Who is the Guardian to call spiked ‘hard right’?

The Guardian – the conscience of illiberal-liberal Britain; the bible of Belsize Park – seems to have it in for spiked.

The antagonism is very much mutual. Still, when we attack the Guardian – for its bourgeois elitism, for its obnoxious identity politics, for its misanthropic greenism – we don’t just make stuff up about it, or baselessly smear it, or blithely libel it.

The same cannot be said for Guardian writers’ periodic attacks on us in recent years. A few weeks ago, it slurred us as a ‘“hard-right” populist magazine’, in a deranged hit piece about spiked contributor, author and comedian Andrew Doyle.

‘Hard right’ is apparently now Guardian house style when it comes to writing about spiked. ‘Hard-right website’, sneered one of its columnists in 2019. Mad old George Monbiot thinks we are the ‘hard right’ mouthpiece of American billionaires, because we once gladly partnered with a US libertarian foundation to organise a series of events on university campuses, about freedom of speech – a value that has hardly been beloved by right-wing extremists historically.

Because, let’s be clear, that’s what they mean when they call us ‘hard right’. That we’re right-wing extremists. Fascist-adjacent. Spewers of bigotry. It’s a smear, and they know it. Either that, or they’ve never bothered to actually read us, which given the notorious sloppiness of the Grauniad – so-nicknamed because of its notorious typos – cannot be ruled out, I suppose.

Had they read us, they’d know that our two great causes are free speech and democracy, which we see as fundamentally progressive values; as the inheritance of the radical, working-class struggle for suffrage and fundamental rights. Apparently, that makes us right-wing nutcases. We’re also pro-choice and anti-monarchy. We’ve long argued for a generous, but sane, migration policy. (Quick, someone refer us to Prevent.)

When we rail against the orthodoxies of today’s supposed liberals and progressives, we do so because we believe them to be deeply illiberal and regressive. We are critics of environmentalism because it immiserates the poor to salve the consciences of the elites. We loathe woke identity politics because it is resuscitating racial thinking in the name of ‘anti-racism’.

If we are right-wing extremists, we also have an odd habit of trenchantly opposing right-wing extremists. When the ‘alt-right’ kicked off, we called out the ‘pond-scum racism’ of those Very Online dickheads. When racist riots gripped England this past summer, we lamented the ‘grotesque rise of white identity politics’ and blasted those making excuses for it.

We are populists. We see the electoral revolt against technocracy as a hugely welcome development, with tremendous potential to democratise politics. But we’re never shy about criticising the more harebrained players – right, left or otherwise – vying for the populist crown. When Donald Trump and his more conspiratorial cronies tried to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, we slammed it as a ‘clown show’ that made a ‘mockery of democracy’.

So no, spiked is not ‘hard right’. And to be honest, I take particular exception to being accused of running a reactionary publication by the fucking Guardian. Indeed, one could easily argue that the Guardian much better fits the traditional definition of ‘hard right’, given the positions it has taken in recent years and its alarmingly high tolerance for bigotries and prejudices of various kinds.

Opposition to democracy, a belief in a rigid social hierarchy in which the elites lord it over their supposed moral inferiors – that has long been a staple of hard-right thought. And it’s also arguably a neat summation of Guardianistas’ worldview, if their spluttering response to Britain’s decision to leave the European Union was anything to go by.

I know they still can’t get this through their thick skulls, but metropolitan liberals’ response to the Brexit referendum was shameful – arguably, the most elitist, anti-democratic spasm this nation has experienced since ordinary people won the vote. The biggest democratic mandate in our history was dismissed as mad, bad and illegitimate, and the great and good pontificated openly in public about how best to thwart it.

No more so than in the pages of the Guardian. Its leader column staked out a somewhat convoluted anti-Brexit position, variously calling for a ‘soft’ Brexit (ie, not Brexit), or citizens’ assemblies to ‘resolve Brexit’, rather than just – you know – implementing Brexit. Many of its top contributors, meanwhile, went balls out, shrilly calling for Brexit to be stopped, in spite of the tremendous damage this would do to democracy. All pretty extreme in my book.

Then there were the trans wars – and the witch-hunting of left-wing women for the crime of defending sex-based rights. The Guardian became a key arena in this. Columnist Suzanne Moore resigned from the Guardian in 2020, following a years-long internal hate campaign against her, waged by lunatics who think commentary like ‘you either protect women’s rights as sex-based or you don’t protect them at all’ were evidence of her ‘sickening transphobia’. Hundreds of Moore’s colleagues went into open revolt because she had the temerity to suggest that men probably shouldn’t be able to use women’s toilets or rape-crisis centres. Unwitting or not, this campaign against Moore and feminists like her amounted to putrid misogyny – and Guardian higher-ups failed to stare it down.

The paper’s actual reporting on trans issues has been a horror show as well. Remember the Wi Spa scandal? In 2021, a woman went viral for confronting staff at a Korean spa in Los Angeles, demanding to know why a man was parading his semi-erect penis around the women’s changing rooms. Guardian reports cast doubt on the woman’s claims, presenting her as a religious nut and repeating baseless speculation that it might have all been ‘staged’. Not only did the story turn out to be true, the alleged flasher in question also turned out to have two prior convictions for indecent exposure.

Do you know what the ‘hard right’ has also been known for historically? Anti-Semitism. An alarming amount of which has crept in to the Guardian’s cartoon section in recent years – from a cartoon of Benjamin Netanyahu puppeteering British politicians, a repackaging of the age-old caricature of Jews manipulating world affairs; to a cartoon of Jewish former BBC chairman Richard Sharp carrying a Goldman Sachs box full of coins and a puppet of Rishi Sunak.

The Guardian apologised, for the Sharp one at least. The cartoonist himself admitted it was anti-Semitic, saying it was unintentional. But how does this keep happening? I don’t expect plaudits for saying that we at spiked have never published an anti-Semitic cartoon. It’s really not that difficult. (Incidentally, restaurant critic Jay Rayner – who used to write for sister paper the Observer – recently accused Guardian editor Kath Viner of failing to root out anti-Semites on her staff.)

So, in sum, it takes some brass neck for the Guardian to accuse spiked of being ‘hard right’. There’s only one publication here that has called for democratic votes to be subverted; that has been accused by its own former columnists and allies of harbouring both misogynists and anti-Semites; that publishes cartoons that wouldn’t look out of place in Der Stürmer. And it ain’t us.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater

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