Spiked editor to speak at Freedom Dinner

The U.K. smokers’ group Forest has announced that Brendan O’Neill, editor of the online magazine Spiked, is to speak at Forest’s Freedom Dinner on July 15.

A blogger for the Telegraph and a columnist for The Big Issue and The Australian, O’Neill has also written also for The Spectator, City AM, Reason and the Daily Beast.

Described by The Guardian as a “Marxist proletarian firebrand,” he is a fierce opponent of “bossy, intolerant and censorious government.”

O’Neill has described standardized packaging as an “infringement of free speech” and proposals to ban smoking in cars  as an exposure of “the new authoritarians’ casual disregard for the notion of privacy, so that even our privately owned vehicles come to be seen as fair game for petty laws to curb and control what was once perfectly legal behaviour.”

Also speaking at next month’s event is Alex Deane, head of public affairs at Weber Shandwick. An elected common councilman in the City of London, Deane was the founding director of Big Brother Watch and David Cameron’s first chief of staff.

Author of Big Brother Watch: The State of Civil Liberties in Modern Britain, Deane currently advises some of the biggest companies in the U.K.

This year’s Freedom Dinner is hosted by Forest and supported by the Institute of Economic Affairs, The Free Society and Liberty League.