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Duleep Allirajah
Kick Jesus Christ
Out Of Football!
It's a progressive sign when predominantly white football fans boo off God-bothering rappers not because they are black but because they are crap.
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Neil Davenport
Raising a glass of chilled red to Abigail's Party
Thirty years after its TV premiere, Mike Leigh's dark comedy about frustrated aspirations in suburbia feels fresher than ever.
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Rob Lyons
...bacon?
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Brendan O’Neill
One million new foreign workers? Three cheers!
Down with the ‘cohesion killjoys’ who claim that mass immigration to Britain is causing social breakdown and environmental pollution.
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| Friday 2 November 2007 |
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Mick Hume
Ex-ter-min-ate: Malthus meets the Daleks
The overpopulation obsession, house priceszzz and Heather Mills: read Mick Hume's columns in The Times (London) this week.
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Patrick West
Heather Mills and the nutty Beatles
Heather's weird behaviour stems not from her separation from Paul, but from her attachment to him (and his wacky hippy outlook) in the first place.
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Ethan Greenhart
Is it ethical to have a bonfire?
Our ethical columnist on why celebrating Bonfire Night will only reduce the planet to ashes.
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Sean Collins
Duke lacrosse scandal:
the dangers of PC
A disturbing new book reveals how political correctness led to a disastrous rush to judgement in an American university 'rape case'.
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| Monday 5 November 2007 |
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David Clements
Bricks, mortar and social engineering
The authorities built more houses in the Depressed 1930s than New Labour is planning to build today. Britain's housing crisis is built on a failure of political imagination.
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James Heartfield
Fifteen myths about the housing crisis
Government slothfulness, combined with the green lobby's snobbery towards the masses and their 'ugly houses', is the cause of Britain's shocking homes shortfall.
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James Woudhuysen
Brown's 'get fit' towns:
Kim Jong-il would be proud
With its new towns that will force people to keep fit, New Labour is pushing an authoritarian health agenda that will be the envy of tinpot dictators.
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| Tuesday 6 November 2007 |
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Brendan O’Neill
spiked needs £10,000:
here's how you can help
We're the online magazine dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity – but in order to do so, we need to raise money, too.
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David Chandler
What about democracy for Bosnia?
Western commentators fret about dictatorships in Burma and Pakistan yet turn a blind eye to the EU's colonial rule in 'over-emotional' Bosnia.
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Frank Furedi
Are ‘terrorist groomers’ warping our kids?
In turning terrorism into a child protection issue, where we must shield fragile youth from sleazy al-Qaeda, Britain has abandoned the battle of ideas.
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| Wednesday 7 November 2007 |
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Basham and Luik
Flabby claims about
food and cancer
A widely publicised report says that having a 'spare tyre' and consuming anything from bacon to milkshakes could increase your risk of cancer. Fat chance.
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Chris Bickerton
Zoe’s ark: the dangers of ‘DIY humanitarianism’
The 'kidnap' scandal involving a French charity in Chad is a product of the reckless self-righteousness of humanitarian interventionism.
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Mick Hume
The New Heresies
In today's You Can't Say That culture, it's those with reactionary views on race or religion who are censored. But fighting for free speech still matters.
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| Thursday 8 November 2007 |
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Emily Hill
A boozy attack on working-class mums
New claims that drinking while pregnant and bottle-feeding are bad for baby provide another excuse to bash 'bad mothers'.
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Frank Furedi
Finnish school shooting: self-loathing goes global
In declaring ‘war against humanity’, might 18-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen have been doing his bit to save the planet?
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Jennie Bristow
Rule 6: There is no right way to ‘Bring Up Baby’
The tantrums generated by the Channel 4 series Bringing Up Baby exposes our screamingly unhealthy obsession with parenting methods.
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| Friday 9 November 2007 |
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Mick Hume
Poofs, pikeys and Enoch Powell
Read Mick Hume's columns on free speech in The Times (London).
