Brendan O’Neill

After Brexit in June and now the victory of Donald Trump, everyone’s freaking out about the howling little people and their ripping-up of the political script.

2016 is the year of rage, commentators claim. Brexit was a “howl of rage”, says the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland. And now it’s been joined by the “anti-establishment anger” of those American voters who elevated Trump to the most powerful post on Earth. It was “rage, not reason” that made people go for Trump, says an American neuroscientist.

All this handwringing over the rage of Them gives an impression of a swarm of folk brutishly disturbing politics and business as usual. Brexit and now Trump have “shaken the postwar liberal order”, says the Financial Times.

Apparently these pesky plebs, driven by “temporary populist passions” rather than “reasoned deliberation”, in the words of British-American conservative Andrew Sullivan, have done great harm to liberal, rational public life.

This is nonsense. It’s a dangerous and distracting myth. For it isn’t ordinary people, whether Brexiteers or Trumpites, who threaten to dismantle important liberal ideals; it’s their critics, the very members of the political class who are raging against what they view as the raging masses, who risk doing this.

Yes, huge numbers of ordinary people are expressing dissatisfaction with the status quo. As the British PM Theresa May said in a speech this week, Brexit and Trump show that people are peeved at the “emergence of a new global elite” and they want “change”. But this people’s protest, this polite registering of dissent, isn’t blind rage, and it isn’t throttling decent politics. That is being done by the response to Brexit and Trump, by the new elites’ demosphobia.

It’s this response that is likely to seriously damage political life. The truly disturbing thing about 2016 is not the rage of the masses against the establishment, but the rage of the elites against democracy.

In the 20 years I’ve been writing about politics, I cannot remember a time when disgust for democracy has been as explicit as it is now. It’s everywhere.

“Trump Won Because Voters Are Ignorant”, says a headline in Foreign Policy magazine. The piece, written by Jason Brennan, American professor and author of the The Case Against Democracy, says Trump owes his victory to “the uninformed”.

But this goes beyond Trump, says Brennan. The general public’s stupidity calls into question the whole idea of making decisions democratically. Perhaps what we need is an “epistocracy”, where “votes are in some way weighted according to basic political knowledge”, says Brennan. In short, let’s have IQ tests and give greater power to the clever over the dumb.

This isn’t an extreme view anymore. Being anti-democratic has become positively fashionable among the chattering classes.

We are no longer successfully “keeping the mob from the gates”, says Matthew Parris in the Spectator. It’s been a while since observers openly talked about “the mob”. Trump’s victory calls into question the wisdom of having “government by the people”, Parris says. So who should govern? Kings? Priests? Parris?

We have become “too democratic”, says Andrew Sullivan. The “passions of the mob” have become too great a player in political life. We need a better “elitist sorting mechanism” to prevent people’s “untrammelled emotions” from dominating political discourse.

There is much talk of “low-information voters”, or “low-information white people”, as Brennan calls them: a modern, PC way of saying “the underclass”. Everyday people are ill-suited to big politics, apparently, because they know little and are driven by rage over reason.

In the words of leading American liberal magazine The Atlantic, the masses are “ignorant of basic facts”, meaning they cannot “act reasonably and rationally in the political process”.

The elitist fury that has greeted the low-information mob that voted for Trump echoes what was said after Brexit. The temerity of 17.4m Brits to vote to Leave the EU, when so many of our betters instructed us to vote Remain, sent the establishment and commentariat into a rage that overshadows any rage from below.

It was ridiculous to ask “ignoramuses” to decide on the future of the EU, said famed atheist Richard Dawkins. The public, being ignorant of “the highly complex economic and social issues facing our country”, should “have no say on our EU membership”, he said.

Leading philosopher AC Grayling denounced the politics of the “crowd”. “Rule by crowd acclamation is a very poor method of government”, he said, since most members of the crowd, dim-witted specks in the mass, are susceptible to “misinformation, distortion, false promises [and] tabloid urgings”.

That is, our minds are easily fried by demagogues and lying newspapers; we’re controlled more by sentiment than reason.

Post-Brexit, elitists started to express their disdain for democracy casually and frequently. “What if democracy doesn’t work?”, asked the Guardian’s George Monbiot. Maybe the idea that ordinary people behave as “rational beings” is a myth, he said.

“Never before has the fate of a country… been changed by the swing of such a blunt axe, wielded by… poorly informed citizens”, said Belgian writer David Van Reybrouck in an essay hilariously titled “Why elections are bad for democracy”.

The horror of Brexit shows that we must not allow “popular sentiment [to hold] sway over informed decision-making”, said former UN official Shashi Tharoor. So let the smart rule the stupid? A pro-Remain conservative said the EU referendum took a “noble idea, that everyone’s political views should count equally, too far”. So sometimes certain people’s views should be more equal than others’.

There are now various legal efforts to overthrow Brexit, to thwart the will of the low-information people. And a good thing, too, says a writer for the Washington Post, since it was “widespread political ignorance” that fuelled Brexit.

The chattering-class narrative is that Brexit and Trump are products of idiocy and rashness, and we should now rethink how often we ask the plebs to have their say.

It’s naked elitism. And it should worry anyone who thinks of him or herself as progressive far more than the rise of Trump or Britain leaving the EU.

It echoes dark anti-democratic moments in history. The idea that crowds are easily manipulated by demagogues and thus can’t be trusted is the same sneer that was made against the Chartists, the great 1840s British movement to expand the franchise to working-class men.

The “lower orders of the people” do not have a “ripened wisdom”, said one opponent of Chartism. And this means they’re “more exposed than any other class” to be “converted to the vicious ends of faction”. Such ugly snobbery is rehashed in the foul idea today that Brexiteers and Trumpites, being “low information”, were easily hoodwinked by “misinformation”.

The idea that ordinary people lack expertise and are too ruled by emotion was also said of the Suffragettes. As one historian says, women back then were seen to “lack the expertise” necessary for “informed political activity”. They were low-information.

They were also said to have difficulty “forming abstract ideas”. They are too emotional, and “government by emotion quickly degenerates into injustice”, said the British journal the Anti-Suffrage Review in 1910. Now that is said about women and men: too many of them are driven by “feeling, emotion”, in the words of Andrew Sullivan. And we can’t have government by emotion, can we?

From the Victorian period to the dark days of eugenicist thinking in the early 20th century, there was a profound discomfort among the elites with the idea of democracy. Now it’s making a comeback. Crowd politics gives rise to “blubbering sentimentality”, said Bismarck in the 1800s; government by “crowd acclamation” gives us a useless “snapshot of sentiment”, says AC Grayling today. The language has become politer, but the agitation with the throng remains the same.

This is the scary thing about 2016: not Brexit, not even Trump, but the openness with which democracy is now written off as a terrible mistake. We need to stand up for the crowd. It isn’t an unthinking swarm; it’s a collection of thoughtful individuals, each capable of rationalism and each given to goodness.

In fact, these ordinary people, because they live and work in the belly of society in a way that cut-off experts and observers usually don’t, can actually have a *better* understanding of what’s wrong with society and how it might be fixed.

Less jaundiced by power, more aware of where everyday society isn’t working properly, the masses often have a keener sensitivity to political and social problems and what might be done about them.

– The Australian, 24 September 2016 –

The great Anthony Burgess is best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange, famously immortalised in blood-spattered celluloid by Stanley Kubrick. But he wrote what I consider to be a better novel, The Wanting Seed, published in 1962, which is about a world in which you have to be gay to get ahead.

Like A Clockwork Orange, it’s a dystopian tale, in which the gay authorities promote homosexuality in an effort to stop humans from breeding and having so many kids. Gay people get better jobs and run politics and the police, while straights are effectively forbidden from polite society.

It’s brilliantly Burgessian: a comic dystopia rather than the tragic sort done so well by Orwell. And this week, it proved kind of prophetic. Well, someone was sacked allegedly for being straight.

It was Cassandra Liebeknecht, unceremoniously booted out of her role as boss of Adelaide’s annual queer arts event, Feast Festival. Feast says she’s being investigated for unprofessional conduct, but Liebeknecht says the allegations are false and that she has been mistreated because she’s a breeder, as straights are disparagingly referred to in A Wanting Seed.

Her claims sound like something out of that topsy-turvy novel of gay repression of straights. “I’ve been spat on, I’ve had people scare me, I’ve had people contact me at work anonymously, saying ‘I know where your children go to school’,” she says.

I’m sorry, but this reminded me of the darker shenanigans in The Wanting Seed, where those with an “aura of fertility” — straights — are set upon by “swift, balletic” mobs.

Of course, we don’t live in that Burgessian world, really. Straights are not repressed. Young gays still find life harder than young straights, though thanks to the new tolerance of gayness they’re usually OK by adulthood.

And yet there is a creepingly authoritarian feel to some gay politics, an almost Burgessian intolerance, not so much of straights per se, but of certain ways of thinking, of certain ideas and identities.

Earlier this month, Catherine McGregor, the military captain and trans woman, was reportedly sacked by Kaleidoscope, a gay-rights not-for-profit, for the speech crime of criticising Safe Schools. That program, which teaches kids about sexuality and gender fluidity, could lead young ’uns down a “blind alley”, she said. But it seems that is unsayable in certain circles, so she had to go.

Last week, the Mercure Sydney Hotel cancelled a strategy meeting of Christian groups, where they were due to discuss how to approach the gay-marriage plebiscite. The Mercure’s Facebook page had been bombarded with one-star reviews and comments that left hotel staff “rattled”.

One campaigner justified this barrage on the grounds that Christian groups can be “dangerous” and “predatory”.

That is, their beliefs are toxic, thus pressure can be used to prevent them from discussing them. This is intolerance.

There are other incidents where gay-rights activists have used threats or pressure to shut down stuff they don’t like. When, in 2014, it was discovered that Georgian opera singer Tamar Iveri had written homophobic claptrap on her Facebook page, gay campaigners and others agitated for Sydney Opera to dump her from its production of Otello. And it did. She was sent packing; this thought criminal not welcome in our brave new Burgessian world. “Bravo to the sacking of the gay-bashing diva”, wrote Steve Dow in GuardianAustralia.

And there was the truly alarming case of the Catholic Church in Tasmania being dragged before the Anti-Discrimination Commission over its pamphlet “Don’t Mess With Marriage”. Campaigners said the pamphlet was “offensive, insulting and humiliating”. And so we had the spectacle of a religious group being investigated for expressing its beliefs: a sight better suited to the 15th century than the 21st.

The weird thing about this coming-to-life of The Wanting Seed, this new, pseudo-liberal authoritarianism, is that it consists of some of the same tactics once used against gays themselves.

