‘Woke’ values are not the real threat to our way of life

It is always diverting to turn to your letters page and read the contributions of your correspondent Colin Bullen, containing his latest expose of the sinister doings of the ‘woke’ plotters and their accomplices.

Now they are wrecking the NHS! Have they been wasting the £350 million a week Boris has won back for the NHS by ‘getting Brexit done’ and ‘taking back control’? No wonder Boris needs the occasional party and social drink to relieve the pressure.

These ideas need to be confronted with fact and logic. Who describes themselves as ‘woke’? I hear plenty about ‘antiwoke’ from Boris, Truss, Farage, etc, who warn of the dangers of ‘woke’ subversion. The whole ‘woke’ social panic has been fabricated. Facing up to our past/ present and extending social inclusion is a social good, not a threat to ‘British’ values.

Could it be that those working in the NHS are right when they point to a lack of resources rather than ‘wokeness’?

Since Thatcher we have been told that ‘free markets’ are much more efficient in providing public goods. Much better than the ‘Soviet style directorate’ that runs the NHS? Aren’t large private corporations involved in the public sector (or otherwise) centralised and bureaucratic?

Neo-liberals claim that the profit motive is the best way to run businesses and allocate resources. They believe water utilities, public health, rail and bus transport, oil companies, etc, are essentially the same regardless of what they produce. They should all be run using ‘market principles’. Managers answerable to shareholders should manage and workers should fit in and know their place; balance sheets should direct management strategy.

One result is a continuous cutting of costs and corners. The ‘bottom line’ is short-term profits for shareholders and inflated bonus payments for managers.

The growing size/remuneration of management is a core neoliberal policy. For the NHS this involves outsourcing services to the ‘free market’; firms like the US group, United Health Care - the last CEO of NHS England was previously an executive of this company. No doubt the above can be justified as bringing free market ‘expertise’ to the public sector. The result is the ‘revolving door’ where politicians, their advisors, corporate executives, top civil servants, lobbyists, etc, exchange jobs.

Colin Bullen may oppose ‘the establishment’ but why doesn’t this include Boris and his chums who seem to be part of this game of musical chairs? Instead, his ire is directed to the so-called power of ‘wokeness’ - people different to

‘us’? What has this to do with ‘British’ values? Let’s hope these values are not simply about being ‘British’. Do the ‘antiwoke’ populists understand that their own ‘identity’ as victims of ‘wokeness’ excludes people they deem different/other and is itself an ‘identity politics’?

‘Anti-woke’ populist demagogues misdirect responsibility for our ills to relatively marginal and inoffensive groups. This has happened before in history with bad results. Don’t rush to judgment. As Samuel Johnson noted, ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’. Think carefully.

Peter Cutler