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Patrick West
YouTube vs television
The Finnish school murderer's ‘massacre manifesto’ has caused new panics about the video-sharing site, but it won't finish off humanity – or TV.
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Ethan Greenhart
Is it ethical to eat chocolate?
Our ethical columnist explains why chocolate is an eco-disaster - and the dangers of pleasure.
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Duleep Allirajah
The rights of the message-board moaner
A judge has ruled that Sheffield Wednesday fans making scurrilous remarks online have no right to anonymity. That's bad news for free speech.
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Nathalie Rothschild
The Counterfeiters:
a genuinely gripping tale
Stefan Ruzowitzky's film avoids the sentimentality, shock tactics and morality lessons that characterise so many Holocaust movies.
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Mick Hume
Ten days that shook the world
On the ninetieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, journalist John Reed's pulsating first-hand account still packs a punch.
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| Monday 12 November 2007 |
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Brendan O’Neill
Statue of limitations
Why I’m glad to see the back of Alison Lapper Pregnant, a colossal statue that embodied the new British elite’s contempt for the public.
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Rob Lyons
A fit of peak
The doom-laden vision of a post-oil world put forward in a radical new documentary is as crude as the black stuff that gushes from the ground.
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Frank Furedi
From Finland to west London: a culture of death?
The Finnish school shooter and Britain’s ‘Lyrical Terrorist’ seem worlds apart. Yet both are products of the globalisation of misanthropy.
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| Tuesday 13 November 2007 |
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William Whitehead
Praise the Lord, fire the Pastor!
There's one thing Jesus doesn't warn you about when he calls you to the church: job insecurity.
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Paul Driessen
It's time for all-out war on malaria
Bed-nets are not going to be enough if we're serious about eradicating a disease that kills a million Africans a year.
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Patrick Basham and John Luik
...being fat?
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Mick Hume
States of emergency
General Musharraf’s crackdown on ‘uncertainty’ in Pakistan is another product of the West’s unravelling ‘war on terror’.
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| Wednesday 14 November 2007 |
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Nathalie Rothschild
Coffee, tea... eco-guilt?
Virgin Atlantic's attempt to shame its passengers into onboard eco-penance is the latest flight of fancy from a guilt-ridden aviation industry.
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Emily Hill
Burning down the house
The Arsonists at London's Royal Court Theatre is a firecracker of a play, and provides the sparks for serious debate on nihilism and its apologists.
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Helene Guldberg
A playground tumble can do you good
More experts recognise that a scraped knee can be a positive experience for a child. Let's hope they now relax about other 'dangers' in kids' lives.
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| Thursday 15 November 2007 |
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Bill Durodié
Gordon Brown's state of terror
The UK prime minister's vision for counterterrorism would involve reorganising the whole of society around precaution and fear.
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Daniel Ben-Ami
Workers of the world, disunited?
Globalisation has not set Asian workers inexorably against Western workers. In fact, we have a truly global working class for the first time ever.
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Brendan O’Neill
London’s PC despot
In the name of combating 'Islamophobia', Ken Livingstone has launched an attack on press freedom that reveals his fear of the public.
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| Friday 16 November 2007 |
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Mick Hume
So was JS Mill just an illiberal liberal too?
The ‘steward state’ and the jailing of an 80-year old monk - read Mick Hume’s columns in The Times (London).
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Ethan Greenhart
Is it ethical to use medicine?
Got a cold? Only natural remedies will do, say our ethical columnist.
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Duleep Allirajah
'Obscene' wages for all!
Ignore the chav-bashing moralists with a snobby aversion to trophy wives and Mock Tudor homes - it's great that footballers are being paid £150,000 a week.
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Patrick West
Postmodern advertising? Don't buy it
From the slap-happy Tango man to Cadbury’s drumming gorilla, Patrick West finds today's smug and mysterious TV ads a turn-off.
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Neil Davenport
Capitalism in ‘ruthless profit-making’ shock!
