Spiked
Spiked is a British online magazine featuring commentary, essays, podcasts and videos. It was founded around 2001 by former staff members of the magazine LM, formerly known as Living Marxism. Today, it has a libertarian outlook, with freedom of speech as a core theme.
What you can find
Spiked publishes almost exclusively opinion pieces on gender. Recurring topics include self-identification in law, the position of women in sport and prisons, the British gender clinic for young people and the freedom to speak about these issues.
Why it is on this list
Spiked is a prominent voice in the British debate and shows how criticism of gender policy is framed from a libertarian perspective. It is not a news outlet: its articles are polemical and clearly take a position, and the magazine is controversial because of that tone. For facts about legislation, policy by country is a better starting point; for the debate itself, see society.
From Living Marxism to Spiked
Spiked was founded in 2001 by Mick Hume. Its predecessor, Living Marxism, began in 1988 as a magazine of the Revolutionary Communist Party and was briefly known simply as LM from 1999 onwards. It ceased publication in 2000 after losing a libel case brought by the British broadcaster ITN. In the article The Picture that Fooled the World, the magazine had claimed that ITN's reporting on Bosnian Muslims at the Trnopolje camp was misleading. The court awarded ITN approximately one million pounds in damages and costs. After Hume's departure in January 2007, Brendan O'Neill became editor-in-chief. Since September 2021, that position has been held by Tom Slater.
Funding and positions
A joint investigation by The Guardian and DeSmog UK found that the American branch, Spiked US Inc., received funding from the Charles Koch Foundation between 2016 and 2018. The money was intended for meetings at universities as part of a foundation programme on tolerance and free speech. Spiked supported Brexit, and members of its staff joined the Brexit Party. The magazine opposes multiculturalism, government health campaigns and the lockdowns. It published an annual ranking of freedom of speech at British universities. Academic sources describe the magazine as right-libertarian.
How to assess this source
Its background explains its tone. Spiked approaches almost every subject as a matter of freedom versus paternalism, and gender is no exception. As a result, its articles are predictable in their conclusions and rarely provide new facts. They are nevertheless useful for seeing how the free-speech argument is deployed in the British debate. A related British opinion magazine on this list is The Critic. For the substantive question that features in many of the articles, see trans people and women's safety.