I’ve been debating with myself whether to repost anything by Barry Wall, the EDIJester, for a little while now. I really don’t share his political opinions – he’s a Telegraph-reading Tory, who thinks that five years of the Labour party in power will totally wreck this country but will have the benefit of leading to another 25 years of Tory rule, as he says in this video. He also thinks that the NHS needs to be scaled back as it’s a socialist state. Well, it’s not state socialism that’s responsible for the increase in bureaucracy, but privatisation. He is very well-informed on the immense damage Queer Theory and the transgender ideology has done and is doing to gays, lesbians and vulnerable young people, principally autistic and gender nonconforming children. However, he is very forthright and outspoken in the scorn and sheer loathing he has for the ideology and those pushing it. While I share his views there, I’m very much aware that many of the great readers of this blog don’t, and I don’t want to insult them. But this issue’s a bit different. It’s about the Critical Social Justice invasion of STEM and in particular the teaching of evolution and ecology.
In the video, he reads out and adds his own comments to a review from the website ‘Why Evolution Is True’, of a scientific paper demanding that the teaching of evolution and ecology should be revised to include the subject’s racism in order to combat modern racism and ‘White complicity’. He states that it’s the kind of material that comes from Black activists like Ibrahim X. Kehindi. This isn’t anti-racism as you and I would normally understand it, where people look past skin colour and disregard past prejudices in order to appreciate the person within. No. Critical Race Theory states that all Whites occupy a privileged position at the apex of society, while all Blacks are brutalised and discriminated against by the system. This has to be laid bare, and Whites must feel guilty about their past in order to make up for past or present racial inequities. This last word does not mean equality in the sense of equality of opportunity. It means equality of result. Thus, lower performing Blacks must be given preferential treatment over Whites and now Asians through affirmative action schemes.
The Jester’s a meritocrat, who believes that firms should only hire and employ the best people, regardless of race. But this is under attack from the Critical Social Justice adherents, who, following the pedagogical theories of the Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freyre, wish to turn teaching into a form of political indoctrination, with the individual subjects merely vehicles for this. The Humanities have been the hardest hit by this attitude, but it’s beginning to infect the science subjects as well. This is particularly pernicious because of the immense power of the STEM subjects to affect the quality of people’s lives. Scientists, engineers and medical professionals need to rely on object fact. But postmodernism, of which Critical Race Theory is a part, rejects objective knowledge as merely a product, or rather a prejudice of western society, and criticises the exclusion of ‘indigenous ways of knowing’. The scientific paper being reviewed does exactly the same.
Now I’d normally avoid sites like ‘Why Evolution Is True’. In my experience, many of them appeared in the first decade of this century as a response to the rise of Creationism and Intelligent Design. They tended to be run by militant atheists, who sneered at people of faith generally when they weren’t attacking them for not believing in evolution. This followed the New Atheists and its leaders, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and so on. Dawkins is known for his particularly bitter hatred of religion, but to be fair he was also very critical of postmodernism. And it’s now postmodernism, in the form of its Critical Social Justice ideologies, that are taken over from religion as the main threat to rationality and objective science.
Evolution is particularly vulnerable to criticisms about its racist past because it was incorporated into the racial anthropology and pseudo-scientific racism that arose in the late 19th century. But Europeans had already developed racial hierarchies with northern Europeans at the top and Aboriginal Australians at the bottom before Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Also, other cultures have also developed their own racial prejudices and hierarchies. Medieval Muslim scholars speculated that White people owed their complexions and temperaments, which were inferior to those of brown Arabs and Asians, because they lived in northern regions and so had not been properly cooked by the sun. Blacks were also inferior, but for the opposite region. They lived in hotter, southern climates and so had been overcooked. And in the First Millennium AD, some Chinese scholars decided that Whites were the product of interbreeding with monkeys. And at one level, I think many students of evolution are already aware of its racist past through works like The Mismeasure of Man by the late palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould.
