Rejoice! Britain has finally woken up to woke-ness
In the ‘Question Time’ studio, people looked as though they were scared to clap
My GCSE religious education classes left two important questions unanswered. First, why would anyone wear hosiery the colour of mushroom Cup-a-soup? Mushroom is not a valid flesh colour, Ms Horner.
Secondly, do people really have “ideological systems”? Week after week, that expression would come up, with even the flowchart we were given, explaining how people with X religious beliefs had Y political, sexual and ecological beliefs, leaving me baffled. Were human beings that robotic? Could the whole of society really be broken down that neatly?
The answer to both of those questions was, of course, “no” – until the “woke” brigade was born. These PC fundamentalists have an “ideological system” that extends beyond religion (and all-consuming self-worship) and politics to the kind of language they use, the grievances they harbour and the variety of milk they drink.
And I thought back to that flowchart as I watched Laurence Fox break out of the “luvvie” box to which he’d been assigned on Question Time last week.
Refusing to toe the line on everything from sexism to racism, the Lewis star rolled his eyes as he implored people not to make the Labour leadership “about the women”, joked that an actor’s carbon footprint “is huge, but we make up for it by preaching to everyone about how they should change their lives”, pointed out that there was an amount of “having cake and eating it” about the Duke and
Duchess of Sussex’s decision to step back from their royal roles, and refuted accusations that the country had driven Meghan out with its racism. “We’re the most tolerant, lovely country in Europe. It’s so easy to just throw your charge of racism at everybody, and it’s starting to get boring now.”
On sofas across Britain, there will have been the same mass exhalation of breath I saw in my emails after last week’s column on the subject; the same palpable relief that someone had said out loud what you were thinking.
Which surely means you’re “allowed” to think it? But in the BBC studio, I couldn’t help noticing that a lot of people looked as though they were scared to clap. Scared to clap.
And when I read the statement put out by Equity, the acting union, calling on the industry “to unequivocally denounce Laurence Fox and his comments”, I knew most actors would also be too scared to say what my friend Alice Evans did in a tweet: “Equity, you are speaking on behalf of thousands of actors who have not shared this opinion. This is beyond your mandate.”
That won’t stop bodies and industries on both sides of the pond from trying to force their prefab “ideological systems” down everyone’s throats. Bullying’s allowed when you’ve got the moral high ground.
So in the US, actor Hank Azaria – who has been the voice of Indian store owner Apu in The Simpsons for almost 30 years – will no longer voice the character, after the wokies accused him of reinforcing racial stereotypes.
Over here, social worker Andrew Thorne is being investigated over Twitter posts in which he criticised the use of puberty-blocking drugs for pre-teen children. Meanwhile, Oxford University intends to push out middle-class high achievers to meet their “diversity targets”, and we have a school – Woolwich Polytechnic School for Girls – imposing a meat ban that means pupils come home “starving”.
It’s enough to make us all collapse face-forward in dismay, like Fox did. But here’s the thing: there’s a sea change coming. We know that from whistle-blowers who were so appalled by the “writing on the wall” at Oxford that they came to The Sunday Telegraph with their story. We know it from the increasing numbers speaking out about the Manchester grooming scandal that police chose to ignore for fear of increasing racial tensions.
We know it from the staff who accused the NHS’S only specialised gender clinic of “silencing debate” after it was discovered that The Tavistock Clinic had withdrawn a book in which academics questioned the clinical and ethical basis for allowing children to transition.
And, after having issued their woke fatwa on Fox, Equity deleted the comments, assuring members that “a more considered response is being discussed”.
So while Twitter continues to be hilariously wrong about every topic it touches and gradually morphs into a kind of AA group for the pathologically un-selfaware (presided over by Lily Allen), we, the long-silenced, should probably start getting used to the sound of our own
voices again.