Do you know what “woke” means? Are you with or against those fighting wokeness and cancel culture? Would you vote for an MP just because he/she was obdurately un-woke? If your answer to the final question is yes, you need to wake up.
I am fully woke. As so much fabrication and fury whips around the word, here is a brief description of what that means. It is to be alert and opposed to historical and contemporary social inequalities, power imbalances and injustices, and to believe in the inviolable rights of minorities, females, LGBT people and outsiders, outliers and misfits.
According to research published by King’s College London last November, 15 per cent of the public are anti-woke, and 16 per cent consider themselves to be woke; 44 per cent don’t know what these terms mean; and 42 per cent of Britons would feel insulted if described as woke – up from 36 per cent in 2022 and 24 per cent in 2020. However, Britons are less likely than they were three years ago to say tensions exist between various groups in the UK. Time moves and people change. Basic, really.
Ron DeSantis, the self-styled Churchillian who for years fought an existential “war on woke”, just suffered a massive defeat in the Republican Iowa caucuses, partly because he was “on the very bleeding edge of… the most punitive approaches to all the culture war things… and he thought that was going to get him over the finishing line”. It didn’t. He was humiliated. That’s according to Rick Wilson, cofounder of the Lincoln Project, a collective of centrist, smart, anti-Trump Republicans, who was speaking to The Guardian.
DeSantis was once hailed by Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post as “DeFuture”. In DeFuture, it seems, voters don’t want unending conflicts and are more concerned about their real lives than culture brawls and anti-woke baiting. Rishi Sunak and his gang don’t get that. In their never-neverland, people facing rocketing fuel prices can be assuaged by cretinous “patriotic” edicts which compel schools to teach pupils about the “benefits of Empire” or disallow critical race theories.
More Britons see through the duplicities of anti-woke Tory banners and slogans. Progressive citizens and ideas are strafed in the name of free speech, which is ever more restricted. Fake claims are made about threats to national pride and integrity. What the anti-woke brigades really, really want is for their right-wing ideologies to be foregrounded and constantly validated.
That’s why Lucy Frazer, the Culture Secretary, accused the BBC of bias this week, and why Transport Minister Huw Merriman moaned about anti-Tory diatribes on the BBC Radio 4 satirical show The News Quiz. Frazer could provide no evidence to back her claims when questioned by the incisive Kay Burley on Sky News.
Such anti-BBC obsessives must know full well that far from being a hotbed of wokeness, the Beeb favours those with right-wing views.
Go count the number of times Richard Tice and his fragrant partner, Isabel Oakeshott, the Spectator’s Kate Andrews (previously of the free market Institute of Economic Affairs) have been on Question Time, Any Questions and Daily Politics. Then see how many times, say, Baroness Helena Kennedy KC or the environmentalist George Monbiot have had that privilege. Now Ofcom’s chair, Lord Grade, an ardent Tory, is to be given more control over the corporation. We, the woke, cannot stop the power grab.
The Tories cancelled and ejected Remain and One Nation MPs have clamped down on protests and today seek to silence pro-Palestinian individuals and institutions. And you thought being anti-woke was to be liberal, open-minded and free speaking?
Keir Starmer is now projecting himself as a defender of good, civil, democratic values. On Monday, he defended the National Trust and Royal Lifeboat National Institution and denounced the “weird McCarthyism” of the Tory army of woke destroyers who were undermining the “very civic societies they once regarded with respect”. Oh good, I thought, an honourable intervention at last. Then I remembered Starmer’s McCarthyite tendencies which resulted in the cancellation and ejection of members from his party, woke folk mostly.
So I don’t wholly trust this new posture. But there is a gap in the political market for woke policies. Spreading discontent with the politics of rage and divisions in the US and the UK isn’t enough anymore. If Starmer is to be a modernising and uniting leader, he will have to be well woke and withstand onslaughts from conservative media outlets.
Is he that brave or bold? I fear not.
Dear Keir, are you brave enough to stand up to the war on woke?
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24.01.2024
Do you know what “woke” means? Are you with or against those fighting wokeness and cancel culture? Would you vote for an MP just because he/she was obdurately un-woke? If your answer to the final question is yes, you need to wake up.
I am fully woke. As so much fabrication and fury whips around the word, here is a brief description of what that means. It is to be alert and opposed to historical and contemporary social inequalities, power imbalances and injustices, and to believe in the inviolable rights of minorities, females, LGBT people and outsiders, outliers and misfits.
According to research published by King’s College London last November, 15 per cent of the public are anti-woke, and 16 per cent consider themselves to be woke; 44 per cent don’t know what these terms mean; and 42 per cent of Britons would feel insulted if described as woke – up from 36 per cent in 2022 and 24 per cent in 2020. However, Britons are less likely than they were three years ago to say tensions exist between various groups in the UK. Time moves and people change. Basic, really.
Ron DeSantis, the self-styled Churchillian who for years fought an........
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