European readers may be surprised at the accusations of racism against ecology, but the American ecological movement is tainted with a racist past. Some of those who established the first national parks in America were fervent racists, who hated Blacks and indigenous Americans. But many of them were also otherwise progressive liberals, who believed in a mixed economy, welfare provision and strong trade unions, as Thomas Sowell points out in his book, Intellectuals and Race. But obviously, racism is only part of this, as I think much of the American ecological movement also sprang from ordinary, working class Americans, who yearned for the beauty of the natural world their parents and grandparents had left when they migrated from the farms to seek work in the cities.
Militant Black activists have also developed their own splenetic racist ideologies, in which Whites are at the bottom. These have been developed by the Afrocentrists and the Black Muslim organisations like the Nation of Islam. The latter teaches that Whites were created thousands of years ago by an evil Mekkan scientist in order to destroy Black racial purity. As time went on, however, they also interbred with lepers and dogs. Now, if the teaching of mainstream subjects like evolution and ecology has to include these subjects’ racist past, the argument could be levelled that no teaching about Afrocentrism and Black Islam should exclude mentioning the racism of these ideologies and religions. But I can see real resistance coming to the mere suggestion of this.
This isn’t about informing students of a particularly evil side of their disciplines, but about using that history as a means of indoctrinating them with an extreme and controversial racial ideology at the expense of the subject itself. CRT should have no place in the curriculum.
We all have an NHS story – from being born in the NHS to seeing it save our friends and family.
We are massively thankful to our wonderful NHS and its brilliant staff for being there for us through the years.
But due to outsourcing and cuts, our NHS is on its knees. And if politicians think that we are going to just clap for the NHS on July 5th, they are sorely mistaken.
We will demand they reinstate our NHS as the fully public service it was created to be and fund it properly.
On a day when the public will be paying lots of attention to the NHS, you can help make sure they are hearing this demand and adding their voices to it.
After a decade of outsourcing and massive cuts, our NHS can longer be there for us when we need it.
7.3 million of us are now on NHS waiting lists. And as a result, 272,000 people in Britain paid out-of-pocket to get healthcare from the private sector in 2022.
You shouldn’t have to wait for months, sometimes over a year, for care because you don’t have money. That is American-style two-tier healthcare happening right here in the UK.
And it’s happening in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
We have a massive opportunity on Wednesday 5th July. Everyone will be talking about the birthday of our NHS on that day and we can make it impossible for our MPs to avoid your demand – on social media and your local high street – that they reinstate our NHS.
There are three ways that you can take action on Wednesday 5th of July to demand that your MP reinstate our NHS as a fully public service:
Organise or attend a local action on your local high street and get messages from the public, which you will deliver to your MP and put pressure on them directly
Make a selfie video or picture with your personal message and share it with the hashtag #NHS75 so that people on social media can help boost your message to your MP
Join KONP’s online rally at 6:30 pm on Wednesday 5th July
You can find out more about how to take action HERE.
There is an action for everyone to take regardless of your situation – you can be part of making sure your MP gets the message. The more of us take action, the bigger the impact we can have together.
Nye Bevan, the founder of our National Health Service, said that our NHS will survive so long as there are people willing to fight for it. And thanks to you and others fighting for our NHS, it is still here 75 years later.
Thank you so much for all you do to protect our NHS.
Cat, Johnbosco, Matthew, Kate, Imogen – the We Own It team’
Now that Sunak and the Tories are feeling the heat from the Labour party they’ve gone back to reviving one of their old lies from a few years ago. This was Bozo Johnson’s pledge that the Tories would build 40 new hospitals. Of course, the pledge was empty. Most of those 40 new hospitals were existing institutions scheduled for some refurbishment or rebuilding work. And in any case, none of the new hospitals have actually been built. But they’ve revived this lie, and Steve Barclay was on yesterday morning’s news and politics show on BBC 1 to spread it. Laura Kuenssberg isn’t my favourite Beeb journalist and in the past has shown herself to be as biased towards the Tories as the rest of them. But to give her credit, she kept on about this issue to Barclay, pointing it out to him again and again. But, Barclay attempted to defend himself, some of the existing hospitals would have to be completely gutted, so they were practically being rebuilt. This cut no ice with Kuenssberg, who carried on making the point, as well as the fact that some of these hospitals needed this work because of the poor condition they’d been allowed to get in. Some of them had their roofs falling in. And besides, no matter what the Tories did now, the new hospitals wouldn’t be completed until 2030. This didn’t impress Barclay, who said that this often happened, that governments started a project that would only be completed years later. But Kuenssberg did seem to have won some kind of victory over him, as she thanked at the end for coming on the programme and admitting that the 40 new hospitals included existing ones.