Far from being big and bold, Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine is naive about capitalism and cagey about the future development of society.
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| Monday 19 November 2007 |
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Editor
Sensitive Spanish royals, avert your eyes
In solidarity with two cartoonists who were convicted of ‘vilifying’ the Crown Prince of Spain, and fined 3,000 Euros each, spiked republishes their cartoon.
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Lee Jones
The grinch who stole Christmas cards
Primary school pupils in Wales have been banned from exchanging cards in the name of saving the planet and its ‘wretched’ Africans.
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Rob Lyons
IPCC: separating fact from fright
Today’s alarmist claims about the planet ‘spinning into a troubling void’ are not backed up by the findings of the latest IPCC report.
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| Tuesday 20 November 2007 |
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James Panton
Giving thanks to America this Thanksgiving
Microsoft, fast food, the First Amendment, the Second Amendment (the one on bearing arms): should we be grateful to the US for these things?
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| Wednesday 21 November 2007 |
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Leah Simpson
...Stella Artois?
The opprobrium attached to Britain's favourite lager is just another excuse to have a go at working-class men.
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Emily Hill
Banality, insecurity, snobbery?
The UK government's idea to create a 'national statement', or even a motto, about being British has been met with derision - and class hatred.
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Nathalie Rothschild
Slamming the lid on free expression
With its ban on a bathroom ad and its warnings about 'violent ads', the UK advertising watchdog is reinforcing the tyranny of the prudish minority.
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Mick Hume
Brown loses it in The Mail
The prime minister’s media groupies are now turning on him like lovers scorned. Hate to say we told you so...
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| Thursday 22 November 2007 |
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Alan Miller
Mailer and the Almighty
Norman Mailer was a master of provocation, even if many of his thoughts - including those in his final book on God - were plain silly.
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Julian Petley
What's wrong with censuring journalists?
A contributor to Ken Livingstone's report on Islamophobia in the press responds to spiked editor Brendan O'Neill's criticisms.
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Munira Mirza
Is modern art a left-wing conspiracy?
Munira Mirza picks apart the idea that all of Britain's arts bodies are stacked with pinkos generating propaganda for liberal causes.
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Brendan O’Neill
After 'Discgate': what now for liberty?
Ridiculing New Labour's incompetence is not a good enough argument against ID cards and the rest of its illiberal snooping into our private lives.
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| Friday 23 November 2007 |
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Mick Hume
Defend the privacy of bike-sexuals!
The right to 'saddle up' and the tyranny of men in white coats - read Mick Hume's columns in The Times (London).
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Duleep Allirajah
In praise of
'Carlos Kickaball'
There aren't 'too many foreigners' in British football. In fact, they should be commended for coming over here, taking our jobs and scoring our goals.
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Patrick West
From Fanny Cradock
to Cookery Porn
Once, statist chefs instructed the nation on how to boil an egg - now Nigella Lawson raises our temperatures with her finger-licking antics.
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Ethan Greenhart
Is it ethical to force people to be green?
Our ethical columnist explains what we really need to do to stop climate change.
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Frank Furedi
Is Israel the organ-grinder?
Yes, the war in Iraq was not in America's national interest - but Walt and Mearsheimer are way off the mark to claim that Israel orchestrated it.
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| Monday 26 November 2007 |
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Richard Reynolds
Just say no to
‘No Platform’
A student at the University of East Anglia strikes a blow for free speech against the NUS's censorious policies.
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TV-debate
Why I invited Griffin
and Irving
Luke Tryl, president of the Oxford Union, discusses free speech and extremism with spiked editor Brendan O’Neill.
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Frank Furedi
Censorship
The shrill opposition to tonight’s Oxford Union debate involving Nick Griffin and David Irving is part of today’s moral rehabilitation of censorship.
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| Tuesday 27 November 2007 |
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Nathalie Rothschild
A brick of a film
Sarah Gavron's adaptation of Monica Ali's Brick Lane studiously avoids stoking controversy and offers only sloppy stereotypes instead.
