the online magazine is 25 years old this year, and I have been writing for it since it launched. My editors there have all been brilliant, from Mick Hume, through Brendan O'Neill, Tom Slater, Tim Black and Fraser Myers.

The articles linked here cover many subjects, from the creative industries, through the housing crisis, energy and green politics, imperialism and the middle east, and the politics of commemorating the past.

These writing were driven by Spiked's humanistic and critical take on the world and how it is run, and my own preoccupations and research.

Some of the issues have changed over time, but one thing stands out as a frame for all of them. It is the decline of the left and the crisis of political direction that flowed out of that are behind most of the morbid symptoms covered here.

How the child-abuse inquiry failed grooming-gang victims 8th January 2025

David Lammy is mad to have flirted with reparations 15th October 2024

Why was Grenfell covered in cladding? Climate targets 5th September 2024

Starmer’s performative crackdown on the Corbynites 27th July 2024

Hamas is the enemy of the Palestinian People 23 June 2024

Starmer's night of the plastic knives 30 May 2024

London's Jews are fighting back agains the bigots 24 May 2024

The Truth about the Houthis 2 March 2024

No, Britain's wealth was not built on Slavery 3 January 2024

No, Israel is not a 'colonial settler state' 7 November 2023

Against reparations 8 August 2023

The taming of the Bash Street Kids 26 July 2023

The dark genius of Martin Amis 24 May 2023

The treasures of the world belong to us all 14 May 2023

The problem with apologising for slavery 18 April 2023

How Sadiq Khan is punishing Londoners 4 April 2023

No, opposing ULEZ is not 'far right' 6 March 2023

Angela Davis' ancestry reveals the folly of reparations 1 March 2023

How the press fell for the 'Russiagate' conspiracy 8 February 2023

Alan Cummings' shallow anti-imperialism 31 January 2023

A brief history of the end of the world 27 January 2023

The hidden story of the British Empire 11 December 2022

The queen and the colonies: it's complicated 14 September 2022

Why Chileans rejected a new 'progressive' constitution 9 September 2022

Keir Starmer is still no friend of Brexit 8 July 2022

Carole Cadwalladr’s fake news 22nd June 2022

How the green agenda fed the Grenfell disaster 14th June 2022

How Lutfur Rahman made his comeback 14th May 2022

A Jamaican republic is long overdue 25th March 2022

The great populist revival 9th February 2022

Remainers are still baffled by Brexit 25th October 2021

Rwanda: a dictatorship loved by the West 20th September 2021

The Covid surveillance state is no model for the future 31st August 2021

The self-defeating rage of Owen Jones 8th August 2021

The truth about historic child sex abuse 2nd August 2021

Dominic Cummings’ delusions of grandeur 21st July 2021

History shows us why vaccines must be voluntary 31st May 2021

The ugly truth about the Guardian 5th May 2021

Opposition to lockdown is on the march 26th April 2021

The British Empire betrayed those who fought for it 22nd April 2021

How Britain became institutionally anti-racist 15th April 2021

The government is glorifying slavery? Oh grow up 1st April 2021

Where are the postmodernists when you need them? 17th March 2021

Is the opposition on furlough? 5th March 2021

We must defend Piers Corbyn’s freedom of speech 4th February 2021

The Corbynite dream is in tatters 2nd December 2020

Margaret Thatcher was no friend of freedom 24th November 2020

Why Labour keeps screwing up on anti-Semitism 18th November 2020

An assault on a vindication of woman 11th November 2020

How the country house kept land from the people 23rd September 2020

The middle-class fantasy of working from home 8th September 2020

No, Putin is not a global mastermind 3rd August 2020

Labour has finally admitted it lost the working class 23rd June 2020

A healthy society does not destroy its monuments 17th June 2020

Black lives matter more than lockdown 4th June 2020

The Mis-Anthropocene 19th May 2020

