Woke politics was never trivial

An old colleague of mine was once grousing about the political opinions of his mother, who lived in a part of Wales so distant from London that they actually speak Welsh. “I can’t believe she called me ‘woke’,” he said, before adding: “It doesn’t even mean anything.”

Setting aside the strangeness of being offended by a meaningless adjective, this kind of claim has been a commonplace of progressive thought since The Great Awokening began more than a decade ago. “Woke” doesn’t mean anything, they say, but is rather a buzzword that the gammons slap on anything they don’t like. And, anyway, many of their complaints are “not really happening”.

In fairness to the progs, many of their opponents have applied the epithet with some liberality. 

For on again, off again home secretary Suella Braverman it was the Just Stop Oil protestors that were the “tofu-eating wokerati”. For “30p” Lee Anderson, “gingerbread people” were a sop to “the woke and delusional”. As for Nigel Farage, his most recent complaint is that the five-pound note will soon swap out Churchill for “woke” beavers — the animals, that is. 

Irrespective of our inability to draw a clear line around wokeness, some woke deniers have at least given a little ground. Writing in the Nerve — a new publication launched by the raw-nerved Carole Cadwalladr — Dorian Lynskey concedes that woke politics is in fact happening, but it’s small beer compared to the rising fascism.

Wokery, he suggests, is really just the latest mutation of the “loony left” and “political correctness”, terms he applies with the appropriate scare quotes. Noting that the internet has handed the left’s crazies a megaphone, he argues that anti-woke writers have leant on “a false equivalence that was blind to power imbalances”, for example by pitting powerless trans activists against the might of anti-trans legislators and newspapers.

Contra the hysterical warnings of cancellation, most of the people who have been “cancelled”, Lynskey says, have faced passing social and professional inconveniences. “It is clear that most ‘cancelled’ celebrities are doing fine.” Likewise, corporations from Meta to McDonald’s jettisoned their DEI commitments as soon as Donald Trump became president-elect in November 2024, and bankers are finally free to call each other retards and pussies again.

Such locker room talk is apparently symptomatic of a fascism that is “hurtling down the tracks”, to invoke Il Duce’s overstated ability to make the trains run on time. “It seems absurd to lambast … Critical Race Theory when [Donald Trump] openly promotes white nationalism; leftwing hostility to free speech when he targets everyone from student protesters to talkshow hosts; … or Black Lives Matter when ICE is murdering people in the street,” Lynskey argues, with an American accent.

Much like an office drone dulled to the risk of fire by weekly drills, I must confess the f-word prompts a certain scoffing on my part. To bring out the inevitable Orwell quote: “The word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.”

The real victims of woke politics are only beginning to be counted

But my real quarrel with Lynskey is not about the alleged incipience of fascism, but his implicit claim that woke politics was little more than an online phenomenon that made easy fodder for Fleet Street. In fact, the real victims of woke politics are only beginning to be counted.

“Wokeness”, at its moral core, is the irrational sacralisation of equality above everything else. This has bled through our institutions, with terrible results. In February, for example, the inquiry into the killing of three people in Nottingham in 2023 heard that previous violence by Valdo Calocane, a paranoid schizophrenic, had been enabled by mental health professionals who considered the over-representation of young black men in custody in their decision to release him from care.

A wider nervousness around racism accusations was also evident in the inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing of 2017. A security guard said he did not confront the shifty-looking suicide bomber Salman Abedi because: “I was scared of being wrong and being branded a racist if I got it wrong and would have got into trouble. It made me hesitant.”

Most consequentially, fears about racism stymied the efforts of police to investigate and prosecute Pakistani grooming gangs across Britain. The report of Louise Casey, a government troubleshooter who is nobody’s idea of a reactionary, concluded that there were “many examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist, raising community tensions or causing community cohesion problems”. (This is proof that in a pre-“woke” world, there was value to complaints about “political correctness”.)

Something similar applies to the handling of transgenderism. Criticisms of the Tavistock clinic’s lax approach to treating children with gender dysphoria were swatted away by senior management for years before the centre was closed in 2024. Those blowing the whistle were discouraged from doing so for fear of being accused of transphobia.

The case of Keira Bell, a former Tavistock patient, is an instructive example of what this meant in practice. Having experienced discomfort with her body at 14, Bell was later put on puberty blockers, followed by cross-sex hormones and later a double mastectomy. It was a course of treatment she would come to regret, realising she was a tomboy rather than a transgender man.

Many a gender critical feminist — or terf, if you prefer — could tell you of the online pressure not to question whether such treatments were in the best interests of young patients struggling with their body image. Woke politics discouraged such scepticism, often in venomous terms, contributing to the continued operating of clinics like Tavistock below the standards of good medical practice.

It also led to not a few people leaving or being pushed out of jobs, or otherwise being excluded from professional opportunities. As Lynskey says, some of these people have done rather well out of cancellation, but most people who get sacked don’t get the opportunity to go on Triggernometry to complain about it.

A more compelling claim by Lynskey is that some commentators have been premature in declaring the death of wokeness. Wokery might have been chastened in recent years, but the people who espoused these views are mostly still around, as evinced by the speed with which Keir Starmer had to disown his warnings that Britain has become an “island of strangers”.

That Lynskey writes his own prescription for “Woke 2.0” also suggests he’s rather game for another outbreak of the culture wars, if focusing “on meaningful battles rather than footling skirmishes with celebrities”. For all his pleading, one suspects he reckons wokery has been good, actually, and it is those of us freaking out about it who are the real problem.