Woke is Labour’s albatross

By Pete North - February 16, 2021

There’s the politics that needs to be done and then there’s the politics that people want to do. You can’t really enthuse people about mail order fish packaging regulations or rules on livestock transportation. This is why I’m absolutely certain GB News won’t be a serious news channel. It’s a commercial venture therefore it has to supply what people will engage with.

You would expect that the collapse of our exports would rate as news, but that seemingly doesn’t rate. Lorry numbers have returned to normal. It doesn’t matter that half of them are empty. A reason not to engage with the subject matter has been supplied and audiences will very happily take it.

This is why the Tories are embarking on a “war on woke”. It’s Twitter catnip. My own article on the subject yesterday got record retweets for Turbulent Times. If we want the exposure then we have to supply lightweight culture war fodder. It’s fun to do but it’s not really what we’re about.

Moreover, it’s not exactly timely. It was at the peak of the BLM riots but this is indeed, as Gaby Hinsliff complains, an attempt “to breathe new life into suspiciously old fights”. But it’s also strategic, she notes. It isn’t merely about telling the Tory base what it wants to hear, it’s about about trying to dictate the terms on which normal domestic politics might resume, as the pandemic begins to recede.

This is a golden ticket for the Tories. It won’t matter that the Tories have crushed the economy and obliterated trade if Labour is exposed as as the party of woke. As Hinsliff observes, “the last thing Starmer wants ahead of May’s elections is a culture war”. Starmer’s worst nightmare “is being forced to take sides in arguments over whether Winston Churchill was a racist”. Hinsliff, along with everyone else at The Guardian does not want to fight an election on enemy territory because they know damn well it’s a loser.

Hinsliff does have something of a point though. “The problem isn’t that there are no concerns about free speech on campus or the limits of political protest. It’s that there are a million concerns that had to be parked while the country fought off a pandemic, and picking a fight with the National Trust simply isn’t top of most people’s lists, so Labour’s message to the government should be that fake outrage is no substitute for action”.

She’s not wrong. I would much prefer it if we could concentrate on the more immediate issues, but then Labour’s unfitness for office is one of those issues, and “woke” is something of a barometer.

Starmer has already showed a spectacular lack of judgement by kneeling before the mob in the name of a radical communist movement – and if anyone has demonstrated a fixation with trivialities, it’s the Labour Party which has more to say on gender pronouns and Palestine than it does about Brexit – the defining issue of our times.

Meanwhile it suits The Guardian to pretend that there isn’t a culture war, not least because it provides the wokeists with a smokescreen of obfuscation. This issue, however, is not trivial as Hinsliff would have it. This isn’t just the odd row over a statue of someone who may or may not have owned slaves. It’s a systematic purge of public institutions and university syllabuses. Moreover, it walks hand in hand with trans ideology – a wave of toxic misogyny from the left.

I have every confidence that it will be stopped in the fullness of time. The Tory “war on woke” will prove ineffectual, but this is now spilling out of university safe spaces and into the wider public domain where it must account for itself. For as long as that’s what Labour is about then they can expect defeat after defeat.

As much as anything it tells us who Labour really are. Wokeness is primarily the domain of very white, very middle class university educated females and beta men. It is not born of any organic movement by ethnic minorities. For sure, it provides race grifters in local and national government a rhetorical weapons system, but this is essentially the upper middle class waging war on the plebs.

This is that same middle class angst that is deeply ashamed of Britain and Brexit, genuinely believes that the plebs are thick and racist and in need of correction their betters, and that public institutions are tools of social engineering. With wide open goals like that, the Tories would be fools not to exploit it. No matter how inept, corrupt and they Tories may be, they’re still not worse than Labour.

The left continues to believe that the voters are wrong and they vote Tory because they’re tricked into voting against their own interests. Not once does it occur to them that the biggest problem with the Labour Party is the Labour Party. And for that reason alone, they must not be allowed near power. Their only function presently is to remind us all that things could be a whole lot worse.