Trying to clarify what the UK public understands by the perennially slippery term “woke”, in 2022 the pollsters YouGov asked respondents how well it fitted various contemporary causes.It's like porn, Gaby. We all know it when we see it.
The highest match – above trans rights, no-platforming people whose opinions you dislike, stronger action on climate change and the Black Lives Matter movement itself – was with removing historical statues associated with slavery, like that of Colston. Something about this combination of direct action against a highly symbolic target, and revisiting history through a modern social justice lens, meant that 61% considered it woke.
The narrative that woke ultimately ate itself, becoming so shrill, sanctimonious and yet simultaneously brittle that a backlash was almost inevitable, has been building ever since it became clear Donald Trump was on course to win a second presidential term.
But then came April’s supreme court ruling that “woman” for the purposes of equality law meant “biological woman”, rolling back trans people’s access to sex-segregated spaces.
I think you meant rolling back men’s encroachment on women’s sex segregated spaces, didn’t you?
In May’s local elections, Reform party candidates campaigned on promises to sack council diversity officers and block what the party’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, calls “net zero wokery”. Keir Starmer, who five years ago took the knee for Black Lives Matter and posted “trans rights are human rights” on Facebook, now leads a government arguing that unchecked migration did “incalculable damage” and advising trans women to use men’s toilets.
He says those things, Gaby, but does he believe them? I'm not sure. Are you?
After four white protesters successfully defended themselves against criminal charges over the Colston statue’s downfall, arguing that Bristol’s then mayor, Marvin Rees, should have done more to remove it legally, Rees – who is of Jamaican heritage – responded by asking whether four black defendants would have been similarly acquitted. If not, he argued in a statement now hung on the wall at M Shed, “then what we saw was an exercise in middle-class white privilege, alongside a declaration of anti-racism”.
“Stop acting like being willing to work with Nazis is a fucking virtue, you creep,” was one of the more printable insults the mild-mannered Tryl and his co-author, Ed Hodgson, received on the social media platform Bluesky in February, for publishing a report suggesting that progressive zeal is sometimes its own worst enemy.
Thus making their point for them!
“It’s not, ‘How far can we turn the clock back?’ We do want to acknowledge some good things happened,” as British Future’s Sunder Katwala puts it. “I think there’s still a broad consensus for doing diversity and equality well. But it’s a chance to sort the wheat from the chaff.”
Your chance has run out, its too late! The jig is up, we all see the futility og most - if not all - of the woke crusades now.
