A wave of ‘wokery’ is engulfing our national institutions
WE ARE an enormously tolerant country, and yet we are increasingly being told otherwise. The latest person to join this chorus of nonsense is the Bishop of Dover, who led prayers at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding.
A fervent Black Lives Matter supporter, the Rt Rev Rose Hudson-Wilkin wants every Church of England parish to draw up “race action plans”.
As the institution’s first black woman bishop, it’s perhaps no surprise she sees race victims everywhere and wants us all to embrace being “woke”.
Yet this is another example of creating dissent where none exists, projecting shame in place of pride, and blaming us all for everything. The same is true of too many national charities and institutions who have fallen thrall to the divisive, woke issue of identity politics in everything from race to gender – representing a de facto radicalisation of everyday life for millions of blameless Britons.
By 364 votes to zero, with no opposition at all and despite the more pressing issue of falling congregations, the Church’s General Synod passed the motion that every parish across the country should “develop local action plans to address issues of racial injustice”.
I suspect many well meaning elderly parishioners will be looking around their sparsely attended churches wondering how they can make amends.
OF COURSE, they only need to go outside if they’re countryside dwellers, where a recent-Wildlife and Countryside Link report has deemed the very landscape a “racist colonial” space “dominated by white people”.
Supposedly, barriers are preventing ethnic minority families from visiting the countryside.
Even five-year-olds are meant to have views on installing transgender-friendly lavatories in their school. Aberdeenshire Council has asked teachers to get their youngest pupils to voice support or not for “nonbinary” loos.
This is all too overwhelmingly contentious and intended to draw lines between those who are “progressive” and those who are not and are – in their view at least – bad people. Leftwing politicians depend on identifying great swathes of our population as having some form of victimhood so they can do them “justice” at the ballot box.
And everyone not a “victim” is expected to be a campaigner, demanding action on past crimes, protesting in the streets at the injustice of it all.
Because the Left’s greatest victory has been to define our very way of life as a crime against the planet, engendering a so-called “climate emergency”. This handy catch-all means that virtually everything we do, from what we eat to how we travel and enjoy ourselves, is defined as causing harm to the world and must be curbed.
So much for our capitalist, industrial age being the source of the greatest amount of prosperity and freedom for the greatest amount of people ever in history – we must now be ashamed of it all.
As the WCL report grandly puts it: “The UK’s role in the European colonial project has also driven the current climate and nature crises.”
It’s little wonder lots of Leftwingers are joining pro-Palestinian marches because this is another way of guilt-tripping us. And when some bold souls object to the antisemitism that comes with it, like Tory MP Lee Anderson, they are automatically branded “racist”, as the Mayor of London shamefully said this week.
The middle classes are uniquely susceptible to this catastrophising world view. Being comfortably off they feel guilty about their good fortune.
So, as they run national institutions, they are the power behind the wave of “wokery”. Their main mouthpiece, the BBC, amplifies their agonies but sometimes they get it wrong.
RECENTLY, a senior meteorologist stated on BBC Radio 5 that “when we see these storms they are more intense and that’s down to climate change”. But when challenged, the Met Office had to admit there was no such evidence.
Whether right or wrong, middle-class institutions are embracing more causes, urging us all to become radicals to save the world from injustice.
The truth is, however, most of us are far better off than we would have been a century ago. Furthermore, the future of the planet is not as bad as many people think.
We should rejoice, not be cajoled into becoming campaigners for endless causes that sow division where none exists.
But the problem is that if we elect Labour, we’ll be backing a government devoted to this never-ending radical nonsense.
‘Everything we do is defined as harmful and must be curbed’