In the past, it was gay writers and activists who, outrageously, could not freely publish their ideas; who risked being sacked from public positions; whose gatherings were sometimes disrupted by people yelling “perverts!”.

Now, in an about-face of epic proportions, some gay-rights campaigners (allegedly) sack straights, hound gatherings of Christians on the basis that they’re “predators”, and try to stop people from publishing their ideas. The repressed risk becoming repressers.

I think this speaks to a profound shift from the politics of autonomy to the politics of identity.

In the past, from the 1960s to the 80s, liberation groups, including gay-liberation groups, were driven by an urge to be autonomous, to have the right to live and socialise as they chose without facing state sanction or harassment by the moral majority. These were positive movements, helping to make society a better place.

But more recently, minority groups, and much of the left, have become enamoured with the politics of identity, where you define yourself by your innate characteristics rather than by your ideas; by your race and sexuality, your biological quirks, rather than your shared human capacity to be free.

And this politics of identity tends to be needy and irritable. It demands constant recognition from officialdom, which must now validate and celebrate all identity groups.

And it is supersensitive to any perceived slight against an identity group’s way of life. Where the politics of autonomy nurtured movements that were confident, cocky even, and driven by a desire for individual self-government, the sad, sectional politics of identity gives rise to groups that are angry, cagey, always on the lookout for insults, always demanding the crushing of anyone who dares blaspheme against an identity or way of life.

– Speech for the IPA, in Canberra, 24 August 2016 –

The famous opening line of The Communist Manifesto, a book I highly recommend to you all, is: “A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.”

I think we should now update that line, and say: “A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Brexit.”

Because I can’t remember anything in my lifetime that has sent Europe’s political elites into such meltdown, into such a spiral of gloom and angst and self-doubt, as Brexit has.

Not even acts of terrorism have had as great an impact on our political class as Brexit has. Not even the recession. Not even the crisis of the Eurozone. Possibly not even the end of the Cold War, with its unravelling of the postwar order and its plunging of the world into a new and unpredictable era. I don’t think any of those quakes caused quite as much weeping and gnashing of teeth in the corridors of power as Brexit.

I would argue that the brilliance of Brexit, the beauty of Brexit, can be measured in direct relation to how much pain and misery it has caused the political and media elites.

We’ve had politicians crying on TV over Brexit. There’s a British Labour politician called Keith Vaz, one of those pompous Labourites who oozes self-satisfaction from every pore, and he actually cried when the Brexit result was confirmed. Hilariously, he did this while accusing the public of voting emotionally rather than rationally. He said us silly voters didn’t understand the question and had behaved like overgrown children, and he said this through actual tears. The irony was beautiful. A nation laughed.

We’ve had peers in the House of Lords finally wake up, after decades of old-age napping, to plot a revolt against Brexit. That is happening as we speak: a few dozen unelected peers are trying to overturn the political will of 17.4 million people, the largest democratic mandate in British history.

We’ve watched as the bureaucrats of Brussels have been plunged into a state of terror and confusion at the prospect that their oligarchy, the EU, is falling apart. They are freaking out that Brexit will ignite Euroscepitism across Europe. And they’re right to freak out. There are now Eurosceptic majorities in Spain, France and Greece, and large Eurosceptic minorities in Germany, Holland and Sweden. Brexit is another green light to these revolters, to these people who want to wriggle free of Brussels bureaucracy and its diktats. Us plucky Brits have inspired angry Germans and pissed-off Swedes — that’s what I call European unity.

The EU has been so rattled by Brexit that it is now openly discussing inflicting pain on Britain, on us wicked revolters, in order to send a stern message to other nations thinking of leaving. One EU supporter calls this “Project Pain”. He says the EU should try to “severely diminish” Britain and “hurt the UK”, in order to “protect the EU from arsonists elsewhere”. This is how mad the EU and its cheerleaders have been driven by Brexit. This is how brilliant Brexit has been. This is the beauty of Brexit.

And of course we’ve seen the British political class thrown into disarray by Brexit. We lost a prime minister, David Cameron. The new prime minister Theresa May, despite being pro-EU, has been forced to stack her new cabinet with prominent Brexiteers. The oppositional Labour Party has basically collapsed under the weight of Brexit, partly after realising that huge numbers of traditional, working-class Labour voters had defied their party’s advice and voted against the EU.

And the left, small l-liberal set in Britain, which is very pro-EU, has lost the plot too. It has finally dawned on them just how out of touch they are with public sentiment. They have set up a new movement called “We are the 48%” — that being the percentage that voted to stay in the EU. This makes me laugh because these are the very people who a few years ago, during the Occupy protests, would describe themselves as “the 99%”. The number is dwindling all the time, from the 99% to the 48%. And it can only fall further. How long before these liberal observers realise that they might just be part of “the 1%” they once railed against?

And my favourite impact of Brexit is that it has driven sections of the media stir crazy. The stuff they’re publishing gets madder by the day. There were calls for London, which voted to stay in the EU, to become its own city state, like the Vatican: that’s how aloof these observers are. Others openly describe the public as ignoramuses, brainwashed, lacking the basic moral and mental skills for political decision-making.

And then there was my favourite headline of the whole Brexit era, and possibly of all time: it was in the Guardian and it said: “Why elections are bad for democracy.” Yes, this is the state of debate we have reached, where writers are openly arguing that asking the people what they think is bad for democracy. You think to yourself: okay, you people have lost it. As I say, Brexit has induced almost a malarial madness among the elites of Europe. And that is why I love it. This is the beauty of Brexit.

And it isn’t hard to see why it has done this. Or rather, it’s important that we talk about and understand why Brexit has done this, why it has become the spectre haunting Europe.

It isn’t only because it has removed from the EU one of its key players, one of its most influential members. It isn’t simply because it has called into question the legitimacy of the EU itself.

More importantly than that, it’s because Brexit represents a direct challenge to the entire postwar manner of politics. Particularly to the insulation of the elites, of political decision-making itself, from popular opinion.

For decades now, in various different ways, politics has become increasingly insulated from mass sentiment and public will. Through the rise of the quangocracy, bureaucracy, technocracy; through the growth of human-rights legislation; through the increasing role played by judges in moral and political matters; through the spread of expert cliques that now govern various parts of our lives; through the development of the nannying, nudging and nagging state; through the growing clout of NGOs both internationally and domestically; through the outsourcing of matters of democracy or even certain aspects of everyday governance to banks or private companies — we’ve seen politics become an ever-more elitist pursuit, done far away from the madding crowd, done by them, not by us. In fact, politics has become something done to the public, not by the public. Public life has become a matter for experts, not plebs; for the cool and the wise, not for the rabble.

And the EU embodied this process perhaps more than any other institution on Earth. It was the clearest manifestation of the removal of political discussion and decision-making from us, the masses, and its colonisation by them, the technocrats, the well-educated, the clever, who apparently understand better than us what needs to be done about climate change, how international affairs should be organised, what laws people should live by, what we should be allowed to say and what we shouldn’t be allowed to say, and so on. The EU is the pinnacle of the postwar move in the West towards a more insulated, distant, officious form of governance.

And Brexit challenges that. It’s a metaphorical hand grenade against the idea that technocrats and experts know better than us how our nations should be governed and our own lives run. It rips away the insulation that the political class has surrounded themselves with in recent decades and says: “Hey. We’re still here. And we matter. Our opinion matters. Our beliefs matter. Our morality matters.”

This is the beauty of Brexit. It is the reassertion of popular opinion over expertise. It is an assertion of moral conviction over what is called science. It is an expression of mass sentiment over the cool, research-driven politics of the bureaucrat who is dead inside. It is a statement of moral reasoning against the narrow technical reasoning beloved of the post-political political class. It represents the return of the people to the public realm.

This is why Brexit should inspire, not only the Brits who voted for it and other Europeans who are also keen to leave the EU, but all liberal-minded, progressive, democratic people around the world, including here in Australia. Brexit speaks to people everywhere. The true message of Brexit is that the popular will is just as good, if not better, at deciding the fate of nations than experts are, and that ordinary people should have a closer relationship with political decision-making — and that is a message non-Brits should cling to just as firmly as the British people have.

There are two things I find especially exciting about Brexit. The first is the clarity it has provided in 21st-century politics, the stunning truths it has revealed about the nature of politics today.

We live in a time when clarity in politics is in depressingly short supply. The dishonesty of PC; the rise of the spun, platitude-spouting politician; the elevation of research over conviction, so that our leaders now say “The evidence suggests…” rather than “I believe…”; the promotion of policy on the basis of research rather than morality or ideology or the idea of what might be good; the demonisation of certain views as beyond the pale — all of these trends have created a situation where it is hard to know who stands for what, what you’re allowed to say, and even where political power really lies.

Brexit has barged into this situation and provided searing, beautiful clarity about political life. Primarily it has shone a light — a harsh, unforgiving light — on who the establishment is and what they truly think of us.

These days, everyone in the chattering classes and among the political elites claims to be on the side of the people, to want to help the people, to want to look after the people. They claim to empathise with us, worry about us, care about us. Rubbish. And if you didn’t know that was rubbish before Brexit, you certainly know it now. The clarity of Brexit has shown us what the elites truly think, and my God it is ugly.

I cannot remember a time in my life when there has been as much open contempt and bile for ordinary people as there was after Brexit. All the PC guff was pushed to one side, and we got to see the disgust of the elites for the public.

British voters have in recent weeks been branded ignorant, ill-educated, warped, racist, overemotional, untrustworthy, dumb, prejudiced. Actual 19th-century-style elitism, the kind that said the poor were too dim to look after themselves, never mind engage in the political realm, has made a violent comeback.

So Richard Dawkins said “stupid, ignorant people” should not be trusted to take “historically momentous decisions… of state”. They lack expertise, he said, tellingly. One pro-EU writer says Brexit represents “democratic extremism”, where the “noble idea that everyone’s political views should count equally” had been taken too far. This is always what people say when referendums give a result they don’t like: “I like democracy, but this is too much democracy.” They like democracy when it backs up what they believe; when it doesn’t, screw it, scrap it, it doesn’t work.

A former UN official said the problem with the Brexit vote is that it allows “popular sentiment [to] hold sway over informed decision-making”. He said it allows the “emotions of the moment” to have “wide ramifications”. He, like so many others, seems not to understand that this is what democracy is: the seeking of, and the representation of, popular ideas and ideals. His contrasting of our “popular sentiments” with his “informed decision-making” was very revealing indeed, and in many ways cut to the heart of why Brexit is seen as such a mortal threat by the new elites: for its challenge to the postwar orientation of politics around expertise rather than moral or mass conviction.

