Brendan O'Neill (journalist)

Brendan O'Neill is the editor of Spiked Online and a columnist for The Australian and The Big Issue.

He began his career at Spiked's predecessor, Living Marxism, the journal of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which ceased publication after ITN won their libel action against it.

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

In his 2012 article titled 'If You Were Abused By Jimmy Savile, Maybe You Should Keep It to Yourself', O'Neill argues against victims of sexual abuse by high-profile individuals coming forward, arguing that "I think there is more virtue in keeping the abuse as a firm part of your past, rather than offering it up to a scandal-hungry media and abuse-obsessed society that are desperate for more episodes of perversion to pore over."

O'Neill has criticised the notion of tackling global warming by solely reducing carbon emissions, and instead advocates technological progress as a method of overcoming any side-effects of climate change. In January 2006, he co-founded the Manifesto Club, an organisation "with the aim of challenging cultural trends that restrain and stifle people's aspirations and initiative". Broadly libertarian, he considers efforts to combat racism in football to be "a class war" driven by "elites' utter incomprehension of the mass passions that get aired at football matches". Referring to high-profile cases of racial abuse and alleged racial abuse, he argued, "these incidents and alleged incidents are not racism at all, in the true meaning of the word", due to the levels of passion involved, describing anti-racism efforts as "a pretty poisonous desire to police the ... working classes".

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