Brendan O'Neill (journalist)

For other people of the same name, see Brendan O'Neill (disambiguation).

Brendan O'Neill is the former editor of Spiked Online (2007-2021) and a columnist for The Australian, The Big Issue and The Spectator. Once a Trotskyist, O'Neill now self identifies as a Marxist libertarian.

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 the magazine.

Since then, O'Neill has contributed articles to publications in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia including The Spectator, the New Statesman, The Guardian, BBC News Online, The Australian, The Christian Science Monitor, The American Conservative, Salon.com, and Rising East. He occasionally blogged at Comment is free, but is now a regular blogger at telegraph.co.uk. He writes a column for The Big Issue in London and The Australian in Sydney.

Views

O'Neill has criticised the notion of tackling global warming by solely reducing carbon emissions, and instead advocates technological progress as a method of overcoming any side-effects of climate change. In January 2006, he co-founded the Manifesto Club, an organisation "with the aim of challenging cultural trends that restrain and stifle people's aspirations and initiative". Broadly libertarian, 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 has criticised opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the United Kingdom as intolerant and fearmongering.

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 still insists that 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 RCP to split and discredit consensus upon the left and to cause impediments for such movements as environmentalism and the reduction of carbon emissions.

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.

Bibliography

• "After that by-election, what now for liberty?" Spiked Online (10 July 2008), retrieved 31 December 2008

External links

• Personal website