And on and on it went: piece after piece, statement after statement, saying that Brexit was a dumb “crowd statement”, in the words of AC Grayling, and it would be better if politics was done coolly and rationally, by the educated few rather than the emotional many. The sentiment of the anti-Brexit elite was best summed up in a headline in Foreign Policy magazine. It said: “It’s time for the elites to rise up against the ignorant masses.”

It really said that. And that is brilliant. It is. Because of the clarity it gives us. It demonstrates that so-called progressives, the PC-sounding lobby, these new elites who claim to be guided by research and information and therefore to know better than us how things should be done, are really motored by a low and profound distrust of, if not hatred for, the ignorant masses. How wonderful it is to know that.

That Foreign Policy headline really captured what is at stake in the Brexit era. It spoke to a recognition on the part of the new elites of what had just happened. The masses, the apparently ignorant masses, had reasserted their opinion, their ideas, against the political class, against experts, against those 21st-century cliques who govern by science and technicalities rather than by belief. And it was a demand, a desperate plea, for things to be returned to how they were: for the elites to reassert themselves over the masses.

So we have seen the establishment exposed. We have had MPs, Lords, businessmen, lawyers, celebrities, editors, bureaucrats and others coming together to oppose Brexit and defame Brexit and call for the re-establishment of the natural order of things where those in the know tell the rest of us how politics and life should be conducted.

To return to The Communist Manfiesto, if you don’t mind. Marx and Engels described how all wings of the elite clubbed together to fight the spectre of communism. They said: “All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies…” Now Brexit has induced a similar response. We’ve seen prominent leftists aligned with super-rich businessmen, Labour MPs with Tory MPs, Brussels bureaucrats with the World Bank and the White House and the Australian government, all of whom warned against Brexit, all of whom are furious with Brexit, all of whom instinctively recognise the damage that has just been inflicted on the postwar insulation of them from us. So celebrate the clarity of Brexit. Celebrate the truths it is revealed.

And then there’s the second thing to savour about Brexit: its revolting nature. The extent to which it was a polite rebellion against the new post-moral, post-ideological way in which public life is understood and exercised today.

As I say, the EU embodies all the worst trends of our era. The demonisation of mass sentiment. The removal of public decision-making from ordinary people. The substitution of technocracy for ideology and debate. The replacement of moral reasoning with the narrow research. The idea that politics and the world are too complicated for us mere mortals to understand and thus we need others, the more switched-on, to interpret and do things on our behalf. All of this post-political rot that is now pronounced across the Western world is most clearly manifested in the EU.

And Brexit tears it all up. This is why the question of expertise was so central to the Brexit debate. It wasn’t a side issue; it was right there at the heart of the debate.

Just before the referendum, polls showed that those planning to vote against the EU were “much more likely to trust ordinary people’s common sense than the experts”. Polls showed that anti-EU voters were very unlikely to trust academics, economists, celebrities, NGOs, charity heads, religious figures, editors and politicians, and were far more likely to trust friends, colleagues and even “the man in the street”. Brexiteers trusted strangers over experts. How wonderful is that. It is the essence of democracy. This is the beauty of Brexit.

And this caused great fury among pro-EU people. They held it up as evidence that Brexiteers are anti-expertise, anti-information, that we’re stupid. And when Michael Gove, the Tory MP and prominent Brexiteer, said people are “sick of experts”, there was media mayhem. He was branded wicked, pro-ignorance, a demagogue. This was very revealing. It suggested the EU’s supporters recognised that this whole process was calling into question their authority, their expert-driven technocracy, their argument that their so-called scientific information and technocratic managerialism ought to override popular sentiment.

The clash over expertise really showed what was at stake. We had ordinary people saying that they trusted their friends and their families, and themselves, more than the technocrats and the new educated elites. This was radical. It was a stab at recovering the original ideal of democracy: the idea that ordinary people are just as good at running their lives and doing politics as experts or lords or officials are. In fact, they might just be better. It was a people expressing trust in itself. This is rare today, very rare.

I have felt deeply inspired by this. It brings to my mind the ideals of the Enlightenment itself. When Brexiteers reject the authority of the political class, academics, the media and religious figures, they channel the sentiment of the Enlightenment. One is reminded of the founding motto of the Royal Society, that institution of the scientific revolution: “On the word of no one.” That is, don’t rely on traditional forms of authority or keepers of “truth”: think for yourself. The British people, against the exhortations of politicians, the church, the banks, the military and academia, thought for themselves.

They trusted themselves. This is what is so dangerous about Brexit. This is the beauty of Brexit. And it is incredibly important that we don’t allow the EU and its cheerleaders to brand as “philistinism” this very public rejection of the elevation of expertise over moral conviction in the political realm. The new expert class likes to depict itself as the heir to the Enlightenment, as the gatekeeper of reason against the unhinged passions of large crowds or radical political groups or religious movements and so on. What they fail to understand is that the essence of the Enlightenment was to revolt against expertise, against the idea that research from on high could provide people with the compasses they needed to make it through life.

One only need read Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’, from 1789, to appreciate the extent to which the Enlightenment was a rising up against the narrow prescriptions of an expert clerisy. Kant’s essay is, in essence, a raging against the nanny state. He complains of having “a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet”, which means “I have no need to exert myself”. He calls these experts “guardians” and says they treat people like “cattle” — they make us view “the step to maturity, not only as hard, but as extremely dangerous”.

There could be no better description of the postwar turn to technocracy, and especially the EU itself: these are the new guardians who treat us like cattle and seek always to convince us that life is extremely dangerous. Only by heeding their expertise can we make it less dangerous, apparently. In rejecting this technocratic drift, Brexiteers have done what Kant advised people to do: to enlighten themselves, to break free from the “guardians”, to “walk firmly” and “cultivate your own mind”. Yes, that is the beauty of Brexit: the British people have decided to walk firmly and cultivate their own mind.

Brexit is a cry for meaning in a world overrun with research and information. It is a plea for morality in a time when we’re governed by sums and maths. As Charles Leadbeater put it, Brexit was about “restoring a semblance of meaning to people’s lives”; it was a “vote for something more than money — for pride, belonging, community, identity, a sense of ‘home’”. That such statements of meaning are so alien to the ruling elite and chattering class — so much so that they brand them racism and ignorance and violently disruptive — only shows how far they have sacrificed the politics of meaning, the politics of belief, for the narrow pursuit of managing society and its inhabitants.

— Speech in Adelaide, 13 August 2016 —

I come from a country where you can be arrested for expressing Christian beliefs.

As you can probably tell from my accent, I’m not talking about Saudi Arabia, or North Korea, or the Islamic State. I’m talking about Britain. In 2016 in Britain, birthplace of the modern idea of liberty, the police might knock on your door if you say certain Christian things.

I know this sounds shocking, so let me give you a few examples.

In 2014, a Christian street preacher was arrested in Dundee in Scotland for saying homosexuality is a sin. A member of the public phoned the police, the police turned up, arrested the preacher and locked him up overnight before his appearance in court the next day. He was charged with breaching the peace. A few months later, the charges were dropped.

In 2011, a Christian street preacher in Manchester was arrested for quoting the following passage from the Book of Revelations:

“But for the cowardly, unbelieving, sinners, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their part is in the lake that burns with fire and sulphur, which is the second death.”

Some members of the public complained that these words were homophobic and had caused them “alarm and distress”, and so the preacher was arrested and put in a police cell, alone, for 19 hours. Nineteen hours. In Britain in 2016 you can be put in a cell for 19 hours for reading from the Bible.

In 2014, a Baptist Church in Norfolk put up a poster suggesting that if you don’t believe in God then you will go to hell. The poster said, “If you think there is no God, you had better be right”, and underneath there was a picture of flames, the implication being that if you don’t believe then you’ll burn for eternity. Passersby complained about the poster to the police. The police registered the poster as a “hate incident”. They launched an investigation. They decided, in their graciousness, in their infinite wisdom, that there wasn’t a case to pursue, but they did visit the church to have a word with the pastor and suggest he take the poster down. He took it down.

So you don’t have to look to some foreign tyranny to see agents of the state forbidding Christians from expressing certain core beliefs. Just look at Britain. It’s happening there.

And then, perhaps the most notorious case of all: in May 2014, a 78-year-old pastor in Northern Ireland was arrested for saying the following during a sermon: “Islam is heathen, Islam is Satanic, Islam is a doctrine spawned in hell.”

Now, you might find those comments offensive; many people do. They are not Christian beliefs, as such, though it is a Christian belief that Christianity is the true religion and the others are wrong or misguided.

Yet for saying those things about Islam, for giving a strongly worded sermon, the Northern Irish pastor was arrested and charged with making “grossly offensive remarks”. Yes, it is a potentially a crime in Britain to be “grossly offensive”. The pastor faced up to six months in jail.

However, this year, two years after his sermon, having spent two years in legal limbo awaiting trial, awaiting his fate, he was found not guilty. The judge said something really striking. He said the pastor’s comments were “offensive” but not “grossly offensive”. So in the UK, judges now get to decide how offensive a person is allowed to be, and whether his level of offensiveness deserves a prison sentence or just a telling off.

These are just some recent examples of people being arrested in Britain for what they have said, and in essence for what they believe. This is the important thing to remember: all those people genuinely, deeply, profoundly believed what they were saying.

We might disagree with them that homosexuality is a sin and that non-believers burn in hell and that Islam is “satanic”. I certainly do. But they believe those things with every fibre of their being. They were arrested for what they think; they were arrested for their moral convictions. In Britain. In 2016.

You don’t have to look at the history books, you don’t have to look all the way back to the Inquisition, to see the authorities harassing or punishing people for their convictions. It’s happening right now, not just in the East but in the West too.

I see my role here today as a kind of canary in the mine, coming to warn you of the dangers of making offensiveness or hatefulness a criminal offence. To warn you of the dangers of allowing the state or the law to determine what people may think and say.

I know Australia is moving down this road, with the use of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act to punish those judged to be racially offensive. But you are not as far down the road as Europe is, and I want to tell you to stop, now, and to scrap every piece of legislation that impedes in any way what people may say.

Let me tell you how bad things have got in Europe.

In almost every European country today, there is someone who is in prison or doing some kind of community service or paying off a fine simply for something that he or she said.

In Scotland, birthplace of some of the best things about the Enlightenment, a man was sent to jail for the crime of singing an offensive song. The man is a 24-year-old fan of the largely Protestant football team Rangers. He was prosecuted for singing “The Billy Boys”, an anti-Catholic song that Rangers fans have been singing for years.

Under Scotland’s Orwellian Offensive Behaviour at Football Act — yes, Scotland actually has an act of law governing offensive behaviour at the football — he was sentenced to four months in jail for, in essence, songcrimes. We’ve had thoughtcrime and speechcrime; but even Orwell didn’t imagine that one day we’d have songcrimes.