I don’t believe the Tories have any intention of building these hospitals. They’ve had three years or so to do so, and haven’t done anything about them. Yes, I know there have been problems with the economy and the Tories throwing out one Prime Minister after another, but Johnson lied through his teeth. The pledge about building hospitals was just one of them. Building NHS hospitals contravenes the Tory policy of running down the NHS and contracting out NHS services to the private sector. And if these hospitals were built, it would be using the Public-Private Finance Initiative, which has resulted in smaller hospitals being built and at greater cost than if the government just used straightforward contracting methods. Besides which, when New Labour started building new hospitals, in some cases existing hospitals were closed and demolished to make way for them.
This is just more Tory propaganda, designed to fool the public into thinking that the NHS is safe with them and to fend off the threat from Labour. Get the liars out!
I got this message from the pro-nationalisation, pro-NHS organisation yesterday.
‘Dear David,
You’re incredible!
159 of you have signed up for a regular donation and hundreds more have raised £8431 towards the campaign to make reinstating our NHS as a fully public service a major issue in this election.
Now let’s do this.
FIRST we’ll launch our pledge for MPs and prospective parliamentary candidates to sign, with new polling to show that the public want our NHS BACK.
NEXT ON 5th July (the NHS’s 75th birthday) we’ll hold actions to ramp up the pressure on MPs.
THEN we’ll hold reverse town halls (where politicians listen to the people!) online with MPs in key constituencies to push them to sign the pledge.
We’ll be in touch again soon to let you know about actions happening in your local area or online.
You can play a key role in persuading your MP and election candidates to sign the pledge – and praising them if they have.
Waiting lists are in the news all the time. The challenge is to make it clear what the answer is – not more ‘choice’ but an end to cuts and privatisation.
NOW IS THE TIME to get the message out loud and clear – people don’t want a two tier system like America.
We want an NHS that is there for all of us when we need it. There for our children and our grandchildren.
We know political parties are deciding on policies right now. We won’t wait until an election is announced to make our demand.
The dedication of all the kind people like you who are on this list – whether taking action, making donations, helping in so many ways – blows us away!
THANK YOU for making this campaign possible, we couldn’t do this without you.
Cat, Johnbosco, Matthew, Kate and Imogen – the We Own It team
PS Campaigning works! The actions you’ve been taking with us – whether on the NHS, energy, water, rail, buses – it all makes a difference.
Just yesterday, West Yorkshire Mayor Tracy Brabin announced that taking buses into public control is her preferred option, bringing the region one step closer to taking back power from private companies. This follows years of campaigning by We Own It supporters like you.
And today four MPs will be joining an action in Liverpool to back public control of buses there.‘
I’m going to have to do a bit more digging on this, because I think I might be missing something. Yesterday Starmer and Wes Streeting announced that if Labour is elected, they’ll reform the NHS. Starmer has been saying for a very long time that the health service is in an existential crisis and that radical reform is required in order to save it. I think he’s absolutely right about this, especially as Sunak wants even more of it privatised as he deludedly thinks this has worked so well, and former Health Secretary Sajid Javid wants to introduce a £20 charge for people seeing their doctor. I also remember Lord Warner back in the ‘teens suggesting that there should be some kind of additional private insurance scheme or tax or something levied to support the NHS. This was, of course, another step on the road to full privatisation, as was pointed out to Warner. Who subsequently left the Labour party. Starmer also announced that Labour would demand increased efficiency in the NHS with targets set to reduce waiting times. This is all good stuff, but I don’t recall any mention on the mainstream news about how exactly he was going to do all this. It should be done through re-nationalisation and the statements from my local Labour MP, Karin Smyth, certainly suggests that Labour’s committed to a nationalised NHS. But Labour has also said that in the short term they’ll use private healthcare to clear the waiting list. This sounds good, but I have a feeling that the arguments for privatising the NHS the Tories have been using recently included the same statement that they were going to use private healthcare to cut the backlog created by the Covid crisis. New Labour was as committed to privatisation as the Conservatives and went further in the privatisation of the NHS than the Tories had dared. I’m therefore at a loss how Starmer and Streeting plan to reform the NHS so that it again meets the needs of this country’s great working people, and whether it’ll still be nationalised at the end of it, whatever the impression Starmer wants to give about it now.