The Electoral Commission’s campaign against democracy 1st May 2020

Corbyn was stabbed in the back… but that’s not why he lost 13th April 2020

Why Corbyn failed 27th March 2020

Coronavirus is nothing like the Second World War 19th March 2020

Why ‘Empire nostalgia’ is declining 16th March 2020

Against eugenics 18th February 2020

Christopher Steele: MI5’s very own Walter Mitty 3rd February 2020

Debunking the ‘schools don’t teach about empire’ myth 23rd January 2020

Labour’s housing promise is hot air 26th November 2019

Stop apologising for the past 20th November 2019

The Brexit Party blinked 18th November 2019

Voter ID will damage democracy 14th October 2019

The reparations racket 25th September 2019

Who’s afraid of the ‘white working class’? 17th September 2019

What Brexit and the Olympics really have in common 29th July 2019

Tom Watson: time’s up for the paedo-finder general 25th July 2019

Voters, not quangos, should pass judgement on Corbyn’s Labour 8th March 2019

The culture war over Winston Churchill 19th February 2019

Angela Davis deserves her award 15th January 2019

War poetry matters 8th November 2018

Victim culture eats one of its own 29th August 2018

Kofi Annan: frontman for Western meddling 20th August 2018

Grenfell and the problem of carbon targets 14th June 2018

Ken Livingstone: undone by his own brand of anti-racism 22nd May 2018

How the working class was shut out 2nd February 2018

JFK and the paranoid style 1st November 2017

A music-hall Marx 26th October 2017

Sajid Javid wants to build? He should bulldoze the Green Belt 23rd October 2017

No, colonialism wasn’t a good thing... 17th October 2017

Should Nelson’s column come down? 24th August 2017

Dunkirk: a British myth 24th July 2017

Grenfell: clad in climate-change politics 26th June 2017

Grenfell: the lie of London’s urban renaissance 15th June 2017

Human rights don’t protect our liberty 7th June 2017

Farewell, Baxendale and his Bash St Kids 27 April 2017

30 March 2015
Give us the freedom to build our own homes
We need 260,000 new homes a year, and officials won’t build them.

24 March 2015
The Communist who made Singapore a capitalist success
Lee Kuan Yew transformed a small trading post – but at a cost.

9 January 2015
Ulrich Beck and the turn against modernity
The late sociologist encapsulated the fears of our era.

17 July 2014
How the Tories ignited the paedophile panic
Revealing the right-wing origins of today's child-abuse hysteria.

9 July 2014
The sex ring at the heart of the British establishment… 100 years ago

19 June 2014
Operation Lollipop: a useful parody
How were Twitter’s hashtag activists so easily hoaxed by #EndFathersDay?

12 June 2014
Homeless spikes: a symptom of the housing crisis
Instead of whining about this petty measure against rough sleepers, we should be building more houses for all.

2 June 2014
A comically incomplete exhibition
The Beano was more rebellious than today’s gothic graphic novels, but the British Library’s Comics Unmasked ignores it.

23 May 2014
The left is over? I hate to say I told you so
A left-wing writer has finally cottoned on to the decline of the labour movement – but his proposals for a revival are deluded.

20 May 2014
The green and NIMBYist war on housebuilding
Nearly everyone recognises that Britain needs more houses. So why won’t we build them?

25 November 2013
Why greens love high fuel bills
Ever-rising energy prices are the product of green attacks on our consumption habits.

19 November 2013
The Gettysburg Address: a great work of humanity
150 years on, Lincoln’s words retain their democratic power.

21 October 2013
The Newspeak of ‘human-centred’
David Chandler’s Freedom vs Necessity dissects the way governments offer us choice today - as long as we make the ‘right’ choice.

8 October 2013
Both Labour and Tories have failed to mind the energy gap
While party leaders bleat about rising energy bills, their policies have undermined the UK’s capacity to generate power.

17 July 2013
Time to face the housing crisis head on
The UK housing shortage has reached crisis proportions. Building a few thousand ‘affordable’ homes is no solution.