In Sweden, viewed by many as the capital of chilled-out liberalism, a man was recently released from a six-month prison sentence for producing offensive art.

His name is Dan Parks. He’s a painter. He does paintings which he says are designed to challenge PC and the stiff, nervous authorities. And they can certainly be described as racist works. For this, he was sent to jail for six months and his artworks were destroyed by the state. Europe once burnt corrupting books; now it incinerates offensive art.

In France, which still presents itself as the guardian of the rights of man, three people are paying off fines imposed on them for making homophobic comments on Twitter. These three individuals became the first in French history to be found guilty of anti-gay hate crimes — not for attacking anyone or damaging property, but for expressing themselves on the internet.

In Germany, a 74-year-old woman had a fine imposed on her by the courts for the crime of carrying an offensive placard. She was on a march against immigration when she held up a sign that said “The arrogant Turks and Muslims are threatening Europe”. For this, for these unpleasant views, she was fined 1,000 Euros.

In Hungary, a historian was found guilty of breaching public order when he described the far-right party Jobbik as “neo-fascist”. He was fined. For expressing a political opinion, for saying something.

And on it goes. Across Europe, from Britain to Hungary, Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, people are being arrested and convicted for expressing themselves. Not for action, but for speech; not for behaviour, but for thought.

Over the past decade there have been numerous cases like this. A pastor in Sweden given a one-month suspended prison sentence for describing homosexuality as a tumour on society; the former French actress Brigitte Bardot fined 30,000 Euros for describing certain Islamic practices as “barbaric”; the French novelist Michel Houellebecq taken to court for “inciting religious hatred” after he called Islam “stupid”. Yes, that can land you in court in France. It’s positively medieval, a return to the blasphemy laws of old. It’s now a risky business in Europe both to express certain religious beliefs and also to criticise religion.

All of this is a result of the spread of hate-speech laws in recent decades.

Thirty or forty years ago, there was a striking shift in how Western states approach to censorship. They shifted from trying to control immoral things, like sexual literature or “depraved” art, towards controlling “hateful” ideas. They went from policing political beliefs, for example by clamping down on communist groups and communist literature, to policing what they call “hatred”.

This has opened up a whole new empire of censorship, a terrifying new form of thought control. For these strictures against hatred allow the state to police not just ideology and art but emotion and belief. Hatred is, after all, just a feeling. They allow the state to punish those whom it judges to be too hotheaded, too offensive. They make Orwell’s nightmare a reality; they make thoughtcrime a real thing.

Such an outlook has taken hold in Australia, tragically, though not to the same extent as in Europe.

Just this week, we have the utterly perverse situation where the race commissioner of the Australian Human Rights Commission is encouraging people to complain about Bill Leak’s indigenous dad cartoon, so that something might be done about it. A human-rights commissioner whipping up a mob against press freedom — it’s surreal.

We’ve also had the Andrew Bolt case, of course, the outrageous use of Section 18C to punish a journalist for expressing an opinion.

Other Section 18C cases have included complaints against an indigenous prisoner for calling a guard “white trash”. Against the comedian King Billy Cokebottle for allegedly mocking indigenous culture. Against the Bible Believers Church for whipping up hatred of Jews. And so on. You are veering towards the European trend for punishing offensive or hateful remarks, and I am here to say to you: Please, stop, now.

Why? Because there are two major problems with today’s policing of so-called hatred.

The first, and most serious, is that people are being punished for their moral, religious and political views.

Supporters of hate-speech legislation claim they only want to stop the expression of vile racist, anti-Semitic or misogynistic ideas, so what’s your problem, they ask? But in reality, religious thought and political ideas are also being swept up in this moral crusade against hate speech, and are punished alongside plain old-fashioned racism.

So as I’ve said, Christians are arrested and fined for saying homosexuality is a sin — that is, for their beliefs. Liberal critics of Islam have been arrested for saying Islamic values are not suited to modern Europe — that is, for their political views.

We must always remember that one man’s “hate speech” is another man’s deeply held, seriously considered moral belief. What the state and mainstream observers, and some of us, consider to be “hateful” might to someone else be an important religious or political ideal.

To my mind, arresting someone for saying “homosexuality is a sin” is just as bad, exactly as bad, as it would be to arrest someone for saying “Malcolm Turnbull is a good prime minister”. Both views are wrong, of course, but there are people out there who truly hold them, strange as that might seem.

Those Christians believe homosexuality is a sin just as seriously as other people believe Turnbull is a good PM. And there should be as much outrage over their arrest as there would be if fans, or critics, of Turnbull were to be arrested. We should be as shocked by the arrest of eccentric pastors as we would be by the arrest of mainstream political writers or activists.

And the second problem with the state’s crusade against hatred is that it actually makes it more difficult for us to challenge actual hatred. It doesn’t only punish moral beliefs by rebranding them “hatred”; it also makes it harder for us to stand up to what we can all agree is real hatred.

Hate-speech legislation disarms us — us ordinary, non-hateful, anti-racist citizens. It prevents us from being able to see and challenge backward ideas.

Censorship is the worst tool for tackling bigotry. Because all it does is push bigotry underground, where it can grow and spread and gain in influence, unchecked by rational, liberal thought.

France demonstrates this well. Twenty-five years ago France outlawed Holocaust denial. And now it has a very serious problem, the most serious problem in Europe probably, with Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. These things are not unrelated. In banning Holocaust denial, France removed this ideology from the democratic public realm where it might be challenged, where it might be raged against with facts and possibly defeated.

It also unwittingly turned Holocaust denial into something exotic, into something edgy, into an attractive outlook for those who already felt isolated from mainstream French society. And so some sections of French society, particularly the poor, cut-off immigrant sections, embraced Holocaust denial as a self-conscious affront to the mainstream, and they were never publicly held to account or confronted or argued down because Holocaust denial has been forbidden from the public realm and effectively shielded from public discussion. Censoring genuine hate speech makes hate speech worse. Banning Holocaust denial exacerbates the problem of Holocaust denial.

Hate-speech legislation is not only an attack on the speaker — it is also an attack on the rest of us, the audience. It undermines our right, and our responsibility as citizens, to expose and confront bigotry; to use the tools of freedom and reason to challenge those who say genuinely racist things.

This is why freedom of speech is so important. First, because it allows individuals to express themselves; and secondly, because it allows the rest of us to listen and to think and to speak back.

Freedom of speech is the most important of all freedoms because it keeps citizens alert; it makes society a more vibrant and thoughtful and engaged place. It trusts people to hear and consider all ideas, and to use our reason to consider these ideas. It actively invites us to be engaged, responsible citizens.

Censorship, by contrast, makes us lazy and childish and stupid. It turns us into infants who don’t have to worry about what is right and wrong because that has already been decided for us by our good, gracious rulers and betters. It weakens our moral muscles; it retires our moral judgment. It encourages passivity, thoughtlessness, obedience — all of which are anathema to a healthy democratic society.

This is why you must challenge every use of Section 18C, not just against Andrew Bolt but also against actual racists and anti-Semites — because otherwise you will end up in the same boat as Europe.

My view is this: there should be no legislation at all pertaining to freedom of speech. And I include in that human-rights legislation that claims to grant us freedom of speech. I am against this too, because it turns freedom of speech into a gift that the authorities give to us, and which, logically, they might just as easily take away.

Indeed, human-rights law actually qualifies freedom of speech. So Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights gives us freedom of speech but also says that it can be restrained in the following circumstances: “In the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety; in the prevention of disorder or crime; in the protection of health or morals; in the protection of the reputations of others; in preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence; or in maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary”.

So it gives us the freedom to speak in one breath, and then dilutes it to the point of destroying it in the next.

We should insist that freedom of speech is not something that officialdom gives to us. It is something that we have. It is not a gift of government, but a central part of everyday human life. It is not something given to individuals — it is the means through which we *become individuals*. It is the means through which we develop our intellectual muscles, train our minds, become aware and alive and part of the moral world. It is in the exercise of freedom of speech that we become free, and become fully human in fact. No one can give us our humanness; we do it, we realise it, ourselves. There should be no laws restricting freedom of speech, and likewise there should be no laws granting freedom of speech. Governments should say nothing whatsoever about freedom of speech. Leave it to us.

– Penthouse, August 2016 –

Are you white? Do you have a dick? If your answer to these questions is “Yes”, then you should be checking your privilege.

You should be watching what you say. You should be experiencing racial guilt. You should feel responsible for every bad thing that happened in history, because all of it was the fault of folk like you: white dudes.

White privilege checking is all the rage. In PC circles, you can’t swing a tote bag without hitting 10 white guys checking their privilege and 10 non-white people demanding they do more of it.

The idea is that if you have white skin and a penis then you won the lottery of life. You’re a lucky bugger, and you must recognise your luckiness, and keep it in check, if you hope to be thought of as a half-way decent person.

Some American colleges now pack students off to an annual shindig called “The White Privilege Conference”. Sounds like a riot. Featuring sessions like “Reimagining the Power of our Deepest Knowing in our Racial Justice Work” (you what?), the conference is basically a long weekend of making white blokes feel bad.

And when it all gets a bit much, conference attendees are offered “safe spaces” in which to “heal and refuel”. Because it’s hard graft taking the mick out of white people.

Privilege-checking is creeping off campus and into the mainstream. Macklemore — the pasty-faced rapper from Seattle — has recorded a song called “White Privilege” in which he berates Elvis, Miley and Iggy for stealing black culture. (Dude, you’re a white rapper!)

He raps: “I have an advantage [because] I’m white.” You can picture thousands of pained middle-class white youths, consumed by disgust for the antics of their ancestors, welling up as they sing along to this self-hatin’ ditty.

Privilege-checking is basically self-flagellation. Where religious zealots used to wallop their backs with nettles to show God what worthless pieces of crap they were, now white dudes with racial complexes pump out tweets and blogs to show how disgusted they are by whiteness.

It’s funny, of course. But it’s also nasty. There are three awful things about the fad for privilege-checking.

The first is how it racialises everyday life. In a shocking snub to Martin Luther King — who dreamt of a world where people would be judged by their character, not their skin colour — political correctness demands that we be racially aware all the time.

We’re now meant to measure people’s worth, and the worth of their ideas, by the colour of their skin. You’re white? Then you’re privileged, you’re a problem, and we don’t like what you have to say. It’s an explicit return to the racial politics mankind spent so long trying to escape.

The second problem is that all the jabber about white privilege is just wrong. It ignores vast class differences. Tell the white blokes who mine coal for a living that they’re privileged.

