Brendan O'Neill is a British columnist. He is the editor of Spiked Online and has been a columnist for The Australian and The Big Issue. Once a TrotskyistMarxist, O'Neill was formerly a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party and wrote for the party's journal, Living Marxism. O'Neill self identifies as a Marxist libertarian and writes for a range of publications.
Career
He began his career at Spiked's predecessor, Living Marxism, the journal of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which ceased publication after ITN won their libel action against it. Since then, O'Neill has contributed articles to publications in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia including The Spectator, the New Statesman, BBC News Online, The Christian Science Monitor, The American Conservative, Salon, Rising East and occasionally blogged for The Guardian, before moving to The Daily Telegraph. He writes a column for The Big Issue in London and The Australian in Sydney. He also writes articles for The Sun. O'Neill has served as a visiting fellow and columnist with the Australian libertarian think-tank, the Centre for Independent Studies, as well as being a keynote speaker for the pro-Israel advocacy organisation StandWithUs. Writing as the fictional character "Ethan Greenhart", O'Neill is the author of Can I Recycle My Granny?, a satire of the green movement published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2008.
Views
O'Neill has opposed the tackling of global warming through reductions in carbon emissions and instead advocates for "technological progress" to deal with the damage done by climate change. He criticised the environmentalist activist Greta Thunberg in his 2019 article "The Cult of Greta Thunberg" in which he describes her as a "millenarian weirdo" and criticises the allegedly "monotone voice" speech patterns of the Swedish environmentalist who speaks English as a second language. In a 2012 Huffington Post article, O'Neill argued against victims of sexual abuse by high-profile individuals coming forward publicly, stating: "I think there is more virtue in keeping the abuse as a firm part of your past, rather than offering it up to a scandal-hungry media and abuse-obsessed society that are desperate for more episodes of perversion to pore over". He considers efforts to combat racism in football to be "a class war" driven by "elites' utter incomprehension of the mass passions that get aired at football matches". Referring to high-profile cases of racial abuse and alleged racial abuse, he argued, "these incidents and alleged incidents are not racism at all, in the true meaning of the word", due to the levels of passion involved, describing anti-racism efforts as "a pretty poisonous desire to police the... working classes". O'Neill has described himself as "an atheistic libertarian". He is opposed to the legalization of same-sex marriage in Australia, arguing that it has been "attended by authoritarianism wherever it’s been introduced" and criticised opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the United Kingdom as intolerant and fearmongering. In September 2019, he said on the BBC's Politics Live that British people should be rioting about delays to Brexit. He said: "I'm amazed that there haven't been riots yet." When asked by guest presenter Adam Fleming: "Do you think there will be riots?", O'Neill responded: "I think there should be." In October 2019, 585 complaints about him calling for riots were dismissed by the BBC's executive complaints unit. O'Neill and others associated with the Revolutionary Communist Party, Living Marxism and Spiked—including Frank Furedi, Mick Hume and Claire Fox—are often seen by commenters such as Nick Cohen as having shifted from a far left position to an extreme stance on the libertarian right. Although O'Neill says he is part of the left, critics such as George Monbiot have suggested that this is typical as a ploy adopted by those associated with the Revolutionary Communist Party to split and discredit consensus upon the left and to cause impediments for such movements as environmentalism and the reduction of carbon emissions.
