by David Ashton
The secular state ideology of “equality, diversity, inclusion,” which some call “Wokeism” [1], is spreading into every nook and cranny of what has been our “national” life. Sharp observers compare it to a new “faith” [2], another politicised “sacred cause”, recently adjunct to Black Lives Matter militancy. Though not enforced by rack or stake, it is imposed no less widely than public religion during the long-past arch-episcopacies of Arundel or Bonner, its top-down promulgation ranging from officially enforced so-called Equality Act “protections” to Big Tech opinion-control [3], plus your local constabulary and fluctuating classrooms.
There is no formal creed, as in traditional Christianity or orthodox Islam, but its adherents and missionaries repeat the requisite jargon off pat better than neophytes of yesteryear Sunday School and, sadly, with deeper psychological internalization than thought-reform penitents of Communist China. Some converts seem almost deranged [4] and often automatically invoke an African-American petty-criminal as their icon “martyred” in problematic circumstances [5].
What are these new “engineers of the human soul” (Stalin’s phrase) up to?
Conveniently for us, the New Statesman in a pull-out section has illustrated the “equitable” future [6] in store for the hapless inhabitants of these northern isles by quoting several typical woke bureaucrats. Opening with the ridiculous statistical complaint that the current pandemic has exposed such “underlying inequalities” as that half of “black, Asian and ethnic minority” women are worried about their work prospects, unlike nearly half of women in general, the magazine wants proactive plans for “equality of gender, race, disability and class.”
“Today’s woke progressives take their ideological marching orders from European thinkers of decades ago, such as the Italian Antonio Gramsci and the German-American Herbert Marcuse” [7]. Their “race, gender, class” formula, initially hatched during the swinging sixties in a US campus/sociology movement, aimed deliberately to undermine western national, cultural and parental structures, and spread internationally as “critical studies” through “agenda-networking.” Targets explicitly specified for collective mobilization were women, students, migrants, sexual and ethnic minorities, especially “black people” [8], the “differently abled” tacked on later.
First up in the socialist weekly was Marsha de Cordova, who wants mandatory disability and pay gap reports, deprecating, because “data-led”, the government approach to racial, religious and sex-orientation group disparities. Politics must be “representative”, not just of ethnicity and disability, but also of “class”, she says. “Equality” must be part of our “thinking” and “everything we do.”
According Ms Ferber, the magazine’s special projects editor [9], this black and registered blind MP became a shadow minister when a spotlight shone on “inequalities, both between the genders and in terms of racism, in health outcomes” around the time that “the Black Lives Matter movement following the killing of George Floyd led to greater acknowledgment of systemic racism… And these things intersect.”
London Transport’s Staynton Brown, whose staff already represents “different protected characteristics”, also believes “the killing of George Floyd galvanised people” to “go further and faster in tackling discrimination” and become “more proactively anti-racist.” “Events such as the tragic killing of George Floyd,” adds Kate Fergusson, at Pinsent Masons legal services, “underscored the need for change”.
BBC “Creative Diversity” boss Miranda Wayland announces £100 million for on-screen “diverse content” and an offscreen workforce quota plan for “50 per cent gender, 20 per cent ethnicity, and 12 per cent disability”. Similar pay for similar work is fair enough. But behind the gender dogma is Marxist “emancipation” which entails the introduction of the “entire” female sex into “public industry” [10], communal care of any children resulting from sexual licence, and abolition of the traditional family home; a harmful policy in Russia that Stalin was obliged to limit.
The notion of women existing for commodity production rather than motherhood persists among corporate capitalists as well as ultra-left revolutionaries. Global boss of TransferWise (“money without borders”) Jihan Ahmed frets over “detailed requirements” in “masculine language” that deter women from an engineering career, while Tesco’s Alessandra Bellini proudly offers “gender neutral language” and “additional” Diversity & Inclusion training for supermarket managers, thereby moving business towards “a more inclusive Britain”.
Dr Matthew Connell, policy and public affairs director at the Chartered Insurance Institute, thinks the BLM protests were “a sobering reminder that the struggle for racial equality is still ongoing” and “systemic change needs to happen”. We must “keep driving forward the momentum on inclusion and focus on the intersectional nature of it”.