In the UK, young white men are statistically less likely to go to university than young black men and young white women. There’s something really off when silver-spooned Gender Studies students write off as “privileged” all white blokes — even the ones who unclog their toilets or drive them to conferences about… well, white privilege.

The third, and worst, thing about white privilege-checking is how it has become a badge of pride worn by PC whites. This is the great irony: white shame is the new white pride.

Acknowledging your white privilege, and publicly denouncing it in self-mauling tweets, has become a way of saying “I’m a good white person”. It’s a way of distinguishing yourself from bad whites, from the ignorant, ill-read white blob, which isn’t even aware of the horrors of history and how those horrors helped to make life super-cool for all whites (allegedly).

White dudes who check their privilege are really juxtaposing themselves to these Other Whites. It’s a new kind of white nationalism, where good, well-educated whites advertise their superior racial awareness. It’s a modern version of the racial self-distinction of Aryan movements in the past: they were also all about contrasting their decent whiteness with the bad whiteness of the throng, of those stupid whites who had no clue and too many kids.

I was interviewed about Brexit for a German newspaper. Here’s what I said.

– Mr O’Neill, since the British voted for leaving the European Union, people have been talking about a deep unprecedented division of the country. Where can we find these division lines? –

I think we are experiencing something like a class revolt, a quiet one. Labourers and the poor voted against the European Union. How much someone’s house is worth, one’s educational achievements, whether or not one works in manufacturing – all these things were strong indicators for how an individual voted. Generally, the more a person suffers from poverty, the more likely it is that he or she voted for Brexit. And now, some politicians and media people are denouncing the voters as stupid, racist and clueless. Leftists are demonstrating for an annulment of the vote. These are gatherings of reactionaries from the middle class, aiming to drown out the will of the people.

– There seems to be a conflict between generations. Around 75 per cent of the youth declare themselves in favour of the European Union; more than 60 per cent of the old generations are not. What is this about? –

Some of the young people demonstrating in favour of the EU are being openly ageist. They’re say disgusting things about old people: they’re selfish, they’ve led a good life and now don’t care about the new generations. Some have even called for an end to the right to vote for citizens over 65. They say that, in contrast to the young population, the old don’t have to live with the consequences of their voting choices for such a long time, and therefore they should have less say. Post-referendum, well-educated young people have created this ugly bloc against the older and poorer sections of society.

– What is it that makes the EU seem so attractive to the youth? –

The young haven’t really known anything else but the EU. To them, the EU means Europe. For older generations, on the other hand, the EU is simply is an institution, which they remember being founded in 1992 and talked about in the 1970s. Old people have a far more nuanced understanding of what Europe actually is. The young also perceive the EU as a progressive project. Supporting the EU is an opportunity to show that they are one the ‘right’ side, that they are good; it has become largely a moral pose.

– Don’t the young care about things like data-roaming charges, the freedom to travel, and student-based exchange programmes such as Erasmus? –

Yes, there is that, too. Many of the young agitators against Brexit seem obsessed with interrailing and education semesters abroad. These are typically middle-class concerns. The 19-year old guy from a poor part of Manchester, say, who is desperately in search of a job — he faces very different problems. His better-off contemporaries can concern themselves with superficial and quite narcissistic things. Some of them seem almost incapable of thinking beyond their own lives. The question of what is in society’s interests doesn’t seem to touch them; instead they view things subjectively, they have been coached through education to view things in this subjective, therapeutic way, rather than socially or democratically.

– The majority of Scotland voted in favour of the EU. Why does the opinion of a labourer in Glasgow differ so much from the opinion of a labourer in Sunderland?–

I think it’s related to the fact that some in Scotland perceive of themselves as being, or wanting to be, separate from the UK. So some Scots come to believe that they have more in common with Brussels than with London — there’s a separatist mentality at work here, I think. The weird thing about the Scottish National Party (SNP) is that they imagine themselves as an independence movement, yet they want to stick with the EU and keep following instructions from Brussels, which of course loathes national independence. The SNP has exposed itself as a dependence movement, not an independence movement.

– Following the SNP’s outstripping of Labour in Scotland, will UKIP do similar in regions in England? Will UKIP becoming a kind of English National Party? –

I think the question of what happens to UKIP now is very interesting. Do we still need them? They only existed to challenge the EU, so their future is uncertain, I would say.

– Perhaps they will position themselves as watchdogs of Brexit, to make sure it happens? –

Yes, perhaps. I am not a fan of UKIP, because I believe very strongly in freedom of movement. I do not believe immigration is the cause of Britain’s social problems, as UKIP does. However, I do find UKIP very interesting. We tend to forget how big and influential the party is among working-class communities. Due to Britain’s slightly odd voting system, UKIP has only one MP in Westminster despite the fact that at the last General Election it got more votes than the SNP and the Liberal Demcorats combined. I think UKIP’s success lies in its ability to take advantage of the dissatisfaction of the working classes with Labour, which has utterly failed them. Much of the working class feels that Labour no longer speaks for them, and actually treats them with contempt.

– Is Labour lost? –

I hope so! I am very much against Labour, from a left-wing perspective. Labour now consists of two factions, vaguely left and vaguely right, and they despise each other. Their conflict is entirely internal, factional without substance. I find it hard to see how Labour will ever govern again. It no longer does the thing it was founded to do in the early 20th century — to represent the interests of the working population. It has been losing contact with that constituency since the 1960s and then in a very dramatic way in the 1980s, when many working-class voters supported Thatcher’s Tories. Why does Labour exist anymore? I don’t think the party itself can answer that question anymore.

– Did Tony Blair alienate the party from its traditions and therefore ruin it? –

That’s what a lot of people think, including people in the Labour Party. I think it’s the other way around: the party had already been hollowed, already robbed of its true meaning, already ‘ruined’, and it was this that allowed Blair to take over in the mid-1990s. Labour did not leave the workers; the workers left Labour. Blair moved into the party’s political and historic vacuum. He managed to disguise the decline, but only for a while, for the rot was already there and has only become more apparent post-Blair.

– What do you think lied behind the Brexit vote? Was the voting entirely related to the EU or did other factors influence people’s decision-making process? –

That is the big question. I think the vote had a lot to do with the EU, but there were other interests, too. People perfectly understood the question on the ballot: should we stay or should we go? But there was also an element of rebellion against the political class. The great majority of the political set, 90 per cent of business leaders, most academics, experts and celebrities called for a Remain vote. The citizens, therefore, saw an opportunity to hit the establishment where it hurts, to pay it back for either ignoring them or treating them in an extremely paternalistic way.

– Why did this eruption of indignation take place now, with this vote? –

For a variety of reasons, I think. For one, there is a huge difference between a referendum and a general election. During an election we got to choose between politicians who are actually quite similar. During this referendum, on the other hand, we were given a real, genuine alternative to choose: we were empowered to make an impact on political arrangements. Then the establishment made a huge mistake: by imploring the people to vote in favour of the EU, they demonstrated how much they care about the ‘right’ vote, and they advertised a weak spot… and sections of society seized this opportunity to say: ‘Well, fuck you.’

– Is the Brexit campaign similar, then, to the Trump phenomenon in the US? –

I don’t think so. Well, there are similarities, yes. Trump benefits from the same climate as exists in Britain, in which politics has become more and more technocratic and disconnected from ordinary people; has become obsessed with influencing our behaviour rather than engaging with our outlook and ideals; has become more and more politically correct; is run by a disconnected middle class. This technocratic, paternalistic approach has caused many people to turn their backs on mainstream politics and search for other political actors. But there is a very important difference between Trump and Brexit: Trump is a deeply unpleasant politician, he is anti-immigration, he is illiberal, and he is sometimes quite racist; Brexit, on the other hand, is positive; it is not racist, despite what the media would have us believe.

– During the referendum campaign, UKIP put up posters showing refugees and saying ‘Breaking point’. Doesn’t that mean that even though not every Brexit supporter is a racist, every racist will have voted in favour of Brexit? –

For heaven’s sake! I find this such a crass argument. It was of course said by Billy Bragg: that not all Brexiteers are racist but all racists are Brexiteers. Well, one could equally say that not every Remainer is a member of the smug intolerant elite, but every member of the smug, intolerant elite voted Remain. What I find unpleasant about the Remainers’ accusations of racism is that they are the ones who voted for an institution that discriminates on the basis of race. EU nations support free movement for EU citizens, but restrict it for Africans and Asians. There are huge Pakistani and Indian communities in Britain, yet their relatives cannot easily come here, whereas white Europeans have free movement here. That is wrong. If you voted for that, maybe you shouldn't talk about racism.

– Aren’t the categories of left and right meaningless now? Traditionally the left side characterised itself through ideas of emancipation, but you believe it has abandoned those ideas? –

Yes, the referendum confirmed how little meaning those terms have. I think we fail to appreciate how disturbing it is that the left should support an institution like the EU. As a result of its oligarchical, globalist policies, the EU impoverished Greece and imposed an unelected technocratic government on Italy. In so many ways, it goes against what the left traditionally believed in. Yet now the left is largely pro-EU and sections of it are forming an alliance against Brexit. It is reconstituting itself in opposition to the working class and poor. This is the end of the left.

– Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn might say he’s in favour of the EU, but he doesn’t sound convincing. Maybe he isn’t that far from your position…? –

Yes, for his entire political life he opposed the EU, yet then he campaigned for it in the referendum. He’s a coward, he betrayed his principles. Ordinary people aren’t really interested in the left anymore. It has disappointed them once too often.

– But many people joined the Labour Party to support Corbyn. Young people. Maybe they could influence the course of Labour? –

Yes, but these are mostly students and environmentalists and they have no connection with the working class. Their outlook is generally one that is hostile to democracy and industry and growth and so on, and therefore it grates against the interests of the working class, I would say. And the more workers understand that, the better, because then they can finally cut the ties with Labour and something new can grow.

– Do you consider Brexit as the beginning of the end of Europe as we knew it? –

– The Australian, 2 July 2016 –

Political quakes don’t get much more seismic than this.

Just over a week ago, Britain had a competent Prime Minister, a functioning opposition, and decent diplomatic relations with the EU and the rest of the world.

Now, after 17.5 million of us ­ignored the advice of virtually the entire establishment and voted to leave the EU, our PM is on his way out; the opposition has collapsed; it isn’t clear who — if anyone — is running the country; and the EU and the rest of the world thinks Britain has lost every one of its marbles.

And I love it. This is the most exciting thing that has happened to British politics in a generation. The whole Brexit fallout has been a crazy, stirring reminder of what people power really looks like.