I got this message from the internet petitioning organisation yesterday. As you can see, they’re hoping to organise a massive petition against Sajid Javid’s noxious proposal to start charging patients for NHS care. I think they organised a similar petition a little while ago, but they seem particularly alarmed after Gordon Brown denounced it. I’ve signed it, and I’ve put it up here in the hope that others may wish to sign it too. The NHS really is under threat from the Tory goons.
‘David, this is shocking.
Former Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, has suggested patients should be charged a £20 fee if they ask for NHS treatment without seeing a GP first. [1]
David – there’s no sugar coating it. Charging sick people for being sick would end the NHS as we know it. And only this week, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised the alarm – now we’re doing the same. [2]
This isn’t the first time something so dangerous has been floated. Rishi Sunak said patients should be charged £10 for missing appointments, and some Conservative grandees have suggested the same. [3] But, every time, public pressure forced them to back down. [4]
David, this is a dangerous moment – our NHS needs us. We are in a fight to defend its very existence. And it’s going to take our biggest NHS campaign ever. Today, we take the first step of the Great British backlash with a huge petition. Together, we could get ONE MILLION PEOPLE to add their name, to show those in power that the British public will NEVER stand for the sick being charged for being sick.
David, this fight starts with you. Will you add your name to the petition and tell the Government: charging the sick for being sick? Don’t you dare. And then share it with 5 friends? If each of us reading this email added their name, and passed it on, we’d make it to a million. And fast. Clicking the button below will add your name automatically with one click:
Make no mistake, this is an attempt by the same people who have spent a decade underfunding and understaffing the NHS, bringing it to its knees, to make paying for healthcare seem a normal way out of this crisis.
We’re planning this huge campaign right now, but it starts – today – with you.
Just got this through from the pro-democracy groups about an article in the Heil by someone called Charles Dunst. Dunst says, rightly, that Brits, especially young Brits, are losing faith in democracy. They are, but this isn’t the fault of 13 years of authoritarian Tory rule and legislation setting up secret courts and curbing the right to protest and strikes! No! The real threat to democracy comes from authoritarian leftists like Extinction Rebellion. And Liz Truss, a puppet of the free trade NHS privatisation lobbyists at Tufton Street, is just the woman to defend democracy. This is just completely bonkers. It’s on the same level as telling the British public that Judge Dredd is a staunch believer in civil liberties and prison reform. I don’t have much respect for Extinction Rebellion as their stunts of holding up traffic and so on seem designed particularly to annoy the ordinary public. And they have harmed people, as when they prevented an ambulance from taking a woman having a stroke in hospital in time, so that they woman wouldn’t have suffered paralysis down one side of her body. But Dunst’s crazy article does remind me of the advice Private Eye gave about reading the opinions of Rees-Mogg senior. He must be read carefully. Then you turn his ideas through 180 degrees and, vioila! he’s exactly right. Here’s Open Britain’s comment:
‘Dear David,
In 2023, Britain is inundated with flag-toting, vote-suppressing, reality-denying authoritarianism. In times like these, nations rely on journalists to speak truth to power, to challenge the government line and speak for the people when their voices aren’t being heard. In Britain, our media ecosystem is doing the opposite – its supercharging and amplifying our vocal right-wing minority.
