The tide is finally turning on wokery

The recent victories for common sense highlight the need to fight boldly

There are still many battles to be fought in the culture wars, but at last we can begin to ask whether woke activists are on the retreat. During her campaign to become Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch’s emphasis on the need to stand up against woke ideas about race and gender struck a chord not just among Conservative MPS but in wider society. Jacob Rees-mogg has turned a spotlight on the profusion of HR managers surplus to requirements in various government ministries; they are very often the source of compulsory training programmes about “white privilege” which even members of the House of Lords have been forced to join. And Grade Ii-listed protection has been extended to a threatened plaque just off Oxford High Street that commemorates Cecil Rhodes.

Significant victories against wokery have included the award of compensation to the barrister Allison Bailey who challenged her own set of chambers, arguing that she had been subjected to discrimination owing to her views about sex, gender and the role of Stonewall in propagating its views about transgender people. The closure of the transgender clinic at the Tavistock is enormously significant, too; within a few years any number of child abuse cases may well be directed at those who pumped hormones into teenagers before they fully understood their own bodies. The wise judge of the Consistory Court that sat at Jesus College, Cambridge was “underwhelmed” by the arguments that a monument indirectly linked to the slave trade should be removed from the wall of the ancient college chapel. And Cambridge University had to abandon its plans for the reporting of “micro-aggressions” against members of minority groups that included constraints on the right of a tutor to tell a student how bad his or her essay is.

Woke people go on about “equity”, which is even more important to them than equality, because it involves positive discrimination and resistance to so-called white privilege.

But what is really inequitable when dealing with woke activists is their refusal to engage in serious debate. I once asked a woke colleague why it was so difficult to engage in debate with his like. His answer was that people like me were creating controversies out of thin air: “There is nothing to discuss.” This is somewhere on the route to the woke position that free speech itself is a contrivance of capitalist society; far from being free, it is a way of subtly coercing those whom the old guard wish to suppress (who are not the working class, for whom the woke have little patience).

Step by step victories have been achieved by organisations such as Toby Young’s Free Speech Union, which has boldly addressed the big question about defending free speech along with individual cases of discrimination.

But there is still a great amount to be done, particularly within universities, museums and cultural institutions. In universities, diversity statements are required from applicants for lectureships in physics, and many people in junior positions feel intimidated and unable to challenge the new orthodoxy. Curricula in subjects as politically neutral as mathematics are still being fatuously “decolonised”. The assumption that actors must always be drawn from the same minority community as the persons they are playing has become a live issue, as has “cultural appropriation” of food and dress. The important thing is not to assume that because things are looking better the challenges will evaporate. These successes are not a sign that we can all relax – far from it, they are a sign that only hard work will undermine wokery.