For too long, elections in Britain, as in much of the Western world, have been formulaic affairs, where we must choose between cardboard politicians who can be told apart only by the colour of their rosettes. But with the EU referendum, our ballots had real consequences. They toppled leaders. They terrified elites. And they changed the world.

So this is what democracy feels like? It feels good.

It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of what has happened in Britain. A freaked-out political and media set, which desperately wanted us to stay in the EU, is peddling the politics of fear over Brexit. They’re telling us we’re heading towards economic catastrophe, that racism is on the rise and that Britain has become the Miss Havisham of Europe, destined to live out its remaining years in cobwebbed isolation.

Don’t believe a word of it. They’re just sore losers. In truth, Brexit opens up a whole new world of political and historic possibility. Brexit has brought politics back to life. The most striking thing it has done is expose the gaping chasm that separates the political and media elite from ordinary people.

Make no mistake: when 17.5 million of us ticked the Leave box, we weren’t only rejecting the bureaucrats of Brussels; we were rejecting our own establishment. We were defying it.

Most of the political class, the business elite, experts, academics and celebrities had spent months telling us to vote Remain. And we voted Leave. This is the bloodiest nose the British establishment has received in decades.

And the punch was delivered primarily by the poor and working class. These communities, who often don’t vote, voted Leave in vast numbers. The class divide in the referendum was extraordinary. Almost every class indicator tells us the down-at-heel were far likelier than the comfortably off to reject the EU.

So, of those parts of Britain with a high number of manufacturing jobs, 86 per cent voted Leave; of areas with low manufacturing levels, only 42 per cent voted Leave. Seventy-nine per cent of local authorities where the average house price is less than £282,000 ($503,000) voted Leave; only 28 per cent of areas where the house prices are higher than that voted Leave.

Of those boroughs that have low education levels, 83 per cent voted Leave; of boroughs with high education levels, only 46 per cent voted Leave.

This is my favourite fact: of the 50 parts of Britain that have the highest number of people from social classes D and E — semi-skilled or unskilled workers — 47 voted Leave. That is 47 very poor parts of Britain crying in unison: “No, we won’t give you what you want.”

And on it goes, stat after stat, revealing that if you do physical ­labour, don’t have a university degree and don’t earn much money, then you’re likelier to have voted Leave than people on the leafier side of the tracks.

Surveys suggest 60 per cent of working-class people are hostile to the EU, while a staggering 95 per cent of business leaders favour it. Readers of The Guardian and The Times are likelier than readers of The Sun to be pro-EU. We have bosses, the well-educated and the broadsheet set on one side, and toilers and tabloid readers on the other. Make no bones about it: this was a revolt of the lower orders. This is what I like most about Brexit: it was a puncturing, a conscious puncturing, of an aloof, smug establishment that thinks its worldview is superior to the little people’s.

Ordinary people, sick of being patronised and nanny-stated, sick of being told they’re bad parents and too fat, that they shouldn’t smoke, shouldn’t drink, shouldn’t be so un-PC or uncouth, seized this opportunity to take the elites down a peg or two.

They could see that the political class had invested an extraordinary amount of energy and resources into the Remain side. They knew how much this meant to the elite.

And they decided to deprive the elite of the thing it craved. The demos struck back.

The reaction from the chattering classes has been vicious. They have spent the past week branding Leave voters as “low-information”, ignorant, racist.

One ­Labour MP says the result must be overturned. It’s “madness”, he says, to let ordinary people’s “resentment and prejudice” determine the future of the nation.

There have been public protests by angry, Guardian-reading campaigners demanding that the referendum result be thrown out because there is “mass confusion” across the country. That is, the plebs don’t know what they’re doing. Observers have sniffed about hoi polloi being manipu­lated by demagogues, hoodwinked by misinformation, overcome with racist hatred against eastern Europeans.

These elitist libels, these nasty slurs, are easily disproved. In a post-referendum survey, only 34 per cent of Leave voters gave immigration as their main concern (and concern with immigration isn’t necessarily racist). Most gave democracy as their key reason for voting Leave. They think political decisions should be taken in London, not Brussels. That isn’t reactionary; it’s progressive.

The post-referendum defamation of certain sections of the public sums up why such vast numbers voted Leave in the first place. Because they’re sick of this. They’re sick of being treated as stupid and maybe even subhuman. And now they’ve asserted themselves, they’ve given the political class a reminder of their power; and in the process they’ve caused glorious upset to the global order.

They’ve injected clarity back into politics. They’ve revealed the fissures between an oligarchical elite and working people. They have exposed how cut off that elite is, so much so that it looks on a chunk of its electorate as unfeeling, unintelligent beasts. Best of all, they’ve put back on the agenda the voice of the ignored, of those who for too long have been treated by the nannying, nudging elite as unhealthy creatures to be morally improved. They’ve made David Cameron resign and pushed ­Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to the edge and rattled the entire establishment.

They have unfrozen politics. They have unfrozen history itself. The EU is really an attempt to suspend politics, to replace the difficult, tense business of political thought and action with managerialism and technocracy. It is a post-politics institution, allowing the leaders of European nations to govern without having to have too many awkward debates or to engage all the time with the throng.

The EU is a lid on European history. It suppresses, without resolving, tensions within Europe. It’s no accident that the EU as we know it was set up in 1992, soon after the reunification of Germany. For it was ultimately about keeping in check old hostilities, nagging rivalries, unresolved questions of power. It is about burying politics in favour of letting apolitical experts run things.

Now the British people, including our poor and uneducated, have blown it all apart. Their democratic assault on the EU has unsuspended politics, already, both in Britain, where the political and cultural divide has been thrown into sharp relief, and in Europe, where the EU is now in a state of panic, concerned that past political questions that were never satisfyingly answered may return if the suppressant that is the EU is weakened any further.

– On 15 June spiked hosted a discussion on hate speech at the October Gallery in London. Here are my opening remarks. –

One of the most curious things about 21st-century Europe is that it presents itself as anti-hate, and continually lectures us about how awful hatred is, and yet at the same time it feels like a very hateful place. And even more curious is that much of this hatefulness, much of the new and quite ugly disdain for whole swathes of people, comes from the very individuals who claim to be anti-hate. In fact it is sometimes sanctioned, implicitly at least, by these people who claim to be opposed to hate speech and who support hate-speech laws. They clamp down on hatred in one breath, yet express hatred in the next.

So we have this really contradictory situation today. A situation where pretty much every EU commissioner, politician, official and member of the media and education establishments claims to hate hatred and to want to stamp out hatred – and yet this anti-hatred ideology coexists with the rise of Twittermobs that say the most hateful things about people who have unpopular views; and with a new, casually expressed disgust for rednecks or the white working classes or Christians; and with a really ugly intolerance of people who have eccentric or just old-fashioned views. Modern, liberal Europe is against hatred, and yet it fosters hatred. I find this fascinating, and revealing.

Let me give you a few examples of what I mean. Over the past week alone, literally this past week, I have read what I consider to be hateful articles about working-class football fans, about old people, and about Labour voters. I have read an article describing football fans as “mindless” and “medieval”, as “unwashed and backward”, as lacking any semblance of “individual conscience”. I have read an article describing old people in the most disgusting way: as simple-minded, racist, parochial, physically incapable and utterly uncaring about future generations; as devoid of feeling, and devoid of rationalism. And I have read an article raging against a whole section of society – the poorer, white people who vote Labour – as rude, prejudiced, “impervious” to rational information, and as all having “crap jobs”. And these articles have appeared in mainstream publications that would normally rail against hate speech: the Guardian, the Evening Standard and Vice, which I know thinks it isn’t mainstream, but it is: it’s the angry little brother to the Guardian.

What’s interesting is that these same sentiments and comments, if expressed in a different context, and in relation to different groups of people, would unquestionably be called hate speech. They might even become matters of police investigation. Imagine if someone described people who follow basketball, many of whom are black, as unwashed, unclean, animalistic. Imagine if immigrants were described as simple-minded and impervious to factual information. Imagine if Muslims, people who follow Allah rather than the England football team, were called mindless or medieval. Imagine the uproar. In those cases, it would be hate speech; but when the targets are the elderly, or white workers, or football fans, it isn’t hate speech. The very people who bristle at what they call “hate speech” frequently engage in what we could quite realistically describe as hateful speech.

You see this all the time these days – people who claim to be anti-hate being hateful. Media feminists who myopically police hate speech against women will casually say the most demeaning things about working-class women who make decisions they don’t like. They call Page 3 girls “fodder”. They say some women suffer from “internalised misogyny”. That is, they have been brainwashed by culture and no longer know what is in their own best interests. They’re children. A classic sexist idea. The people who are most concerned about Islamophobia will happily ridicule Christians. They have invented a whole host of censorious terms to chastise criticism of Islam, from Islamophobia to hijabphobia: an irrational fear of the veil, apparently. Yet they mock Christians and even support state investigations of Christians for expressing their religious views, on homosexuality, for example. The people who are most disgusted by racism against black people will think nothing of speaking about “White People” as an undifferentiated, unintelligent, uncaring mass of people.

In the US, the very people who are in a panic about Donald Trump and his allegedly hate speech-spouting followers will say the most awful things about the poor and Southerners and people who aren’t like them. In recent years mainstream liberal commentary in the US has said that poor Republican voters use the irrational, lizard side to their brains; it has called them knuckle-draggers; it has continually called into question their capacity for rational thought. All the things that were said about black people in more racist eras – that their brains are different to ours and they lack the ability to rationalise – are now said by liberals about rednecks. The liberals who say Trump is engaging in hate speech against Muslims and Mexicans will happily, and uncontroversially, engage in hateful speech towards dumb whites, white trash, Christians, and so on. The critics of hate spout hate when it suits them.

This weird, contradictory situation was really summed up for me at a debate on Charlie Hebdo in LA that I attended earlier this year. One of the speakers was this super liberal, very popular Californian cartoonist. He said he despises Charlie Hebdo because it is hateful against less powerful people: Muslims. He said he wasn’t sure that Charlie Hebdo deserves freedom of speech. The audience nodded in agreement. Later on, he displayed one of his cartoons caricaturing Southerners who are opposed to gay marriage. He had drawn them as fat, ugly creatures, with tombstone teeth and hairy arms, almost as animals, as gorillas: it was reminiscent of how black people were caricatured in the past. The audience laughed. So here we had people agreeing that hatred of Islam is bad and then engaging in collective mocking, a two-minute hate, against poor Christian communities who are opposed to gay marriage. They were anti-hate and hateful at the same time.

