Our best articles of 2024

spiked’s end-of-year coverage gets underway today, with this typically brilliant piece by Lionel Shriver on whether wokeness really is in the rear-view mirror. Stay tuned for more fantastic articles over Christmas and New Year, reflecting on the good, the bad and the batshit of the past 12 months.

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As a reminder of the trailblazing, polemical prose that your donations make possible, here’s a roundup of some of my favourite spiked pieces of 2024, in no particular order, and almost certainly with some glaring, unforgivable, but totally unintentional, omissions.

Let’s start with our most popular article of the year, Joel Kotkin’s ‘The crumbling of the Democratic empire’, where he picks through the rubble of Kamala Harris’s historic electoral defeat with gusto. Since joining our columnist roster in 2021, Joel, writing at the intersection of politics, economics, climate and the culture war, has quickly become one of our most widely read and incisive contributors.

This year we were also delighted to have Batya Ungar-Sargon, one of America’s most insightful and class-conscious writers, join us as a spiked columnist. Revisit her piece on the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, and how liberals turned him into both a target and martyr.

Once you’ve read Lionel’s end-of-year piece, you should also revisit her withering essay from April on why a risk-free life isn’t worth living, lamenting Rishi Sunak’s insane and illiberal plan to gradually prohibit smoking, which the even-more-miserable Labour Party is now happily implementing in government.

Matt Ridley is another journalistic legend who we are delighted to call a regular contributor. I know I’m biased, but his long-read on the Covid lab leak and its cover up is the best, most comprehensive article on that world-historical scandal. Speaking of legends, here’s my favourite Julie Burchill spiked column from this year, on the insufferable rise of awareness-raising days.

As you may have heard, Graham Linehan and Andrew Doyle – two great comedy minds and towering figures in the British culture war – are off to America to work on comedy projects with Rob Schneider. The UK’s loss is the US’s enormous gain. But we’ll always have their spiked articles. Read Graham on Keir Starmer’s slipperiness on trans and Andrew on why it’s time for gay people to turn their backs on Pride.

In October, we were thrilled to publish After the Pogrom, spiked chief political writer Brendan O’Neill’s landmark book on 7 October, anti-Semitism and the crisis of civilisation. (Get your copy if you haven’t already.) Here’s a fantastic excerpt, ‘Jewish Lives Matter’.

spiked’s own Mick Hume has also written powerfully for us this year about Israel and its war against barbarism. Here’s one such piece, doing what Mick does best: cutting to the heart of the matter with style and aplomb.

While we’re still on Israel, these articles are also not to be missed: Jake Wallis Simons on why Israel is not a ‘settler colonial’ project; Daniel Ben-Ami on the killing of Hassan Nasrallah; and Rob Killick’s despatch from the Jewish State.

Frank Furedi is always essential reading on populism and the culture war. This piece on Irish voters’ revolt against wokeness, in the ‘family and care’ referendums, was a personal favourite of mine. Also on Ireland, don’t miss Ella Whelan on the Irish asylum crisis and Ian O’Doherty on how Sinn Féin became a party of the establishment.

Is our collective gender derangement finally abating? We all hope so. But until it actually, finally, disappears you know you can read the sharpest, bravest and best informed writers on this topic on spiked. Here’s Jo Bartosch’s long-read on the long road to the Cass Review, Gareth Roberts on the mean boys of trans activism, Meghan Murphy on Canada’s trans Stasi, Gillian Philip on her cancellation for backing JK Rowling, and Malcolm Clark on Jaguar’s ‘queer’ makeover.

The identitarian corruption of our institutions goes well beyond the trans issue, of course. Here’s an eye-opening piece by Cory Franklin on how identity politics has infected the hard sciences and one by Stephen Knight on the nonsense of ‘indigenous ways of knowing’.

As free-speech absolutists, we at spiked were kept depressingly busy this year, defending our most fundamental liberty from a relentless onslaught of state censorship. Read Toby Young on how even kids are being turned into thoughtcriminals now, Norman Lewis on the EU’s censorship machine and Alaa al-Ameri on why banning ‘Islamophobia’ would harm Muslims the most. This essay on how Britain became a world leader in ‘hate speech’ laws isn’t bad, either.