Inveterate black campaigner and demonstrator Larissa Kennedy, NUS President, chimes in. She expects her generation to go “beyond diversity” and “fight” for “gender justice”, to “implement systemic changes that redress the historical exploitation and erasure of women and non-binary people”. Energised by school climate-strikes, university rent-strikes, Black Lives Matter & the Women’s March, she rejects “neoliberal individualism” for “collective power” to “transform” the whole world. Meantime, there are less-global issues like “anti-black dress-code policies with hair requirements steeped in misogynoir [11]”. Of course, it all requires “an intersectional lens” when, for instance, forcing employers to improve pay-gaps impacting “women and non-binary folk at the margins – those of colour, those who are disabled and those who are LGBTQ+”.
Beyond the New Statesman supplement, Ofcom “hate” speech regulations already extend to “all forms of expression” based on “intolerance” of “disability, ethnicity, social origin, sex, gender, gender reassignment, nationality, race, religion or belief, sexual orientation, colour, genetic features, language, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth or age”, prompting a distinguished modern historian to ask what comes next: “Disapproval of mass immigration? Criticism of Black Lives Matter?” [12].
Wokeism has captured one organisation after another, from the “English” Association, “British” Library and “National” Trust to “Historic England” [13], the “Royal” Horticultural Society and “anti-white privilege” Barnardo’s, the City of London’s “Task Force” post-Floyd/BLM comprehensive recommendations and monitoring supervision particularly illustrating the ultra-left totalitarianism of the entire process. The Primate Archbishop of York, who thinks Jesus was “black” and supports “same-sex relationships” [14], complains that the “Church” of “England” leadership is “too white” [15]. Likewise, Jamaican-descended, celebrated millionaire actor Sir Lenworth George Henry PhD CBE protests that UK TV is “too white”; “The death of George Floyd…made him realise that ‘what we need is power…fundamental, integral, systemic change’ [16].”
Universities dumb down entry qualifications (“equality”!) and shut down free speech (“diversity”!), while the “Queen’s English” has largely expired (“inclusion”!), sooner than either the Queen or the English, but regarding it as a superior standard is “racist” anyway [17]. Cults typically prevent followers from accessing contrary information and alternative opinions.
Academic books and journals have been Equality, Diversity & Inclusion-saturated for decades, though more extensively today than when Penguin’s leftist Education Specials supplied students with a handy 90-page bibliography in tiny print including “How to make bombs, etc” [18]. Publishers still pour out more and more conformist matter for teachers and children alike, and have started to “cancel” dissident writers. They have yet to print a formal Book of Common Protest for their captive congregations, from college “safe spaces” to BLM/Antifa street battles [19], but the dominant clerisy, as shown above, recites from the “same hymn sheet”.
Do we deserve this compulsory indoctrination? Isn’t another “Reformation” needed?
Some useful Intellectual ammunition is fortunately availableHuman Diversity: The biology of gender, race, and class (2020); Ed West, The Diversity Illusion (2020 ed); Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds & Firebrands (2019); Winston C. Banks, Excessive Immigration (2019); Byron M. Roth, The Perils of Diversity (2014); Murray Rothbard, Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays (2000); Kenneth Minogue, Alien Powers (2008); Steven Goldberg, Why Men Rule (1999); Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage (2020); Patricia Morgan, Farewell to the Family? (1995); David Sedgwick, The Fake News Factory: Tales from BBC-land (2020).
NOTES
[1] “Woke”, Wikipedia, online; “Fighting ‘Wokeism’ & the origin of Slug.com,” online; Peter Wood, “Joe Biden, high priest of the cult of woke,” The Spectator [US], 28 January 2021, online; Steve Hilton, “The Divisive President,” The Mail on Sunday, 31 January 2021; cf. “’Woke guy’ Joe Biden is an inspiration for Labour, says Lisa Nandy,” The Guardian, 20 January 2021
[2] E.g. Max Funk, “Wokeism – The New Religion of the West,” convergemedia.org, 4 August 2020; Edward Dutton, “The Next Great Awakening,” Radix, 27 June 2020, online; Sean Collins, “Wokeness: old religion in a new bottle,” Spiked-Online, 14 August 2020; Paul Embery, Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class (2020). Search also online comments by Alexander Beiner, David Bern, Casey Chalk, Helen Pluckrose, Kyle Smith, Robby Starbuck, &c.
[3] Tom Slater, “How Big Tech took over, Spiked, 15 January 2021, online; Neill Ferguson, “The tech supremacy,” The Spectator, 16 January 2021; “The sound of silence,” The Economist, 16 January 2021; Allum Bokhari, #Deleted (2021); cf. Tobias Ellwood, Chairman of the Defence Committee on “social media”, The Mail on Sunday, 7 February 2011.