11 July 2013
Domestic violence is falling. Why aren't people celebrating?

7 May 2013
UKIP’s rise: a shortlived rebellion
The success of anti-EU parties speaks to the decline of the old political order rather than to the rise of a new one.

22 April 2013
How to solve the housing crisis
Britain's housing stock is too old and too expensive. The only answer is to build millions of new homes.

25 January 2013
How to overcome racism: a hopeful subject
A new book explains how both racism and multiculturalism have been state-led projects. The way out, the authors argue, is to revive a sense of common, purposeful humanity.

2 January 2013
When Lincoln and Marx were on the same side
150 years ago, Lancashire cotton workers fought alongside Abraham Lincoln to abolish slavery in the US.

2 October 2012
Eric Hobsbawm and the tragedy of the left
Where Hobsbawm’s histories of the 19th century were enlivened by his Marxism, his histories of the 20th century were corrupted by his Stalinism.

29 June 2012
Seeking salvation, behind society’s back
Reviewing Jacques Ranciere, and David Black and Chris Ford on Chartists and Utopians in the Nineteenth Century

27 April 2012
We are not all mentally ill now
Kenneth McLaughlin’s Surviving Identity is an important salvo against the mainstreaming of mental health treatment.

24 February 2012
A surreal commitment to Stalinism
Román Gubern and Paul Hammond’s excellent new biography of the surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel reveals the reactionary impulses behind his anarchical facade.

27 January 2012,
Review of Lucio Magri's memoir of the Italian Communist Party

20 September 2011
On the 'Hands orf Our Land campaign

13 September 2011
 In defence of Dale Farm Gypsies

29 July 2011
On the Aborigines' Protection Society,

24 June 2011
Governing the Empire

2 March 2011
On Education and the Working Class

25 February 2011
Review of Lizzie Collingham's book The Taste of War

25 May 2010
'Why the EU will thrive on Greek Troubles',

26 March 2010
Review of Ian MacEwan's Solar

11 January 2010
On Yemen

20 April 2009
obituary of J.G. Ballard

11 February 2009
Council Housing plans

26 January 2009
against the Dale Farm evictions

29 December
On Harold Pinter,
with Sandy Starr

5 December 2008
Review of Channel 4's The Devil's Whore

23 September 2008
Capitalising on climate change
The emergence of a market in carbon emission rights shows that there is big money to be made from trading in hot air.

16 July 2008
'Who demolished the housing industry?'

7 July 2008
'don't blame bio-fuel'

3 June 2008
farmers' protests in Perpignan

20 May 2008
Gordon Brown at NESTA

7 April 2008
Gordon Brown's Eco Towns Con

28 January 2008
obituary of Indonesia's Suharto

25 January 2008
Review Lucy Robinson's Gay men and the Left

7 January 2008
on Xmas sales and green snobs

27 December 2007
on Putin's Time 'man of the year' award

21 December 2007
Chris Dillow's book on The End of Politics reviewed,

18 December 2007
Eco-Imperialism at Bali

6 November 2007
Fifteen Housing Myths,

1 October 2007
The High Price of Britain's Housing Shortage

20 September 2007
Review of Oona King and Alastair Campbell's diaries

18 September 2007
GM: where the science does not count

11 September 2007
farewell
Anita Roddick, Green Capitalist

23 July 2007
'Stop Romanticising Council Housing'

20 July 2007
review of Rick Kuhn's biography of Henryk Grossman

11 July 2007
Who’s to blame for crazy house prices?
With NIMBYist sentiments enshrined in policy, and house-builders tied up by bureaucracy, it is little wonder people can’t afford to buy a home.

