UK: Yes. Labour will go Woke
Now that Labour has won an enormous majority the dogs of woke be released. As if on cue, Prime Minister Keir Starmer used his maiden speech to boast about his party’s world-leading share of LGBT MPs and praise race grievance-monger Diane Abbott. He also appointed the woke one-two punch of Bridget Phillipson as Education Secretary and Anneliese Dodds as Equalities Minister.
Both have incurred the ire of J.K. Rowling because they prioritise the rights of biological males who think they are ladies over the right of women to female-only spaces. This foreshadows the surreptitious manner in which, for the the next five years, Labour will push what I call ‘left-liberal extremism’ —walk softly (talk about ‘centrist’, ‘country over party’, ‘bringing people together’) but carry a big woke stick.
As Matt Goodwin has commented, the woke belief system is not just a sideshow. It threatens the very foundations of Western civilisation. Starmer, as Goodwin notes, is likely to toss red meat to Labour’s radical woke interest groups because he lacks the budgetary headroom to drive growth, boost public spending and increase pay.
His large majority also means he will have to contend with querulous progressive backbench MPs who include Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) such as Nadia Whittome - who has vowed to push gender self-identification ‘no ifs ands or buts’, and described open debate as ‘an effective rollback of assumed equality.’
This doesn’t mean Starmer is suddenly going to start saying ‘transwomen are women’ or Britain is ‘systemically racist’. He knows the British people are not woke. In my own surveys, two-thirds oppose woke policies while we have already seen, in Scotland, how a large majority break against woke policies when they become aware of them.
Instead, Keir Starmer’s stated aim is to shoot down the opponents of this cultural revolution as ‘divisive’, thus running interference for woke left activists in the civil service, schools, universities, public sector bodies, galleries and other institutions.
Already, in her opening speech to civil servants, Lisa Nandy, new Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, has made clear she will drop a ban on rainbow lanyards and other political messaging because ‘the era of culture wars are over’ and ‘[our] entire focus is on the work of delivering change – not lanyards’ (read: green light for culture war activists).
This will be paired with discreet (‘walk softly, big stick’) measures, such as appointing woke ministers to key redoubts in the culture war (such as Dodds and Phillipson), while suggesting that similarly self-identified ‘woke’ activists and supporters of Black Lives Matter take control of Labour’s efforts to curtail illegal immigration.
While the Conservatives did little to combat woke, the differences with Labour are important. The Tories mounted a weak and unfocused effort to rid schools, the civil service, and the NHS of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and gender ideology, failing to stop to these ideas in the wider Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) agenda.
While 2019 Tory MPs such as Caroline Noakes, Crispin Blunt, Theresa May and Dehenna Davison were openly woke, many of their peers were not and some, such as Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman and Oliver Dowden, were willing to combat this poisonous belief system.
The knowledge that the government was at least somewhat opposed to this agenda meant woke activists in the public sector could not fully let rip. But that leash came off when Labour won its enormous majority at the general election, on July 4.
What is woke? Don’t let the left fool you by arguing it is an empty epithet, that it is just about “being nice” or “tolerant”. In fact, it is an analytically and empirically robust concept —a distinctive political tradition or ideology in its own right.
As I explain in my new online course on Woke, and my new book Taboo, woke refers to the making sacred of historically marginalised race, gender and sexual identity groups.
It is a belief system that results in a prioritising of equal outcomes and protecting minorities from emotional harm. Its supporters claim this is about ‘being kind’ but the reality is that, today, kindness to one group, such as biological males who identify as female, entails being unkind to another, such as biological women who want to protect women’s sport and spaces.
Likewise, assailing ‘whiteness’ in the name of making minorities feel welcome is an attack on the identity of the ethnic majority. Punishing people for politically incorrect speech or chilling their freedom of expression might make a few sensitive minorities feel better, but will embarrass and annoy more confident minorities while stifling the majority group’s traditions and free speech.
These are conflicts of group interest in a democracy, not open-and-shut ‘rights’ issues – which is the way the woke media class and elite institutions frame it.
The view of minorities as sacred began with the anti-racism taboo in mid-1960s America, which was the ‘big bang’ of today’s moral order. Then, over time, the magic was borrowed by feminists, gays, and later trans activists to create new taboos in our society around sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, and more.
While proportionate norms against racism and prejudice are important, taboos are tripwires that activate our disgust reflex, reducing complexity in our society to binary and simplistic debates in which those who deviate from the new, stifling orthodoxy are silenced or stigmatised as racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on.
These stigmas are the ‘North Star’ around which today’s moral system revolves. Until we undo that, cancel culture, gender ideology, critical race theory, and routine attacks on the history and collective memory of Western societies like Britain will not just continue; they will accelerate and intensify.
As African-American writer Shelby Steele, who lived through the civil rights struggle, recalls, in the 1950s African Americans in the South had to kowtow to whites, who at that time held the cultural power.
But from the 1960s whites had to genuflect to African Americans, who had acquired cultural power because whites had confessed to having mistreated African Americans. This was an unavoidable response to the dismantling of racial segregation.
In order to recover moral authority, Steele writes that white people and American institutions had to virtue signal they were ‘good whites’ by praising minorities, denigrating their fellow white Americans, or adopting policies like affirmative action, which arguably do more harm than good to African Americans.