[4] Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds (2021); “Anarchy is breaking out,” Mail Online, 14 June 2020; Frank Furedi, “Why did the protests over George Floyd turn into mass hysteria?” 21 June 2020, online; Aram Bakshian Jr, “The National Media Is Fanning Hysteria About Racism,” The National Interest, 5 June 2020, online2020; Soeren Kern, “Black Lives Matter: ‘We Will Burn This System’,” Gatestone Institute, 2 August 2020, online
[5] E.g. Dr Simukai Chigudu, Rhodes Must Fall tub-thumper, appointed Professor of African Politics, describes his trauma following the “brutal torture and murder of George Floyd”, empathy with “other Black people” under “racist regimes”, and his demand that “Oxford, Britain, and the west must be decolonised [sic]” (The Guardian, 14 January 2021). For alternative views, see Jim Goad, “George Floyd: The Big Lie,” Taki’s Magazine, 9 August 2020, online; Arthur Kemp, The War Against Whites (2020) pp.3-40. Subsequent “peaceful protests” across the USA caused 20+ deaths and $2billion worth of damage.
[6] “Spotlight” Supplement, 8 January 2021
[7] Mike Gonzalez, “The Revolution Is Upon Us,” Law & Liberty, 4 September 2020, online; Kevin Portteus, “The War on America,” The American Mind, Claremont Institute, 2 September 2020; Dinesh D’Souza, “The Philosopher of Antifa”, The Epoch Times, 23 June 2020; Maurice Cranston (ed) The New Left (1975); “Stuart Hall (cultural theorist),” Wikipedia, online
[8] Michael William, The Genesis of Political Correctness (2016) p.99; Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Penguin 1972) p.63; cf. Lanre Bakare, “Steve McQueen to produce BBC films on black power…,” The Guardian, 29 January 2021.
[9] Alona Ferber, “counter-extremism” specialist & former managing editor at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
[10] Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Selected Works (London/Moscow 1968) pp.510-511; Richard Weikart, “Marx, Engels, & the Abolition of the Family,” History of European Ideas (1994), Vol.18, No.5, pp.657-672. Cf. Pavel A. Parfentiev, “A Brief History of Family Policy in Russia, 1917-2013,” The Natural Family (2013), Vol.27, No.3, online.
[11] See “Misogynoir”, Wikipedia, online, for an indispensable explanation of this “intersectional” term.
[12] Professor Dominic Sandbrook PhD, Daily Mail, 5 January 2021
[13] Following BLM protests, “Historic England” in a strategy designed to prioritise BAME & LGBTQ+ appeal, reports on the “mainstay” dependence on the slave trade of our rural society, including villages, farms, schools, churches, housing, lodges, hotels, road works, burial sites, local memorials, &c. See e.g. Craig Simpson, The Sunday Telegraph, 7 February 2021.
[14] For an unfashionable scriptural perspective on homosexual practice, see the scholarly studies in print & online by Dr Robert A. J. Gagnon, despite downplaying biological factorsThe Sexual Dead-End (1992).
[15] Sunday Times, 5 July 2020; Archbishop Steve heads “a programme” to turn a long-established national network, facing paid-clergy dismissals and parish-building closures, into a more cyber-friendly “institution” to replace vanishing churchgoers with an “ethnically diverse membership”, Sunday Times, 31 January 2021.
[16] Sunday Times, 3 January 2021; BBC News, 8 February 2008, online
[17] John Twitchin & Clare Demuth, Multi-Cultural Education (BBC 1981), pp.165-167. David Derbyshire, “How English as we know it is disappearing,” Mail Online, 27 March 2008; Richard W. Bailey, Images of English (1993); Cockburn, “U Chicago declares that English is racist, The Spectator [US], 15 September 2020; Jeff Jacoby, “Is English grammar racist?” Townhall, 29 July 2020, online; J. R. Thorpe, “[The English language] contributes to structural racism,” Bustle, 5 October 2017, online; Konstantin Kisin, “Goodthink & crimethink,” Standpoint, August/September
[18] Trevor Pateman (ed), Counter Course (1972), p.389; Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies (2002) is a revealing guide to subsequent subversion by one of its all too influential academic exponents.
[19] Kyle Shideler (ed) Unmasking Antifa (2020); John Perazzo, “Black Lives Matter: Marxist Hate Dressed Up as Racial Justice,” FrontPage.mag, 1 September 2020, online; “Black Lives Matter Exposed,” A Project of Accuracy in Media, online
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