27 June 2007
TV as judge and executioner
BBC2's Hunt for Britain’s Paedophiles was a sordid show.

21 June 2007
Let Technology set you Free
my review of Barbrook, Edgerton, Elliott and Atkinson on technology, old and new

20 June 2007
a rebuttal of Tristram Hunt's Thames Gateway histrionics

22 May 2007
denouncing Margaret Hodge's 'white's first' housing policy

 9 May 2007
Seeing people as a plague on the planet
The Optimum Population Trust’s claim that having a large family is an eco-crime exposes the anti-human streak in green politics.

8 May 2007
The road to Baghdad was paved with good intentions on Blair's Wars

26 April 2007
Review of Channel 4's "The Human Footprint"

24 April 2007
an obituary of Boris Yeltsin

16 April 2007
on the Moscow protests

19 Feb. 2007
 Review of Lynsey Hanley's Estates: an intimate history

8 Feb. 2007
'Bring down the House',
Response to reform of the Lords

23 January 2007
Not-so-positive discrimination
Richard Nixon and the Rise of Affirmative Action, Kevin Yuill, Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.

17 Jan. 2007, 
'A United Kingdom of Britain and France'

on the revelation that Guy Mollet proposed it to Anthony Eden in 1956

20 December 2006
Caught up in a new Cold War (with Julia Svetlichnaja)
When we interviewed Alexander Litvinenko, we had no idea we would end up being branded as Kremlin agents.

7 December 2006
Standing up for science
Science vs Superstition: The Case for a New Scientific Enlightenment, edited by Jim Panton and Oliver Marc Hartwich, Policy Exchange, 2006.

30 November 2006
Putting Russia in the frame
The response to Alexander Litvinenko’s death implies that all Russians are collectively guilty of skulduggery.

15 Nov 2006
my review
of Bettina Aptheker's memoirs

11 October 2006
A secular version of Kingdom Come
Environmental polemicist George Monbiot's new book asks why people do not act on their fears of climate change. Good question.

2 October 2006
Pervez Musharraf: Mau-Mauing the flak-catcher
The Pakistani president exploits Western fears of radical Islamism to boost his standing at home and abroad.

12 September 2006
Britain’s phantom housing boom

26 July 2006
Will Self’s mockery of the mockneys
The Book of Dave envisions a post-apocalyptic London, rebuilt along lines imagined by all those novelists obsessed with the seamy side of life in the capital.

29 June 2006
A miserabilist history of the twentieth century
Niall Ferguson’s War of the World is shot through with a negative view of progress and some dubious socio-biological thinking.

31 May 2006
Do we need a nicer nationalism?
David Goodhart is trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear with his call for 'progressive nationalism' in Britain.

27 April 2006
Interdependent we stand, divided we fall
The New Economics Foundation’s report on 'ecological debt' is a fascinating picture of Britain's exploitation of the world's resources. But it is frustratingly one-sided.

11 April 2006
Attacking Berlusconi for all the wrong reasons
His bank balance, foul language, rumoured plastic surgery: the left focused on Berlusconi's personal foibles because politically they aren't that different to him.

4 April 2006
Farewell to the city?
Ignore the New Urbanists and 'Londonostalgics' - the end of the boundary between town and country is a liberation, not a loss, says a writer on urban issues.

28 March 2006
Pinochet in Suburbia
The BBC drama on Britain’s detention of Pinochet was nostalgic for Blair's brief ‘ethical foreign policy’

7 March 2006
The biggest scandal in Italian politics
Never mind Tessa Jowell's husband David Mills; it's the Italian magistrates hunting him that we should be worried about.

6 January 2006
Who's afraid of the Thames Gateway?
Why government proposals to build 200,000 new homes in London and Kent are causing a stink in certain circles.

16 December 2005
Humanitarian interventionists dig in
In his new book Anti-Totalitarianism, Oliver Kamm makes a shrill and inconsistent defence of the Iraq war.

30 November 2005
City, suburbs and snobs
Richard Rogers' warnings about middle-class flight to the countryside are wide of the mark.