Another depressingly predictable feature of this year has been the onward march of anti-Semitism, dolled up as opposition to Israel. Read the great Wendy Kaminer on the Columbia encampments and Heather Mac Donald on why Biden could never be trusted to confront Jew hatred.

The riots that erupted across England last summer exposed all manner of social ills, first and foremost a white identity politics that has been curdling online and off for some time. Inaya Folarin Iman’s piece on the grotesque rise of the ‘Very Online right’ is essential reading. As is Obadiah Mbatang’s piece from last month, blasting the race-obsessed right-wing creeps who have it in for Kemi Badenoch.

It might not have felt like it at the time, as Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer performed with all the charisma of a bank manager and a head teacher respectively, but this year’s UK General Election really was historic, all but laying waste to the supposed natural party of government. We were thrilled to publish historian Robert Tombs’s essay at the time, reflecting on the last Tory rout of 1906.

As bad as things were before the election, since the election it has become abundantly clear that things really can get worse under Labour. Here’s spiked deputy editor Fraser Myers on the eco-madness of Ed Miliband and Kevin Yuill on Labour’s horrifying ‘assisted dying’ law.

And while we prepare for the Miliband blackouts, here are a few pieces on the cult of greenism to expose what a thoroughly regressive ideology it is: James Woudhuysen on why Net Zero is a war on the working class, Iain Macwhirter on the lunacy of the Scottish Green Party, and Phil Mullan on why Karl Marx was not an eco-warrior.

Other grim moments in British life this year included the attempt to turn the gangster Chris Kaba into Britain’s George Floyd, as legal eagle Luke Gittos wrote about at the time, and the acid attack in south London, committed by an Afghan sex offender who was granted asylum despite being a clear danger to women. Rakib Ehsan wrote a sobering piece on that particular moral horror show.

The British appetite for hysteria was well-fed this year. Check out Joanna Williams on the Gregg Wallace scandal, which, while serious, hardly warranted days of rolling-news coverage and the cancellation of already-filmed episodes of MasterChef, for fear they might ‘trigger’ people. Candice Holdsworth wrote about the crazy Kirstie Allsopp scandal, where the house-hunting TV star was reported to social services for allowing her 15-year-old son to go interrailing.

While the UK election might have been a snoozefest, the US election was anything but. I think Sean Collins put it best when he said the stunning re-election of Donald Trump was ‘the biggest “fuck you” in American history’. Other great pieces from the campaign included Jenny Holland on the McDonald’s stunt, Wilfred Reilly on Trump’s rainbow coalition and self-identified metropolitan liberal Nick Tyrone on why his fellow metropolitan liberals are to blame for Trump’s rise.

In the run-up to the election, I also loved Daniel McCarthy’s piece on JD Vance and Ann Furedi on what Republicans get wrong about abortion.

We also published a lot of sharp cultural criticism this year, including Simon Evans’s sparkling tribute to Galton and Simpson, the writers behind Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe and Son; Maren Thom and Alex Dale’s piece on Wolf Hall and ‘virtue-tainment’; and perhaps our most controversial, divisive article of the year – ‘Swifties need to grow up’, by our very own Lauren Smith.

The same goes for our international coverage. If you missed Tim Black’s magisterial long-read on the Kurds’ fight for freedom, you can correct that oversight now. We also had Mary Dejevsky on Alexei Navalny, Jacob Reynolds on the Romanian elections and Sabine Beppler-Spahl on the Islamist stabbing in Mannheim and its perverse fallout – to name but a few.

I could go on forever. But other must-reads that must get a mention here are Neil Davenport on the crucial importance of the pub, Hugo Timms on why smoking is becoming cool again, Ian Acheson on how terrorist Usman Khan slipped through the state’s net, Christopher Snowdon on Lucy Letby trutherism, Patrick West on how politics was colonised by bores, Andrew Orlowski on why AI keeps getting dumber, Thomas Osborne on Labour’s woeful governance of Wales, and Michael Collins on the awfulness of Sadiq Khan.

So, once you’ve dutifully read all of those, please consider making a donation to our Christmas appeal. It’s your donations that allow us to produce our top-quality articles, essays, videos and podcasts. Thank you for your generosity. And thank you to all of our wonderful writers, who I can’t wait to read more from next year.

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