back. Why?

Brendan O'Neill: The barbarism in Belfast

That crazed, savage knifing was a bloody byproduct of state failure.

Are we allowed to feel pure, cold rage yet? It’s what millions of us felt this morning as we watched footage of that barbarous assault in Belfast. However much the pleb-fearing thoughtpolice of Keir Starmer’s government might disapprove of such fury, it’s the emotion that swelled in all decent British and Irish people as they saw a brute rain stab after stab upon his sprawled, struggling victim. Good luck trying to curb the people’s rage over this act of wanton savagery.

Brendan O'Neill: We are right to feel rage over the death of Henry Nowak

The elites want to crush the working-class fury over this vile murder – don’t let them.

Are you raging over the death of Henry Nowak? Has the horror of that boy’s slaying, the lynching-like savagery of it, incensed you? Did you feel molten fury as you watched the bodycam footage of those lowlife officers dragging Henry across the harsh gravel? Were you consumed by wrath seeing this dying boy be libelled as a racist by his killer? If so, then according to the chattering classes you are tantamount to a fascist. It is you and your febrile emotions that pose the truest threat to the nation, even more so than knife-wielding scum like Vickrum Digwa.

Brendan O'Neill: The English have revolted

The Reform surge in England is more than a protest vote – it’s a people's blow against the cultural elites.

Here are some phrases I don’t want to hear today. ‘Protest vote.’ ‘The cry of the “left behind”.’ ‘A bloody nose for the establishment.’ For while it’s true that the colourless functionaries of our two-party regime will be holding their bloodied snouts today following a bruising blow from the electorate, none of those trite phrases captures the historic nature of what is happening. This is not just a ballot-box ‘screw you’ – it’s an attempted reordering of politics itself by voters with nothing left to lose.

Brendan O'Neill: The ugly truth about the cult of Palestinianism

The conviction of the Palestine Action activists confirms it: Israelophobia is a vile menace to civilised values.

So this is the movement that the queen of smug, Sally Rooney, promised to share her fat royalty cheques with. This is the movement that plummy vicars fawned over in Westminster Square with their placards saying ‘I Support Palestine Action’. A movement that counts within its ranks men content to use a 7lb sledgehammer to fracture the back of a woman. A movement so far up the fundament of its own self-righteousness that its members think nothing of raining steel blows on a woman’s spine. I would engage in some serious self-reflection if an organisation I gushed over was found to contain blokes who use weapons to crack women’s bones.

Brendan O'Neill: The glorious Irish revolt against globalist insanity

There’s nothing like a drivers’ revolt to tease out the classism of the new elites. Then Canadian PM Justin Trudeau invoked the wartime Emergencies Act against truckers who had the temerity to agitate against Covid-19 vaccine mandates. European farmers who rose up against an eco-hike in fuel taxes were furiously denounced as ‘far right’ by the gated ponces who rule over them. And now in Ireland, the cossetted moralists of Dublin 4 have been roused into a frenzy of anti-worker bigotry by that most awful of sights: farmers, truckers, cabbies and others protesting over soaring fuel prices.

Brendan O'Neill: So Iran’s civilisation is safe. Now what about the West’s?

For all his digital bluster, it isn’t Trump who threatens to unravel our civilisation – it’s his influential haters.

Imagine calling for the destruction of a civilisation. Imagine dreaming about violently scrubbing an ancient nation from the face of the Earth. Imagine flirting with the idea of obliterating a land with thousands of years of rich history. I am referring, of course, to the activist class and its annihilationist hatred for the Jewish State. For nearly three years, these people have beat the streets and swarmed the digital networks to agitate for the erasure of Israel, all the way ‘from the river to the sea’. President Trump’s juvenile bluster on Iran has nothing on their existential loathing for the Jewish homeland.

Brendan O'Neill: Anti-Trump catastrophism is the real menace to the West

The cultural elite’s dream of an American defeat in Iran scares me far more than Trump’s premature claims of victory.

Snark really is all that President Trump’s critics have left. They greet his every utterance, whether made in the flesh or on Truth Social, with instant sarcastic derision. Their cliquish cynicism was on full display during Trump’s address to the nation on the Iran War last night. No sooner had Trump said the US was nearing victory than his opposing army of nay-sayers was gleefully crowing: ‘Nah, it’s a disaster, we’re screwed.’