17 November 2005
Cox Report: creative accounting
Designers and admen aren't going to save the British economy.

8 November 2005
Who's fanning the flames?
It is not that assimilation has failed, but that France only pays lip service to assimilation.

2 November 2005
They should have dropped the Code of Conduct, not the minister
The manufactured scandal over David Blunkett's earnings shows up the problem of over-regulation.

21 October 2005
Conservation's Conservative streak
We shouldn’t be surprised that the Green Zac Goldsmith has turned Blue.

16 September 2005
Disability on a pedestal
Marc Quinn's sculpture of Alison Lapper in Trafalgar Square creates a tension between what we are supposed to think, and what we really feel.

12 September 2005
Concreting over the facts
That's enough handwringing about 'the end of the countryside': the vast majority of Britain is greenfield, and it's likely to stay that way.

30 August 2005
Behind the ‘bra wars’
Making sense of the EU-China spat over textiles.

10 August 2005
Robin Cook: from ethical imperialist to anti-war activist

3 August 2005
Don’t protect the Green Belt - build on it

12 July 2005
Revisiting the Blitz Spirit
Myths about the Second World War won't help us understand what is happening today.

4 July 2005
Mao: The end of the affair
A new biography by former Maoists Jung Chang and Jon Halliday blames Mao for everything that has gone wrong in China. What are they trying to hide?

14 June 2005
Bureaucrat of the Year
Hilary Cottam won Designer of the Year for her work on Kingsdale School in south London, even though she didn’t design it

17 May 2005
Abolish the DCMS

9 May 2005
Second World War: The Battle of the Books

29 April 2005
The end of Blairism?
Personality looms large in New Labour because it is a marketing initiative, not a movement.

15 April 2005
British manufacturing: they think it’s all Rover
The collapse of the Birmingham-based car company points to deep structural faults in British industry.

26 January 2005
All Talk and No Bricks
Britain needs new homes - but the government just makes proposals.

21 January 2005
Pitting parent against parent

The case against the Parental Separation Bill

10 December 2004
Constructing Global Civil Society
A new book asks why, from Iraq to Ukraine, Western politics is being played out everywhere but in the West.

11 November 2004
Arafat’s tragedy
He helped to found the idea of Palestinian independence, but ended up as a mouthpiece of great power politics.

11 October 2004
Deconstructing Derrida
The French philosopher is dead, but his legacy lives on in the age of unreason.

1 September 2004
Zombie anti-imperialists vs the 'Empire' 

Today's anti-war movement is motivated more by romanticism than a serious critique of imperialism.

28 May 2004
Bonfire of the investment opportunities 
What were so many contemporary artworks doing in a warehouse in Leyton?

26 May 2004
Euro-smugness gets a free ride
European leaders are making the most of America's crisis over Iraq

26 January 2004
 'This is the hangover of a major bubble' Doug Henwood discusses his new book, After the New Economy

20 November 2003
 Reviewing After the New Economy Doug Henwood's book

 

23 October 2003
Axis of influence
Asian-Pacific states signed up to Bush's war on terror - but they're more interested in trading with China.

1 October 2003
What Edward Said
Obituary

18 September 2003
Dancing the Cancun
The third world rebellion at the WTO talks has its roots in London and Washington

19 June 2003
Policy has not created diversity
Contribution to a debate on culture and difference

5 June 2003
Capital of Complaints
Liverpool's unique cultural signature dwells on a sense of victimhood.

14 May 2003
A house of cards
America's tense relations with Saudi Arabia

27 March 2003
That uprising
The wishes of the people of Basra are buried under the myth-making of others.

27 March 2003
Rethinking Human Rights
A new book on the human rights agenda casts light on events in Iraq.

26 November 2002
Taking Churchill at his words
One viewer's view of the 'Greatest Briton'.

21 November 2002
The French connection
In the UN debates about Iraq, French diplomacy has re-emerged. How?

1 November 2002
Language barriers
The Chirac/Blair spat shows international personality politics at work.

17 October 2002
Breaking up Indonesia
The Bali terrorist attack is the latest expression of Indonesia's destabilisation.

27 September 2002
Forgetting the evils of Empire
The left's embrace of Europe as an alternative to America creates illusions in a destructive elite.

