As the New Year begins, culture warriors on the Right are in buoyant mood. After years of being stuck on the defensive while progressive ideologues advanced their agenda, they now sense that wokery is in retreat.
The creed has lost its ugly potency. Its supporters no longer appear so dangerous when they try to bully and blackmail. Cherished Left-wing theories about race and transgenderism, which had become a form of groupthink in so many institutions, are now openly challenged or held up to ridicule.
The cancel culture, which has been such a menace to free speech, is itself facing cancellation.
At times, it feels as if we are beginning to wake up from a nightmare akin to the fear that gripped America in the early 1950s, when a deranged senator called Joe McCarthy held Washington in his thrall as he undertook his paranoid quest to root out Communist subversion.
Just as the McCarthyites had their blacklists, censors and committees on ‘UnAmerican activities’, so today we have catalogues of so-called ‘non-crime hate incidents’, as well as ‘diversity’ commissars to uphold the new orthodoxy and ‘awareness’ programmes for those who are deemed to have deviated from correct thinking.
But an era in which wild accusations, personal smears, character assassinations, guilt by association and the dogmatic intolerance of alternative ideas had become the norm now seems to be coming to an end.
The victory of Donald Trump in the recent U.S. presidential election was a vital turning point, for the spirit of his Make America Great Again was the antithesis of the woke mentality, writes Leo McKinstry
The victory of Donald Trump in the recent U.S. presidential election was a vital turning point, for the spirit of his Make America Great Again was the antithesis of the woke mentality, with its hostility to traditional U.S. national pride, its obsession with identity politics, its guilt-tripping about the West’s heritage and its embrace of green puritanism.
Kamala Harris’s defeat was more than just an individual loss for the Democrat candidate. It was also a rejection of an entire philosophy.
The same process has been happening elsewhere in the world. In Canada, the ultra-liberal Justin Trudeau looks likely to be ousted soon by his Conservative opponent, the anti-woke Pierre Poilievre.
Further south, in Argentina, the new maverick President Javier Milei is enjoying phenomenal approval ratings as he takes an axe to woke shibboleths and civic bureaucracy.
In Europe the Italian leader Giorgia Meloni has grown in authority as she successfully implements a hard-line policy on immigration. Meanwhile, the woke elites in France and Germany are quaking as voters move to the Right.
Here in Britian, the dramatic rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, which is now level-pegging in the polls with the two main parties and claims to have more members than the Tories, is an indicator of the widespread disillusion with wokery.
The trend can be seen in a host of other developments, like the anger that greeted the latest advertising campaign by Jaguar, which featured, not a car, but a group of largely androgynous models with solemn faces and brightly coloured outfits.
A couple of years ago this commercial might have been hailed as ground-breaking. In 2024 it was met with derision.
The loosening grip of the woke brigade is also illustrated by the decline of two of Britain’s foremost progressive institutions: the Stonewall charity and the Tavistock Clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service for children and young people.
Originally founded to campaign for gay equality, Stonewall became obsessed with implementing a radical brand of transgenderism.
The key instrument in this mission is its Diversity Champions scheme, whereby employers pay substantial fees for courses and certification that permit them to parade their inclusive credentials: the more woke they are, the higher they move up the table that ranks them against other companies.
And those who fell out of favour with Stonewall risked accusations of homophobia and transphobia. One gay rights campaigner, angry at the organisation’s methods, commented that ‘the whole thing has become akin to some sort of protection racket’.
Even so, the scheme was initially a huge success, with more than 900 organisations joining. But the more the money rolled in, the more extreme Stonewall became in its trans activism. Former backers grew alienated and major names – including local authorities, government departments and the BBC – dropped out of the scheme, which is now hopelessly discredited.
Even more broken is the Tavistock Clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service, which in 2021 had almost 2,500 cases on its books but in 2024 was forced to close after a damning report showed how it put transgender ideology before the clinical and psychological needs of young people.
In Europe the Italian leader Giorgia Meloni has grown in authority as she successfully implements a hard-line policy on immigration
The tide may have turned but the woke zealots will not give up without an enormous fight.
After all, they have on their side a Labour government with a majority of more than 200 in the House of Commons. The progressive agenda is part of Labour’s soul, its very reason for existence.
That’s why most Labour MPs and activists would have cheered last week when the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson announced a review of the school curriculum to make it ‘more diverse’.
The review, to be conducted by feminist professor Becky Francis, who once criticised Tony Blair’s government for its ‘obsession with academic achievement’, will have input from the trade unions.
That is certain to lead to more wokery, as can be gauged from some of the recent statements of Daniel Kebede, the General Secretary of the National Education Union, who said of the last teachers’ strike: ‘It’s about taking back control from a brutally racist state.’
Language like that shows that the wokerati are not about to surrender. Many of them have a professional vested interest in maintaining the apparatus of ideological oppression, such as the 10,000 diversity officers employed across the public sector, backed up by an army of consultants, trainers and managers.
Human resources departments have become agencies of woke enforcement, just as the top ranks of the police and Army subscribe to all the fashionable nostrums of political correctness.
Earlier this week, in another indicator of the strength of wokery’s roots in our public life, it was reported that the Ministry of Defence is planning to remove the Christian cross from the cap badge of military chaplains in an effort to make the service more ‘multicultural’.
The bureaucrats do not care about public opinion, only the triumph of their doctrine. And the soaring waves of immigration, now running at the incredible net figure of over 900,000 a year, give them a spurious justification to maintain a kind of Maoist ‘permanent revolution’.
One of their key themes is that the workforce in every organisation must reflect the make-up of wider society.
But because of unending demographic upheaval, the work of change will never be done.
The fight will be all the tougher because the woke advocates, like all cultists, tend to be imbued with self-righteousness.
They see theirs as a moral cause, to rid Britain of prejudice.
So the Welsh government, in its latest anti-racism strategy, openly declares that its aim is to change ‘the beliefs and behaviour of the white majority’, a task which will require museums, libraries and galleries to ‘set the right historical narrative’ and provide a ‘decolonised account of the past’.
In the same vein, HM Inspectorate of Probation promises to ‘create, promote and embed cultural humility’ as part of its equality strategy.
The truth is we have had quite enough ‘cultural humility’– which is nothing more than code for self-loathing – in our public realm.
A battle royal awaits between dogma and common sense.
For the sake of our national survival, the woke wreckers must be defeated – and reassuring events around the world show that they can be.
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Publish date : 2025-01-03 03:18:00
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