We must unite to combat pernicious wokeists who even trash Churchill, top Tory tells US
BRITAIN should unite with America to combat the ‘pernicious new ideology’ of wokery that is distracting the West from battles with external foes such as Russia and China, a senior Conservative will declare in a landmark speech in Washington tomorrow.
Tory party chairman Oliver Dowden is expected to tell the audience that the intellectual forces of the Right should unite against woke warriors who want to trash the reputation of Sir Winston Churchill and deface monuments to him.
Mr Dowden – who will become the first Tory chairman to deliver a speech in Washington for more than two decades – is making his intervention at a time when Downing Street has been criticised by Tory MPs for soft-pedalling in the war on woke and not taking a strong enough line against cancel culture and the toppling of statues of controversial historical figures.
The chairman, who will also use his visit to meet Republican election strategists as he ramps up preparations for the next General Election, is expected to tell the Heritage Foundation that ‘the enemies of the West ... are finding fresh confidence in their eternal battle against liberty’ because ‘a social media mob can cancel you... merely because you have dared to challenge ... one of the Left’s fashionable nostrums’.
Mr Dowden plans to urge American conservatives to ‘find the confidence’ to defend ‘the values of a free society’, arguing that ‘the idea that Beijing’s partial embrace of free markets ... would automatically lead to greater personal and political freedoms’ has ‘proved to be breathtakingly naive’.
The speech follows growing calls within the party for a clear attack line in the ‘culture wars’.
Last month, former Minister Lord Frost, who resigned in December over the political direction of the administration, urged the Prime Minister to axe ‘all the neo-socialists, green fanatics and pro-woke crowd’ in Downing Street.
The Prime Minister has faced criticism from Tory MPs over his green policies, which they believe – unfairly, say No10 sources – are being pushed by his wife, Carrie.
Mr Dowden is expected to refer to the need for America and its allies to stand together as ‘rogue states are seeking to challenge the international order’, because ‘at the precise point when our resolve ought to be strongest ... a pernicious new ideology is sweeping our
TYRANNY OF THE WOKE WARRIORS
societies’ which ‘threatens to rob us of the self confidence we need to uphold our values’.
The Cabinet Minister is also planning to argue that the ‘woke warriors’ are ‘engaged in a form of Maoism’ which is ‘determined to expunge large parts of our past’.
He will say: ‘For them, nothing is sacred. Winston Churchill was central to the Allied victory ... in a fight for survival against Nazi tyranny. Yet some seek to trash his whole reputation and deface monuments to him ... Just when our attention should be fixed on external foes, we seem to have entered a period of extreme introspection and self-criticism that threatens to sap our societies of their self-confidence’.
Mr Dowden is expected to condemn international companies that ‘keep a profitable silence while flogging their products to authoritarian regimes’.