This coexistence among the liberal elites of anti-hate and hate, of a war on hate speech alongside the promotion of hate speech, is very revealing. What it tells us, I think, is that today’s hate-speech codes and laws and clampdowns are not really about outlawing hatred; rather, they are about policing politics, policing ideology, policing passion, policing emotion itself. Under the guise of tackling hatred, the political classes are really seeking to punish ideas or views they find difficult or wrong or overly confrontational or just plain uncomfortable. They are implicitly communicating hatred for ways of thinking and ways of life they don’t like.

This slippage from clamping down on hate to punishing moral or political beliefs can be seen all the time these days. In his book ‘Censored’, Paul Coleman details very well the use of hate-speech laws to punish unfashionable moral convictions. There was the Swedish Christian pastor given a one-month suspended prison sentence for describing homosexuality as a tumour on society. That is, for expressing his genuinely held moral belief. There’s Brigitte Bardot, fined 30,000 Euros for describing the Islamic ritual slaughter of animals as barbaric and disgusting: again, her deeply held belief. Recently in Britain, a church was visited by the police for displaying a poster warning of the end of the world and the punishment of sinners. It was considered offensive, hateful; even core Christian beliefs can be redefined as hate and face investigation.

Hate-speech laws punish belief. They sanction disdain and disgust for certain outlooks, and for the people who hold them. In the very process of telling us what or who we may not hate – minority belief systems, vulnerable groups, the less powerful, and so on – hate-speech laws also tell us, by implication, what and who we may hate. They do not outlaw hate – they police hate; they differentiate between good hate and bad hate; they sanction hate. They tell us, in essence, that we may hate the hateful, we may be intolerant of the intolerant, we may be disgusted by the disgusting. And of course, what is hateful, and what is intolerant, is defined by them. It is strong-minded Christians, traditionalists, the old, the poor, the old-fashioned, the questioners of new moral orthodoxies – they are hateful, so you may hate them. Hate-speech controls do not end hate – they redirect it.

On 11 June I spoke at a youth Brexit rally in London. Here’s what I said.

One of the downsides to being a Leave campaigner is that we sometimes sound negative. For the simple reason that we are saying “No” to something. We are rejecting something. We are saying to the EU: “No, thanks”, “Screw you”, “Go away”, “We don’t want this”. We are trying to negate something – the Brussels oligarchy – and therefore we sound negative, naturally.

But I want to talk about what we are for. We all know what we are voting against on 23 June: a vast, bureaucratic, Byzantine system of government that usurps national democracy and which has treated countries like Greece, Italy and Ireland with the most grotesque contempt. But what are we voting for? More importantly, who are we voting for?

To my mind, our vote on 23 June is not simply a vote of no confidence in the EU – it is a vote of confidence in the people. It is not simply us saying we oppose Brussels bureaucrats – it is us saying we support the right of ordinary people, the voters, the public, to have the final say on political matters. We are not just saying we are against the EU – we’re saying that we are for the demos.

We are saying that when it comes to shaping the political future, we trust our friends, neighbours, workmates, fellow voters, strangers, the people who clean this building, more than we trust the elites of Brussels, and the elites here in Britain who support them.

We are voting for the masses. The Remain side trusts experts over ordinary people, which is why they cannot so much as finish a sentence without haughtily informing us how many economists, corporate bosses and IMF bureaucrats think we should stay in the EU. They’re effectively saying, “Listen to the clever people, you plebs”. Ours is a vote for the plebs, for their moral autonomy, for their right to have control over the people who make the laws.

And we aren’t only voting for the plebs here in Britain. We are voting for the plebs in Greece, Italy and Ireland, whose democratic will was so thoroughly trashed by Brussels. We are voting for the plebs in France and Holland, whose democratic rejection of the EU Constitution was ignored by Brussels. We are voting for the swarm of Eurosceptics across the continent, who are growing in number, as a Pew survey revealed last week. In Greece, France and Spain there are now majorities who view the EU unfavourably; in Holland, Sweden and Italy the number of unfavourables is growing and looks set to become a majority soon. These people include right wingers, left wingers, old people, trade unionists, the poor, the working class, the middle class – people from all walks of life, who are looking to us to make a decisive strike against the EU. We are voting for them. Because we also trust them more than the aloof regime in Brussels. Ours is a vote for solidarity with the people of Europe who want change.

We are voting for risk and adventure. It is the Remain lobby that is deeply, profoundly conservative, not us. They are desperate to preserve the status quo, constantly warning us: “Don’t take a leap into the unknown.” We are voting for the unpredictable course, the risky course, for a leap into the unknown. Because we recognise that every good thing mankind enjoys – from science to industry to the idea of freedom itself – started with someone taking a leap into the unknown.

We are voting for the democratic ideal. Against a European Commission that draws up laws and directives far away from us, and from our input and say-so, we are voting for the idea that people must have the right to consent to the institutions that govern them. We are voting for an ideal that people fought and died for over centuries.

We are voting for the Leveller idea that the “supreme authority” in politics should be a parliament directly elected by the people, and that if there is any authority above that then it is tyranny. We are voting for the Chartist ideal, which said “it is necessary to subject those who have the power of making the laws to a wholesome and strict responsibility to those whose duty it is to obey them when made”. We are voting for the Suffragette conviction that if people are expected to obey laws, then they must have “a share in making them”. Against a Brussels machine that has developed a Kafkaesque system for the drawing-up and imposition of laws that affect the lives of 500million people who have not directly consented to the EC, and cannot directly depose of it, we are fighting for the hard-won right of peoples to consent, or refuse to consent, to the institutions that write laws for them. We’re voting for that. We’re voting for the democratic warriors of the past.

Most importantly we are voting for ourselves. To the Remain side the true virtue of the EU is that it passes directives that our national governments cannot wriggle out of – on climate change, workers’ rights, etc – and so it acts as an allegedly civilising check on the people that we the dumb mob voted for. This is deeply anti-democratic. It is motored by a profound distrust of voters, and even of oneself. Apparently our passions are so heated and peculiar that we need bureaucrats and experts to monitor us and sometimes stop us from doing certain political things. We are voting against that, and we are voting for us. Our vote is a statement of faith in ourselves and in our rational decision-making capacity. It is a statement of faith in the entire idea of the democratic citizen: rational, adult, free-thinking and a central, rightful part of the supreme authority in matters of politics.

This is what irritates me about the narrative that says Leave campaigners are negative and fearful and depressing. Because voting to leave the EU is about as positive a political stance as one can take. We might be saying “No” to the EU, but we are saying “Yes” to more democracy, better democracy, to debate, to the demos, to ordinary people, to our Eurosceptic brothers and sisters in Greece, France, Sweden and across the continent, and to the idea that the collective say of a people is always preferable – and better – than the aloof, often jaundiced wisdom of priests, kings and now Eurocrats who have always insisted that they know better than us.

Whatever happens on 23 June, we should not stop making the argument for democracy. Democracy won’t be magically fixed by leaving the EU. That’s only a start. A lot more will need to be done to defend and expand people’s democratic clout. But we should be delighted that this referendum is taking place, for it has fundamentally called into question the existence of the EU. It has said that this institution doesn’t always have to exist. It has thrown the very existence of the Brussels oligarchy open to discussion and doubt and anger. It has struck fear into the hearts of EU officials: there’s a reason they’re doing Project Fear – because they are genuinely terrified. This referendum asks us, in essence, “Do you want to dismantle the rotten political order in 21st-century Europe?” And our answer to this is positive, too:

On 13 April I took part in a conversation about censorship as part of Freedom Day at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. These were my conversation kickstarters.

– Once, we had political censorship and religious censorship, designed to protect certain ideas from questioning and ridicule. Now we have therapeutic censorship designed to protect individuals and their self-esteem from hurtful, offensive or challenging comments. This new censorship is even worse than the old censorship, because it is so swirling and subjective. Anything that any individual finds threatening can potentially be demonised and even censured, especially on campuses. Where blasphemy laws elevated Christ above the fray of mere mortal debate, therapeutic censorship makes us all into little Christs, deserving of our own personal blasphemy law and forcefield against criticism. It’s the high point of our culture of narcissism.

– When it comes to campus censorship, we can’t blame “snowflake students” for everything. Their censorious agitation is only the latest expression of a trend that’s been growing for years. It’s all well and good to mock “safe spaces”, but they are surely only the logical conclusion to all those speech codes adopted by American universities in the 1990s which defined campuses as potentially “hostile environments”. If a university redefines itself as a “hostile environment”, it can’t be surprised by students’ search for a “safe space”. We can laugh at trigger warnings, but these, too, come from the 1980s / 1990s idea that words wound, and indeed from the po-mo conviction that language constructs both us as individuals and the reality all around us. The philosophical foundations of both safe spaces and trigger warnings were laid before today’s students were even born. These “snowflakes” express in ruder form a new censorship that both liberals and leftists allowed to develop, and which they even spearheaded.

– Beware talk of phoney rights. One of the most striking things in the argument for censorship today is how the language of freedom is twisted to demand restrictions and restraints. The censorious claim merely to be defending their rights rather than limiting other people’s. They are merely “rearranging public platforms” to give the marginalised a voice, which is doublespeak for demanding that certain people be No Platformed in favour of others. Or they say they’re fighting for the right to feel comfortable, the right to be safe, the right not to feel offended or undermined. But you don’t have the right to feel comfortable. Or even safe, if we’re talking about mental, intellectual safety. These are phoney rights used to undermine the real right to freedom of speech. In every single spat over speech, we should defend the speakers’ rights, no matter how many people he’s pissing off.

This is the text of a speech I gave at Cambridge University on 1 March 2016.

The Brexit camp has asked the BBC to do it one, pretty small favour in the run-up to the EU referendum: to differentiate between “Europe” and “the EU”. To encourage its reporters to say “Europe” only when they are referring to the vast continent we live in, and to say “the EU” when they are referring to the Brussels-run union of 28 member states.

And the BBC has refused. Or it has at least failed to clarify when these two very different terms may be used by its staff. This means the BBC has implicitly given a nod of approval to its reporters to say “Europe” when they really mean “the EU”.

Some observers think the Brexit lobby is mad for asking for this reporting clarification from the BBC. A writer for the New Statesman said it showed that some people will find bias in the most innocuous of things. In other words: chill out; it is not a problem for the national broadcaster to use the terms “Europe” and “the EU” interchangeably; stop making a fuss about nothing, you Europhobic idiots.

But I think the BBC’s unwillingness to maintain a distinction between “Europe” and “the EU” is actually very revealing, and worrying.

It speaks to one of the worst aspects of the debate about the EU: the conflation of the Brussels-based oligarchy with the continent of Europe; the depiction of the small, unaccountable cliques who peer down at Europe from their air-conditioned towers in Brussels with Europe itself.

