spiked: 25 years of kicking against the pricks

spiked celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. That’s a quarter of a century of ‘puncturing all manner of ideological balloons’, as the New York Times once put it. A quarter of a century of defending democracy and freedom against all comers. And a quarter of a century of kicking against the pricks – and there have been a lot of those.

spiked has come a long way in that time. It was born in the spring of 2000, in the trenches of the free-speech wars. At the time, LM – the punchy, counter-cultural successor to Living Marxism – was being sued for libel by ITN. Its courageous editor, Mick Hume, and his staff fought back. But, as defendants in English libel trials usually do, they lost. Duly bankrupted by legal fees and costs, LM was forced to close at the beginning of March.

LM’s supporters urged Hume to carry on. But things looked bleak, given the financial hole the trial had left. That was until, as Hume recalls, someone came up with a bright idea – ‘designing a website for nothing, or next to nothing’.

Few would think it an outlandish suggestion today. But back then, it seemed crazy. This was the year 2000. Mass-market smartphones and tablets were barely a glint in Steve Jobs’ eye. ‘No newspaper or magazine was only online’, recalls Brendan O’Neill, spiked’s editor from 2007 to 2021. spiked became the UK’s first online-online current affairs and commentary magazine, launched by Hume, who became our first editor, along with his team, including O’Neill and deputy editor Jennie Bristow.

There was a lot of debate at the time about what to call this new venture. ‘It was my wife, Ginny, who came up with the name “spiked”’, says Hume. The term refers to the journalistic tradition of ‘spiking’ stories that weren’t going to be published. ‘You would stick an old paper story on a nail on the editor’s desk, meaning it’s “spiked”, it’s dead’, he explains. ‘So the idea was we were going to publish things that others wouldn’t. We were going to tell the other side of the story. But it also had a “spikiness” about it… We aren’t just reporting the news, we are fighting a battle here.’

Hume and his team set about turning spiked from a risky idea into an exciting reality. Key to this effort was the late, great Helene Guldberg, who tragically died of cancer in 2022. As managing editor during the 2000s, she worked around the clock to develop a financing model for spiked – a role performed today with aplomb by managing editor Viv Regan.

The critics scoffed. Few thought it would last, especially against the backdrop of the dot-com crash. US tech magazine Wired struck a downbeat note on spiked’s launch, claiming Hume had ‘unveiled spiked at a time when most new-media companies are struggling to survive… it’s unclear how long spiked can stay afloat’.

spiked did more than just stay afloat, of course. It flourished. Its views resonated. And its arguments helped to shape public debate. ‘It proved to a lot of people that it can be done’, says O’Neill. ‘That you can punch above your weight, you can make an impact on the world, an impact on public debate and impact on people’s minds – just through the internet.’

Most importantly, spiked had something to say that people wanted to hear, as well as the balls to say it. It cut against the elite ‘consensus’ on every issue from climate change to the European Union. And it was guided – as it still is – by certain fundamental principles, from an unwavering belief in humanity to a fierce commitment to freedom of speech.

‘If you don’t have the freedom to argue, to report and argue for the truth as you believe it, then you’ve got no chance of achieving anything’, says Hume. ‘Free speech is a lifeblood issue.’ As current editor Tom Slater puts it: ‘Free speech is not just about the freedom to take a view on events, or to say your piece… It’s about having the capacity to transform the world around you, to persuade people, to change minds. It’s a really radical phenomenon.’

Slater recalls the first time he came across spiked as a teenager: ‘You realise there’s nothing else like it. People like Mick and Brendan are great editors, but they are also brilliant writers, as are all of our other contributors… spiked has always been irreverent, principled, but also very funny.’

Under Hume’s editorship, spiked took on the petty authoritarianism of New Labour, while getting to grips with a world remade by 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’. Contributors ruthlessly criticised the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. But they also took on the leftists who painted al-Qaeda’s Islamist barbarism as a righteous blow against the West. ‘We fell out with virtually everybody on the left over 9/11’, recalls Hume. ‘We insisted on taking the view that this was not resistance to imperialism or something – it was nihilistic, anti-Western terrorism that demonstrated a real sickness at the heart of our society.’

It was a far-sighted critique that anticipated today’s unholy alliance of Islamists and decadent, anti-Western leftists. But then spiked has consistently been ahead of the political curve. As Slater has it, ‘we put a lot of issues on the map before they were on the map’.

Long before Net Zero was even dreamt up by deranged greens, spiked was taking on the regressive, impoverishing implications of environmentalism. We challenged its misanthropic view of humanity as a plague on the planet and its assault on industry and development.

spiked has also always been staunchly Eurosceptic, coining the slogan, ‘For Europe, against the EU’. ‘It was an important distinction’, says Hume: ‘being internationalists but at the same time being for national sovereignty, and against the idea of a superstate which was then being created in Brussels’.

It was a position that was to stand spiked in good stead over a decade later, when the British public were finally given the chance to have their say on membership of the EU.

The formidable Brendan O’Neill took hold of the editorial reins in 2007. At that point, Brexit was still a decade away. But even then, spiked could see the populist revolt brewing, following the financial crisis in 2008, the imposition of EU integration, and the European debt crisis, leading to the economic waterboarding of Greece.

From the start, spiked knew what was at stake. We saw the nascent democratic uprising as an attempt on the part of vast swathes of the public to re-assert themselves and their views in the face of our increasingly dismissive and aloof political and media classes. spiked was a champion of Brexit before and after the 2016 referendum. As O’Neill puts it: ‘We were at the forefront of making the case not only for Brexit, but also, by extension, for democracy itself.’

Democracy has always been central to spiked’s political worldview, owing to a deep faith in the wisdom of ordinary people and a deep suspicion of the establishment. ‘It is the great bulwark’, says Slater. ‘It’s the great defence against the hysteria of the elites, who claim to know everything, who claim to have the right idea about where society should be, and yet have proven themselves to be batshit crazy time and time again.’

spiked has also been at the forefront of tackling the new censorship, which arrived dolled up in the garb of ‘social justice’. After he first joined in 2013, Slater led spiked’s campaigns against censorship on campus, touring UK and US universities with our Unsafe Space Tour, sparking protests at American University and Rutgers. spiked also set up the Free Speech University Rankings, the UK’s first league table for campus censorship.

Identity politics had suddenly burst from obscure academic seminars and into the cultural elite. ‘Dividing people up by skin colour, dividing people up by sexuality… We saw that this stuff was poison before a lot of other people did’, says Slater. spiked was an early critic of Black Lives Matter, too – years before the 2020 mini cultural revolution that was waged in George Floyd’s name.

Much has changed over the past 25 years, for good as well as ill. But freedom of speech, democracy, the right of ordinary people to speak their minds and to steer the nation in which they live, are on the agenda now in the way they weren’t in 2000. spiked has changed a lot, too – with a growing roster of columnists, contributors, films and podcasts. It’s even dropped its ban on split-infinitives.

But spiked’s principles and guiding ideas have remained constant throughout – freedom, democracy and the limitlessness of human potential. ‘spiked, in a nutshell, is a force for democracy’, says O’Neill, ‘a force for freedom and a force for good’. Here’s to another 25 years.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.