I can’t be the only person who now finds this voguish gloom more grating than Trump’s starry-eyed statements? Give me Trump’s possibly premature declarations of victory over these wet dreams of defeat any day of the week.

Brendan O'Neill: Islamists have been given a veto over public life

The banning of a UKIP march to appease Islamist hotheads is a scandal.

So now we know: if you want to prevent a public gathering in the UK, just threaten violence. Be menacing. Be intimidating. Let it be known, with a nod and a wink, that you will roundly kick off if those people you don’t like come anywhere near your neighbourhood.

Brendan O'Neill: Hands off Greenland!

Neither President Trump nor his EU critics understand the first thing about sovereignty.

It’s hard to say who comes out worse in the war of words over Greenland. Is it President Trump, who has flagrantly abandoned his promise to the American people to wean Washington off its vain, destructive meddling in world affairs? Or is it the leaders of Europe, who expect us to buy that they are overnight converts to the cause of sovereignty, despite having spent years ravaging sovereignty across our continent? On one side, a president whose commitment to the ideals of sovereignty turned out to be thin indeed; on the other, leaders who never had any such commitment.

Brendan O'Neill: The Orwellian madness of letting boys on to girls’ sports teams

The US Supreme Court must make the right decision and keep males out of female sports.

If any kid in the future asks me how nuts things were in the 21st century, I’ll tell them Sharron Davies once had to go to Washington, DC to explain what a woman is. Yes, a British Olympian, one of our national treasures, had to fly 3,700 miles to remind the world that people with penises are men. There she was, on the steps of the US Supreme Court, telling a crowd that people who’ve been through male puberty – ie, blokes – should not play in women’s sports. What a time to be alive!

Brendan O'Neill: 7 October was the biggest mistake Iran ever made

The Iranian regime thought it signed Israel’s death warrant on 7 October 2023 – in fact, it may have signed its own.

‘The Zionist regime is melting before the eyes of the world’, gloated Ayatollah Khamenei in the aftermath of Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. His giddy foretelling of the death of the Jewish nation was echoed across the realm of Israelophobia. Israel’s downfall ‘is a matter of when, not if’, said the Islamo-loons of 5 Pillars. Leftist hotheads agreed that the invasion of Israel by Iran’s proxies sounded the death knell for ‘the Zionist project’.

Brendan O'Neill: Marine Le Pen is right about Venezuela

Why did it take a former far-right leader to spell out the danger of Trump’s intervention?


Here’s a sentence I never thought I would write – people should listen to Marine Le Pen. She might not be your cup of tea. She isn’t mine. Yet she has hands-down made the clearest, most principled comment on Washington’s venture in Venezuela. Slicing through both the hypocritical hysteria of the Maduro-sympathising left and the infantile gloating of MAGA influencers who’ve learnt to love war again, Le Pen reminds us what is at stake in this strange geopolitical blaze: the future of sovereignty itself.

Brendan O'Neill: Trump’s gunboat diplomacy is a betrayal of populism

His regime-change crusade against Nicolas Maduro is dangerous for Venezuela and for America itself.

So regime change is back? Having for years mocked the wasteful, lethal Clinton-Bush-Obama crusades against states they hated, now President Trump has carried out a regime decapitation of his own. Having installed as his director of national intelligence one of the most stinging critics of regime-change wars – Tulsi Gabbard – now Trump launches not quite a regime-change war but certainly a regime-change strike. Having said MAGA would end these ruinous excursions and prioritise the needs of the American working class, now Trump goes south and does what so many administrations before his did: topples a Latin American dictator.

Brendan O'Neill: The hatred for the Jewish State is endangering the Jewish people

After Bondi, we can deny it no longer – bourgeois Israelophobia has aided and abetted a lethal new violence.

Let me get this right – we’re expected to believe it is entirely coincidental that there has been a spike in anti-Jewish violence at the exact same time as hatred for the Jewish State has soared? We’re meant to think there is no connection whatsoever between today’s frothing bourgeois animus for the Jewish nation and the rise in disdain for the Jewish people? You’re telling us the targeting of Jews in the West is wholly unrelated to the Western elites’ ceaseless damning of the Jewish homeland as a uniquely barbarous entity?