24 September 2002
Germany's Third Way win
Schröder's narrow election victory came from an appeal to national sentiment, and caution.

6 September 2002
Trot along, Martin
Why is Martin Amis cranking up dead Cold War controversies?

22 August 2002
Summing up our fears
Post-11 September apocalyptic thriller strikes UK cinemas.

27 June 2002
TV as judge and executioner
BBC2's Hunt for Britain’s Paedophiles was a sordid show.

11 June 2002
Continental drift
Why is the centre right winning elections across Europe and the USA?

22 April 2002
Too late, the French left have a cause
Right-wing president Jaques Chirac is now embraced as the candidate of 'human rights' against Jean-Marie Le Pen.

31 January 2002
Farmers turned park-keepers
The Curry Commission's farming policy proposes a world fit for beetles.

16 November 2001
Friends, allies and enemies
How the West has abandoned old friends and embraced one-time enemies since the end of the Cold War

15 March 2001
Culture vultures
How can the UK government present the creative industries as a major money-spinner? Through some creative accounting.

 

 

Articles in the Times Educational Supplement

Humanist pupils: the right not to pray 
They have a positive and moral belief, but schools expect them to join hands. James Heartfield reports
Publication day: 28 October 2005
Lifting the veil on Islam 
Most British Muslims are likely to choose faith over fanaticism, writes James Heartfield There are 1.6 million Muslims in the UK, mostly of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin
Publication day: 23 September 2005
Scatterlings from Africa 
Work in the UK keeps most Zimbabweans from returning, says James Heartfield Early this year, the Home Office began deporting Zimbabweans
Publication day: 03 June 2005
A kick up the career 
Master of Teaching is a new degree. The first group to pass believe it will inject life into work. James Heartfield reports
Publication day: 13 May 2005
Island trouble 
Tsunamis, terrorists and gang wars have affected many Sri Lankan Tamils, writes James Heartfield If your students' heads are nodding to the sound of M.I.A's "Arular", they are listening to a back-ha
Publication day: 06 May 2005
Suffer the children 
Be gentle when teaching traumatised Iraqi pupils, writes James Heartfield Fifteen year-old Duua arrived in Britain two and a half years ago
Publication day: 08 April 2005
From unrest to uncertainty 
Many Angolan families in the UK live in fear of being forced to return there, writes James Heartfield. Twelve-year-old Nsona (Natasha) Matambele of Forest Gate school in south London, was refused permission to stay
Publication day: 04 March 2005
Refuge makes for Turkish delight 
Fleeing persecution, many Turks have prospered in the UK. James Heartfield reports There are around 100,000 Turkish nationals living in the UK (according to the Turkish Consulate), mostly in London,
Publication day: 04 February 2005
New communities, same old problems 
The South East building boom should mean many more jobs and exciting new schools. As James Heartfield found, the reality does not match the dream
Publication day: 14 January 2005
James Heartfield detects confusing signals in the housing debate 
The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is regularly responsible for declaring that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new homes are to be built.
Publication day: 14 January 2005
Seize a hold on the pole position 
James Heartfield helps you to give a warm welcome to pupils from Poland About 70, 000 people living in the UK were born in Poland, and most are based in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, West Yorks
Publication day: 07 January 2005
Fixing a hole? 
Labour's commitment to rebuilding schools over the next decade means familiar landmarks could change. James Heartfield looks at architectural styles dating back to the Victorian era
Publication day: 07 May 2004
Section: Extras & updates
Dangerous Liaisons... 
Education is like seduction. James Heartfield charts the history of teacher-student relations since Socrates corrupted the youth of Athens
Publication day: 10 January 2003