Woke zealots are using taxpayer cash to denigrate our heritage. They must be stopped
THE Imperial War Museum recently apologised for ending its Remembrance Sunday silence this year with a ‘woke’ rap attacking Sir Winston Churchill. Bizarre and grossly disrespectful as this spectacle was, I cannot say I was surprised. Contempt for our nation and history is now so widespread that it has infiltrated our most important institutions and the people who run them.
‘Wokeism’ is founded on the bitter prejudice that the entire Judeo-Christian tradition, and the Western societies that stem from it, are fundamentally corrupt. That, at its heart, our society is intrinsically racist and intolerant.
If the West is wicked, it follows that everywhere else is persecuted and virtuous. A disturbing moral certainty typifies woke movements, a belief in the purity and primacy of their cause.
Their views are confirmed and reinforced by social media, a place for posing, posturing and positioning, but rarely for discussion. In our brave new world, activist groups vie for attention by shouting ever louder in what can best be described as a competition of victimhood.
On the surface it is difficult to understand why reasonably welleducated people could be inclined to agree with such a warped world view. Yet it transpires that our Civil Service is allowing these politically motivated doom-mongers access to vast sums of precious public money that, once secured, is spent to deride and divide us.
The most high-profile culprit is Stonewall, of course, which has received millions of pounds in public funding to evangelise a trans agenda that has been disowned by many feminists and even some in the LGBT community.
The problem is deeper and more endemic than many people understand and goes to the heart of how we are governed.
Across Whitehall, departments are granting huge sums of taxpayer money to groups that are openly hostile to the British values of fairness, open-mindedness, mutual respect and reasonableness.
For example, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) has seen fit to spend tens of thousands of pounds on Shout Out UK, a group that claims people living in rural areas are ‘as bad as the genuine believers of white supremacy’. This condescension typifies the distance between the prejudiced metropolitan elite and the common sense of small-town Britain.
How a Government department can justify spending money on disparaging the millions who live in rural towns and villages is hard to fathom. Before the pandemic, DCMS appeared to be funding the efforts of a magazine called The Meteor to topple statues across Manchester. The magazine was pushing for a complete review of the statues – which enrich the city centre – with an article saying ‘we are making new history when we replace them’.
Among the figures dismissed as no longer relevant were the former British Prime Ministers Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington.
This talk of making new history has a chilling echo of 20th Century Nazism and Stalinism. Sneering at the great figures from our country’s past is a common theme for those receiving public money. Earlier this year the Arts and Humanities Research Council awarded considerable funding to a project on ‘White Supremacy and White Saviours’ in young adult fiction. The lead academic on this project is an individual who has made no bones about hers hatred of Churchill, saying that ‘the man was a scourge… What a cruel, macho, imperialist horror that man was… Ugh’.
Unless action is taken, the British values that guarantee civic harmony and social cohesion face an uncertain future in the face of prolonged attacks from a cabal of wellfunded militant agitators.
This is why the Common Sense Group, made up of 50 Conservative
Whitehall is funding groups that are openly hostile to British values
It is crucial we embrace rather than hide from our history
parliamentarians, supports the new campaign group Britain Uncancelled and its efforts to ‘defund cancel culture’. The Government needs to do more to stand up for the patriotic majority so loathed by the frenzied ‘woke’ mob.
The Cabinet Office can begin this process by launching a cross-departmental review of public spending, informed by groups such as Britain Uncancelled, which highlight instances where funds have ended up in the wrong hands. Well-funded woke zealots are denigrating our heritage, dishonouring our heroes and engineering the silence of those who dare question them. It is crucial that we stand up for Britain by embracing rather than hiding from our history.