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Guy Rundle
The Rudd to nowhere
What the victory of Kevin Rudd's Labor Party in Australia reveals about John Howard, the Culture Wars and the state of contemporary electoral politics.
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Mick Hume
Where Blair had God,
Brown has only Branson
Not fit for purpose? No, this government is in permanent crisis because it has no idea what its purpose might be.
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| Wednesday 28 November 2007 |
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Martyn Perks
Tracing the history
of Helvetica
A film about a font?! Yes, and it's gripping, too, showing how a sleek typeface has encouraged good design and helped to shape big ideas.
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Stuart Derbyshire
Sticking a needle in alternative medicine
Exotic therapies such as acupuncture might make people feel good. But the role of medicine is to cure patients' illnesses, not make them happy.
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Rob Lyons
Lack of development:
that's the real disaster
An Oxfam report suggests climate change has led to a quadrupling of weather-related disasters. It pays to interrogate such heated claims.
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| Thursday 29 November 2007 |
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Shirley Dent
William Blake: ‘rational and inspired’
William Blake had flaws. But 250 years after his birth, his humanist ambition is still - like his Tyger - ‘burning bright’.
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Tim Black
Christine Ohuruogu: sporting hero or villain?
In the Kafkaesque world of athletics drug-testing, admirable world champions like British runner Ohuruogu will always be tainted with suspicion.
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Patrick West
Let's declare jihad against Motty
One good thing about England's loss to Croatia: it will be a hell of a lot easier to avoid John Motson, the most irritating man on the box, in the next year.
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Brendan O’Neill
In Britain, heretics get a metaphorical lashing
The Sudanese 'teddy bear affair' is bizarre. But it’s not a million miles from Britain’s own policing of morality, speech and thought.
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| Friday 30 November 2007 |
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Rob Killick
On the futility of extracting fact from fiction
Philip Roth has always intertwined biographical details in his fiction. Yet his latest novel is a polemic against those who judge a work of art through the artist’s personal life.
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Raymond Tallis
Art, humanity and
the ‘fourth hunger’
Half-awakened, humans are constantly engaged in a battle to make sense of the world and our experiences within it. And a great work of art, especially music, helps us to do just that.
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Stuart Derbyshire
A brainless analysis of American politics
Drew Westen’s attempt to explain voting patterns in America by examining the nerve activity in voters’ brains is light on political insight and heavy on Yank-bashing.
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Nancy McDermott
Is stay-at-home motherhood only ‘half a life’?
Two new books implore women to ‘get to work!’ instead of staying home as dish-cleaning, hands-on mums. But it will take more than slating women’s personal choices to change women’s social roles.
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Sean Collins
Seeing through the dogma of ‘transparency’
Learning more about what goes on behind closed doors won't solve the social and political problems that face us. In fact, the obsession with disclosure only reinforces distrust in society.
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Michael Cook
Who’s the miserabilist
of them all?
There is stiff competition these days for the title of ‘Biggest Misanthrope’. But with his ‘pro-death’ book on why it is better never to have been born, David Benatar pips the rest to the post.
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Frank Furedi
Humanitarianism: the antithesis of humanism
Western foreign policy since the end of the Cold War has been driven by a desperate quest for purpose. It is the pursuit of political crisis management by other means.
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Brendan O’Neill
‘The war on terror is a symmetry of confusion’
Frank Furedi, author of Invitation to Terror: The Expanding Empire of the Unknown, talks to Brendan O’Neill about al-Qaeda, radicalisation, and what today’s political crisis has in common with the fall of Rome.
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Dolan Cummings
Remembering the
Reign of Terror
Robespierre is today depicted as a sexless fanatic who invented modern terrorism. His own words reveal he was a fearless critic of tradition and incorruptibly committed to liberty: a million miles from today’s webcam jihadists.
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