How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement That Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason: 1 (None)

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After a hundred years of continuous Unionist majorities, the prospect of an ex-paramilitary republican party coming out on top has a powerful symbolism, but perhaps no more than just symbolism. Far from gaining ground, Sinn Féin is confidently expected to lose support compared with the last Assembly elections in 2017. If it tops the poll this time it will be because the DUP has lost even more support. The latest poll puts Sinn Féin six points down on 2017 with the DUP down eight points. Germany/Turkey 2007, 122 mins. Director Fatih Akin. Starring Nurgul Yesilcay, Baki Davrak Tuncel Kurtiz and Hanna Schygulla. Turning now to the war that is still raging on Europe’s eastern flank, the war that turned the world upside down this year, this long-read by spiked stalwart Frank Furedi – on how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine represents the ‘revenge of history’ – is essential reading, if somehow you missed it the first time around. As is Ella Whelan’s piece on the perils of Russophobia.

Cancel cancel culture. Drawstring bag - spiked Cancel cancel culture. Drawstring bag - spiked

As mainstream broadcasters now seek to distance themselves from Brand, it is worth remembering the role the media played in making him a star. In the mid-2000s, Brand was named the Sun’s ‘Shagger of the Year’ three years in a row. He would later boast about ‘bedding nine women in one evening’. ‘Instead of taking someone for a date and then going to the pictures and then calling them, I was able to go, “Let’s do sex right now!”’, he said in a 2010 interview.Oxford theologian Nigel Biggar, a defender of the British empire as a moral good, claimed that Rhodes “was an imperialist, but British colonialism was not essentially racist, and wasn’t essentially exploitative, and wasn’t essentially atrocious”. Rhodes was merely “a supporter of the British empire as a modernising force for good”. There has been much criticism of taking down statues as the “rewriting of history”, but little recognition that many statues themselves were erected to substantiate an often distorted historical narrative. Monuments, whether to Winston Churchill or to the Bristol slaver Edward Colston, or indeed to Mary Wollstonecraft, are not just dumb pieces of stone. Each is designed to tell a particular story.

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Whatever happens next in Belfast or London, the protocol will continue to dominate Northern Ireland’s politics. If we want to discuss the rewriting of history, those words are as good a place to start as any. For this is the same Rhodes who believed that non-white areas of the world were “inhabited by the most despicable specimen of human being” needing to be “brought under Anglo-Saxon influence”. It’s the “not essentially racist” colonialism about which the Liberal politician Charles Wentworth Dilke could boast that “nature seems to intend the English for a race of officers, to direct and guide the cheap labour of Eastern peoples”. It’s the empire so modernising that during the course of British rule, India’s share of the world economy fell from 23% to less than 4%. Biggar is not against the rewriting of history. He just wants to rewrite it with his own myths. The book is a comprehensive and detailed survey of the ways in which woke thought and practice have corrupted so many of the institutions comprising civil society. It has done this by adopting the intellectual architecture of Critical Theory which holds that imbalances of power in society are hidden from view by dominant cultural structures, such as language and the way knowledge is imparted. Only by exposing these structures is it possible to reveal the extent to which the ‘oppressed’ are held in subjugation by the ‘oppressors’. Telegraph columnist Celia Walden used the word earlier this week in a headline. ‘The self-pitying “woke” generation needed a war – and in coronavirus they’ve got one’, she wrote, proving that any situation – even a global pandemic which has already killed thousands – is fair game in the ‘woke’ debate. As it turns out, the politician we’re talking about here is actually London mayor Sadiq Khan. This week, he has jettisoned his boring responsibilities in Britain’s capital to embark on a five-day trip to the US. On the tour so far, he’s schmoozed with everyone from tech entrepreneurs and celebrities to New York’s mayor and Hillary Clinton.Pedants might point out that Joe Davis won the world title 15 times in a row between 1927 and 1946, but the World’s Professional Snooker Championship, as it was known from 1935, was a rinky-dink affair by modern standards, involving as few as two players battling it out while taking a break from the supposedly more serious game of billiards. Fred Davis – Joe’s brother – won a somewhat more coherent version of the competition on eight occasions after the war. John Pulman won something that was technically the world title eight times between 1957 and 1968, but the game was in the doldrums by then and these matches were little more than exhibitions, with a lone challenger allowed to take on Pulman. Three of his titles were won in a single year (1965). I have long been critical of ideas that some may call “woke”. Of viewing white people as the problem. Of seeing racism where the problem may be other forms of discrimination. Of the concept of white privilege. Of presenting disagreement as bigotry. Of the politics of identity.

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It is a must-read. But don’t take my word for it. ‘Anyone who wants to restore sanity, beauty or simple humanity to our public life should read How Woke Won’, says Jonathan Haidt, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind. Paul Embery, trade unionist and author of Despised, calls it a ‘searing assessment of how the West succumbed to such a pernicious ideology’. ‘Williams is one of Britain’s sharpest and most eloquent writers on the “woke” phenomenon’, says talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer. Woke has adopted this ambiguity about truth which allows words — such as ‘racism’ and ‘hate speech’ — to take on whatever meaning the user intends without regard to the possibility of countervailing evidence. As Williams remarks:Joanna’s writing has been published widely in the UK and the US including The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Spectator, The Guardian, The New York Post and American Conservative. Defenders of woke will always cloak their efforts to denounce and cancel their critics with claims of protecting freedoms of the vulnerable; opponents of woke see through this ruse, and must gird themselves for another long march if they are to reverse woke’s advance. As Williams reminds us forcefully, there is a great deal at stake. You don’t need to be a psychologist to see that downplaying your own talents is a way of taking the pressure off, but it is not wholly an act. After winning the World Championship in 2012, O’Sullivan dropped off the tour, stopped playing snooker and went to work on a pig farm before returning to the Crucible in 2013 to win the tournament again. Up to a point, he really can take or leave it. Nonetheless, Williams guides the reader through the tangled ideological undergrowth while never losing her focus on the significance of the threat that woke poses. “Woke might be difficult to pin down,” says Williams, “but it is a useful concept. It allows us to describe the outlook the currently dominates our social, cultural and political lives.”

Woke: Compliment or criticism, it is now fuelling the culture Woke: Compliment or criticism, it is now fuelling the culture

For those who would broadly consider themselves woke, the word has been weaponised against them. But the Fox/Young brigade often claim the same. While the ways ‘wokeness’ makes itself known today are not obscure, its evolution from an aspirational concern with racial justice to a zealous obsession with overcoming all forms of social injustice is more hazy. Racial divisions are rehabilitated in the name of anti-racism. Women’s rights are destroyed in the name of trans rights. Ordinary people are demonised as bigots, while virtue-signalling (but exploitative) corporations pose as radical. The subversion of ‘woke’ is political and means the word can now be used to perpetuate the very injustices it sought to eradicate in the first place.Optimistically she goes on to propound that we have much more in common than the woke would have us believe, and it is time to come together to forge a freer, more democratic and truly egalitarian future.