Think about some of the phrases that could potentially be used by BBC reporters if they use “Europe” for “EU”. They could say that the people of Peterborough, which is one of the most anti-EU parts of Britain, are “against Europe”. They could say that people in Warrington, the seventh most Eurosceptic part of Britain, “hate Europe” or are “voting to get out of Europe”.

But of course they’re doing no such thing. Britain isn’t leaving the continent of Europe. That isn’t what we’re voting on. And these people in Peterborough and Warrington might love Europe. They might holiday in Spain, have friends in France, love Swedish TV dramas. Many, if not most, of them won’t be anti-European — they’re just anti-EU.

The Remain campaign’s habit of conflating “Europe” and “the EU” means that those who are anti-EU can be easily depicted as anti-Europe, as xenophobic or nationalistic. These people’s political outlook — their dislike of the way Brussels can impose its writ on nation states — is reduced to a prejudiced outlook, a simple case of being anti-Europe. Their politics is pathologised, turned from opposition to a political system into opposition to a whole continent and its cultures and peoples.

This is why we so often see the use of the term Europhobic. This term explicitly pathologises people’s dislike of the EU. It treats it almost as a mental illness: a phobia is an irrational fear.

The Guardian recently said that ordinary people’s Europhobia has been “pandered to and fed by Tory leaders”. So there’s a strange, fearful mob out there and the Tories are recklessly stirring it up. This week, a writer for New Europe magazine listed “Europhobia” alongside “xenophobia, nationalism, Islamophobia and racism”, as values that are “alien to our postwar European culture”.

See how casually criticism of the EU, opposition to the Brussels oligarchy, is reduced to a phobia, an ism, something which goes against the ideals of Europe itself.

We must challenge the cynical conflation of “Europe” and “the EU”, and we must challenge the pathologisation of Brussels’ critics as phobic or dumb. Because, to my mind, the EU and Europe are not even remotely the same thing.

Actually, I’d go further and say that the EU grates against everything that is brilliant about Europe. The EU is an ugly, illiberal, undemocratic blot on the wonderful continent of Europe. The EU is a stain on the best, most inspiring values of Europe and its peoples. It is the EU that is anti-Europe.

I love Europe, but I hate the EU. I consider myself a European. I don’t have any special emotional attachment to Great Britain. I love London, but I’m kind of Irish, and if I could afford it I would live in Paris.

My argument for getting out of the EU is not a Little Englander one. It’s not because I think Britain is the best country in this continent. It’s not because I love the pound or the Queen. It’s because the EU is detrimental to the whole of Europe, and particularly to two incredibly important values that European peoples have in various ways been fighting for tooth-and-nail for hundreds of years: democracy and liberty. The EU is anti-democratic and illiberal.

Supporters of the EU tell us it is a happy-clappy union of the European peoples. Nonsense. It is a union of European elites who want to avoid their peoples. The EU is the mechanism through which national governments outsource various powers and decision-making processes to distant, aloof, mostly unaccountable bodies like the European Commission and the European Court of Justice.

The true instinct behind the Brussels machine is not to bring Europe together. It is to absolve national governments of the burden of having to consult us, the plebs, about important political and social matters, in favour of allowing various experts and cliques in Brussels to discuss and shape such things on our behalf. The EU’s fuel is not cosmopolitanism — it’s democracy-dodging.

From the outset, the EU has not been the embodiment of people’s will — it has been a struggle against people’s will. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty that founded the EU was only just approved by France and was rejected by Denmark. And of course, John Major’s Tory government refused to put it to a referendum. British people were co-opted into the EU without our explicit say-so.

Almost every time they have been asked about the EU, people in Europe have said “We don’t want it”. In Ireland in 2001, voters said No to the Nice Treaty. In 2005, the new EU Constitution was rejected by voters in France and Holland. EU bureaucrats then denounced the French and Dutch as “ignorant” and “xenophobic”. One MEP said it was mad to subject something as important as the EU’s constitution to the “lottery” of public opinion.

The European Commission responded to this French and Dutch disobedience by renaming the EU Constitution the “Lisbon Treaty”, which EC vice-president Margot Wallstrom admitted was “essentially the same proposal as the old constitution”. Only this time people wouldn’t be asked to vote on it, because, in the words of Nicolas Sarkozy, “a referendum now would bring Europe into danger”. So democracy is a threat to Europe; the people’s will is a danger, a risk, something that runs counter to the EU project.

In 2008, the Irish were permitted to vote on the Lisbon Treaty. And they said No. They were slammed and defamed by Brussels bureaucrats and forced to vote again. Under the pressure of the EU’s economic blackmail, they said Yes second time time.

The EU is not an expression of European people's will. On the contrary, it has been constituted time and again in direct opposition to people's will. The people’s will is a “danger” to this project.

The hostility of the EU to national sentiment and democratically elected governments can also be seen in its constant hectoring of the governments of Eastern Europe.

In 2006, the elected prime minister of Slovakia was instructed by Brussels to challenge political extremism in his country and repress certain political ways of thinking or else risk being in breach of EU regulations. In 2006, the prime minister of Poland was forced by Brussels to declare that his government was not homophobic or anti-Semitic and that it would not bring back the death penalty. In 2011, the EU pressured the Hungarian government to rethink its new constitution.

In 2000, when the far-right Freedom Party won 27 per cent of votes in Austria, enough to enter into a coalition government, Brussels imposed diplomatic sanctions on Austria. There would be no “business as usual”, the EU decreed, so long as the Freedom Party remained in government. The Freedom Party that had just been elected by huge numbers of Austrian people.

Brussels’ lecturing of Eastern governments doesn’t only expose the anti-democratic instincts of the EU — it also gives the lie to the idea that the EU has united the nations of Europe. Actually the EU has nurtured new and deep divisions, primarily between the apparently civilised West of Europe and the allegedly dark, twisted East of Europe which must constantly be punished and corrected, but also between the supposedly industrious north and the apparently lazy, financially reckless south. The Iron Curtain is back, and the north-south divide is back, in a new, insidious way.

The Brussels oligarchy’s view of democracy as dangerous became most apparent in 2011. In that year it worked to impose technocratic governments in Greece and Italy and to import a gang of bankers and bureaucrats to Dublin to keep a watchful eye on the Irish government and its austerity measures. It rode roughshod over democracy, and effectively installed benign tyrannies.

Mario Monti, the unelected technocrat charged with controlling Italy on behalf of Brussels, actually boasted about the aloof regime he was running. He said: “The absence of political personalities removes any ground for disagreement.” This is what EU and its lackeys really hate: politics, personality, debate, disagreement, the lifeblood of democracy. They far prefer the rule of experts, the rule of technocrats.

And their fanboys in the media agree. In 2011, the Guardian published an article headlined “In defence of Europe’s technocrats”. It argued that “temporary technocrat rule may well be… acceptable — perhaps necessary — at a time of crisis”. Here we have an explicit defence of the destruction of democracy. An open, unabashed argument for the rule of the unelected. And it comes, not from the far right or neo-fascists or other extremist groups that we are constantly told pose a threat to European values, but from the Guardian, from so-called liberals, from supposed EU cosmopolitans.

Some people argue that the EU is our best guard against the kind of tyranny Europe experienced in the 1930s and 40s. Yet as they say this, Brussels installs unelected leaders, blackmails elected prime ministers, describes democratic referendums as a “danger”. Under the cover of keeping at bay the tyrannies of the past, the EU constructs a new kind of tyranny.

The vile attacks on the voters of France and Holland and Ireland, the dictating to the elected governments of Eastern Europe, the enforcement of technocratic rule or oversight in Greece and Italy…. none of this is accidental or merely a response to particularly tense, crisis-ridden moments in recent years. Rather, it is in the very nature of the EU to be suspicious of or outright hostile towards the views and attitudes and will of European peoples.

Indeed, the EU has shaped itself precisely around European elites’ feeling of exhaustion with the democratic process. The EU is the means through which politics can be done in a distant and post-democratic way. And to this end, at the very top of Brussels, there is the EC, a body that is emblematic of the EU’s agitation with democracy. This executive body, responsible for proposing EU legislation, is unelected. It has 28 members, one for each member state, who are nominated by the member states. You have no more power to get rid of this tiny clique of commissioners that makes law on your behalf than you have of walking on the Moon this evening. They are beyond your reach, yet they make laws that impact on your life. That is fundamentally contrary to the sprit and letter of democracy. It cuts against the basic democratic principle that we should consent to the institutions that rule us.

The EU doesn’t only trash democracy. It restricts liberty too. This vast oligarchical entity is, unsurprisingly, hostile to the idea that people should be free to think and say what they please and to live their lives as they see fit so long as they don’t harm anyone else.

The EU does not trust you plebs. It continually passes rules or laws that seek to govern your minds and lives. It tells all national governments to restrict speech that incites hatred “based on race, sex, religion or nationality”, an explicit attack on free speech. It has seriously discussed outlawing the denial not only of the Holocaust — which would be illiberal enough — but also of various other crimes against humanity. This would massively dent academic freedom and historical debate.

Its illiberalism is often mad and petty. It has banned chocolate candy cigarettes on the basis that they “appeal to minors” and could be a gateway to real smoking. It has passed regulations designed to protect “vulnerable consumers” — ie. stupid ordinary people — including by restricting the advertising of formula milk to new mums who, in the EU’s eyes, should be breastfeeding and not arrogantly making their own parenting choices. It wants to ban diabetics from driving. It enforces controls on products that use a certain amount of wattage, in an attempt to make us uncaring idiots more eco-friendly, whether we want to be or not.

The EU thinks our nationally expressed political will is dangerous, and it thinks it is dangerous to leave us to our own devices, to let us say what we want, buy what we want, behave as we want. This is an institution designed to circumscribe your democratic rights and your everyday ability to run your life.

It goes against what it means to be European. For hundreds of years, through democratic upheavals, revolutions, struggles against arbitrary power and struggles for enlightenment, the peoples of Europe have sought to gain greater control over both their nations’ political affairs and their own lives. The EU undermines both of these things, both democracy and individual liberty. It is against the gains of history. It is against Europe. It is against us.

As someone who considers himself left-wing, I’m horrified that lefties are often at the forefront of defending this elitist institution. It is an historic black mark against the reputation of the left that it has been the chief cheerleader of an institution that undoes so many of the great gains of past radicals and progressives.

We must leave the EU, in order to start the process of recovering our democratic clout. But we must do more than that: we must also encourage and offer solidarity to other European peoples who want to leave. Too much of the current debate is focused around, “What will happen to Britain if we leave?” My concern is what will happen to the other European peoples who will remain stuck in this awful institution. We must fight with them, alongside them, and create a new and real unity across Europe: a union not of elites who distrust the people, but of peoples who have had more than they can take of these backward elites.