You may have seen this Daily Mail headline circulating on Twitter. Charles Dunst’s unbelievable article claims that young people are losing faith in democracy, that they just don’t feel it’s working for them anymore – and that’s true. Our institutions are not adequately reflecting the will of the people, meaning we need to fix those institutions and restore trust (which is exactly what Open Britain is fighting for).
Dunst has other ideas. Instead, he goes on to commend Liz Truss of all people for standing for “liberal values”, while arguing that the reason democracy isn’t working is actually because of China. He claims that climate protestors are the real authoritarians in the UK, despite their almost complete lack of power and the harsh government crackdowns on their right to protest. It’s an incomprehensible distortion of reality – but it still gets into people’s heads.
The mental gymnastics required to write such an article must have required years of rigorous training. But it’s just one example of how the UK media manufactures consent among the public, deploying specific framings and omitting hard truths that change the tone of the story altogether, functioning as unofficial state propaganda. This article is toeing the line of people like Liz Truss, Rees-Mogg, and Boris Johnson, presenting them as a solution to a problem that they caused.
None of this is terribly new. From backing the actual Nazis back in the 1930s to going on xenophobic, anti-muslim tirades in the 2010s, the Mail and its counterparts have long pushed an unpopular agenda. But now, in the age of tabloid articles, social media, and targeted advertising, it’s posing a real threat to democracy itself. A democratic system is only as good as its information environment – and ours is clouded with propaganda and misinformation.
For one thing, we need to support the independent media in the UK. In recent years, a new breed of media companies like Byline Times, Politics JOE, and openDemocracy have started to set a new standard, covering substantial political stories instead of hacking into Harry and Meghan’s phones.
What we really need, however, is meaningful press regulation. At this critical time, we need to start asking questions like “Why does Russian oligarch Evgeny Lebedev get to sit in the House of Lords and own the Evening Standard?” or “Why are we allowing Rupert Murdoch’s media empire to warp public opinion in his favour?”.
It’s just another reason we need a democratic renewal in this country. As much as a broken press is a threat to democracy, democracy is equally the solution to a broken press. In a survey of 24 countries, the UK had the second lowest level of trust in the press (just 13%) – only beating out Egypt and ranking well below Russia, Indonesia, and Mexico. The people want change, and we need real democracy to reflect that.
As Charles Dunst said, the people are losing faith in democracy. But the solution is not more NatC conventions or bringing back Liz Truss. It’s a wholesale revitalisation of the democratic institutions that deliver the will of the people. That’s what Open Britain is all about.
More evidence of what a nasty, callous and thoroughly unsympathetic piece of work Anne Widdecombe is. With more people suffering real hardship and starvation due to the cost of living crisis, it’s now been reported that Widdecombe really doesn’t have much sympathy for their plight. She was in some kind of debate over the rising cost of food. The prices of some articles have risen by 25 per cent. Cheese sandwiches were cited as an example, the price having risen enormously from its previous price of 40 p. What was Widdecombe’s response to the question? She said that people shouldn’t make cheese sandwiches if they couldn’t afford the ingredients, and that people had no right to cheap food because of inflation. It was the same complete lack of any kind of empathy for the public displayed by 30p Lee Anderson.
But people do have a right to expect staple foods will be kept affordable. During times of famine in the 18th century, when the price of bread rose beyond the ability of the poor to buy it, mobs broke into bakers’, seized the loaves and sold them to the public at a price they considered just and affordable. According to historians of the working class such as E.P. Thompson, this was part of a growing working class consciousness. This has been challenged by right-wing historians, who see it as middle class consciousness. Regardless of the niceties of such debates, the lesson is that ordinary, working people did feel they had a right to cheap food, and when this was unable, took matters into their own hands. I am not suggesting that people similarly break into modern bakers and their local supermarkets to steal or seize items. I am merely saying that people have a right to expect official intervention to ensure that some items remain cheap even during inflation.