We see this, for example, in studies which shown how white liberal progressives in America dumb down their speech when speaking to African Americans, tiptoeing around groups they revere as sacred rather than treating them as equals.
The power of identity stigmas, like kryptonite, can be used to disable opponents, rending them radioactive to others. The political left, whether radical or liberal, drew on newly sacralised minority groups like African-Americans as a source of meaning and direction for their politics.
But this also meant they could borrow cultural power from minorities and use it against the right. In other words, the moral revolution brought about by the race taboo did not just involve a transfer of power from white to black; it also involved a shift of moral authority from right to left.
When a party is in government they make the laws, and when an ideology has cultural power it makes the norms. The new cultural order gave the left the authority to use epithets like racist, sexist or transphobe to shut down democratic debate in numerous policy areas. Immigration, crime, education, health or any other sphere of policy that could plausibly be associated with race or sex thereby came to slant left.
The fear of being irradiated by the kryptonite of the race taboo – and thus socially ostracised – could even turn conservative politicians into useful idiots, such as when Theresa May called the Conservatives the ‘nasty party’ and pushed the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) agenda as a way of deflecting the charge of racism levelled at her government by progressive media because of its efforts to cut immigration.
In this way, as I argue in Taboo, the political left’s strategy across the West has been to launder its illiberal ideas by badging them as liberal. Who could possibly be opposed to ‘anti-racism’, ‘inclusion’, ‘diversity’, or ‘trans rights’, they ask?
Those who try to argue against such policies are smeared as racists, Islamophobes, transphobes, or simply ‘hateful’ figures. We saw this, tragically, with the grooming gangs scandal, where public officials routinely failed to act against Pakistani Muslim gangs that preyed on young, white, working-class girls for fear of being seen as ‘racist’.
In fact, the cultural left deploys a ‘radioactive velvet glove’, involving both a carrot and a stick. The carrot is that you get to think of yourself as a good person if you agree with this new moral order; the stick is you are cancelled if you are dare disagree
https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/yes-labour-will-go-woke
****************************************************The Tory elite class is in CLOUD CUCKOO LAND
Ever since their historic defeat at the general election, more than a few members of the Tory elite class have decided to leave reality for Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Despite Nigel Farage and Reform having just fired a bazooka at the Conservative Party’s electorate, winning over millions of disillusioned conservatives, one member of the Tory elite class after another has since lined up to warn their party that any association with Faragism would be the final kiss of death.
Writing in The Times, former Conservative Party leader William Hague, who never won an election himself, warns his party against “appeasing populist rhetoric”, “simplistic and nationalistic solutions”, and brands Faragism “a dead end”.
Andy Street, who just lost the West Midlands mayoralty to Labour, likewise warns the Conservative Party it would be “very, very foolish” to adopt a “Reform-light agenda”, which would only push them “down an electoral cul-de-sac”.
And then there’s former leader Theresa May who, after squandering the biggest electoral opportunity in modern times, in 2017, has proclaimed Nigel Farage “is not a Conservative” and should never have any role in the Tory party.
Are these people for real? Are they serious? Do they not realise what just happened to their party?
Or are they simply more interested in signalling their elite values to other members of the Tory elite rather speaking to their wider party and the country?
I say all this because I think they need a reality check. So here it is. Nigel Farage and Reform just completely blew apart the only electoral coalition the Tories have managed to assemble since Thatcher that was capable of delivering a big majority.
And Farage did this —as I warned for years he would— by reaching out to all those disillusioned and disgruntled 2019 Tories who took a punt on the Conservatives five years ago but now wish they never had. Just look at the data.
Farage and Reform, according to Lord Ashcroft’s post-election polling, poached nearly twice as many 2019 Conservative voters as Keir Starmer and Labour. He cannibalised close to one-quarter of the entire Conservative Party electorate.
YouGov’s polling is even more striking. Fully one-quarter of the Conservative Party’s 2019 electorate defected to Reform while just one-tenth switched to Labour.
Put another way, while one in ten 2019 Tories switched to Labour, one in four went to Reform.
The blunt reality is that more 2019 Conservatives switched to Reform than the number who switched to Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined.
Yet if you read recent commentary by the Tory elite class —endorsed by pro-Labour analysts who rather like the idea of the Tories becoming indistinguishable from the Labour Party—then you’d think that the very opposite is true.
You'd think the Tories must do all they can to avoid Faragism and focus instead on winning back all those Labour and Liberal Democrat voters in the big cities and leafy shires who, we are led to believe, might actually consider voting Tory in 2029. Are these people out of their minds?
It is Nigel Farage, nobody else, who presents the greatest threat to the survival of the Conservative Party. And, as we learned last week, he is now also hitting the Tories in other ways, too.
By tearing off the biggest chunk of the Tory vote, Farage just indirectly cost the Conservatives 150 seats while leapfrogging ahead of them to become the main opposition in nearly 100 seats.
He not only displaced the Tories across northern England, which really matters given Labour has re-emerged as the dominant force in Scotland, but has done so while becoming far more competitive in Wales, picking up seven in ten former Brexit Party voters, one in three Tory Leavers, nearly three in ten of all Brexit voters, one-fifth of the working-class, and nearly as many middle-aged men as the Tories.
https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/the-tory-elite-class-is-in-cloud
************************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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