Widdecombe departed to Richard Tice’s Reform party a few years ago, dissatisfied with the Tories over Brexit. I caught a bit of her speech on YouTube at their conference a week of so ago before I turned it off in disgust. She’s still suffering from the delusion that we can make wonderful deals with countries independently of the EU, despite the fact that the Tories glaringly struggled to do so. Liz Truss’ deal to export British cheese to Japan, where most of the people are lactose intolerant, was being promoted as some kind of success. Instead it provoked widespread laughter and ridicule. She hasn’t learned anything from that. But what really made me turn off was when she looked back nostalgically at the days when you could just turn up at your doctor’s and be seen without an appointment. Yes, I remember those halcyon days as well, Anne. They were right before Thatcher’s healthcare reforms of privatisation and cuts started to bite, and created the horrific mess healthcare is in today. Widdecombe was part of Major’s administration, which helped create it. She can’t blame Labour or socialism for the state it’s in. It’s purely the Tories’ fault, although I don’t think Blair helped. And it won’t get better if Tice’s lot get voted in, although they are better than the Tories in that they do recognise the benefits of partly renationalising the energy companies.
But Widdecombe has shown herself to be out of touch and completely unsuited to be anywhere near government. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone.
I got this latest comment from the pro-democracy organisation about the National Conservatives’ conference earlier this afternoon. They make the point that their real views about democracy and transparency are shown by the way they stopped left-wing media organisations like Novara entrance, despite all their rhetoric about it. Other highlights included Reet Snob stating plainly that the Voter ID laws were all about gerrymandering and a speech by Cruella in which she went on about genitals. This last was dig at Starmer. Cruella said that she and Sunak knew that 100 per cent of women don’t have penises, unlike Starmer. Who, she joked, would stand as the trans candidate at the next election. Here’s the message
Dear David,
The National Conservativism (Nat-C) Conference kicked off yesterday, proving to be just as much of a weird, far-right cringe-fest as any of us could have anticipated. Despite one of the conference’s ostensible themes being “free speech”, they’ve shut their doors to journalists.
Once again, this clique of Conservatives is showing that their commitment to freedom of expression is ankle-deep. One of their core values crumbles to dust the moment anyone disagrees with them, in which case they become the delicate “snowflakes” they claim to detest.
Byline Times’ political editor Adam Bienkov, as well as the political correspondents from OpenDemocracy, Politics JOE, Novara Media and others, all had their press tickets rejected. It’s not hard to see what those publications have in common: they don’t share the extreme views of the conference and probably wouldn’t cover it favourably.
We shouldn’t be surprised that non-Conservative media is being barred from entry. This conference is a symbol of minority rule, a gathering of election deniers, theocrats, and billionaires’ mouthpieces. They’re becoming increasingly bold about rejecting democracy outright.
Here are some highlights from the conference so far that illustrate the point:
Jacob Rees Mogg openly acknowledged that voter ID laws were “gerrymandering” elections. He actually just admitted it.
US Senator JD Vance said that the US and UK Conservative movements are on “similar trajectories“. This from one of the people that tried to overturn the 2020 US election.
Douglas Murray said that just because Germany “mucked up” nationalism doesn’t mean the UK can’t give it another go.
Suella Braverman’s weird speech about genitalia and the need to arrest protestors – ironically interrupted by an Extinction Rebellion stunt.
They may call themselves “populists” and pretend to be representative of ordinary people, but it’s all just rhetorical sleight-of-hand. These are free-market fundamentalists, Christian nationalists, and conspiracy theorists – and thepublic at large is not behind them.
As the old adage from David Frum goes: “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
We’re already there – the mask is now fully off. The only way to counter people like this is to force them to play the game fairly. Instead of letting them “gerrymander”, spread lies, and appeal to the worst elements of xenophobia and hate in Britain, we need to fix the system that has enabled them for far too long. We know that the general public rejects this kind of politics – we just need a system that reflects that.
A more democratic, fairer politics would prevent the rise of fascism in Britain. We’re running out of time to build it. As a young person in Britain, my future depends on us changing this trajectory – there’s nothing for me in the UK under Nat-C rule.
That’s why I signed up to Open Britain’s mission and why I would encourage everyone who shares my concerns to do so too. We know the majority of people in this country are on our side. By working together, we can and will see off this creeping authoritarianism and set free Britain.
I’m not a member of Open Britain, but I’m leaving the link here for anyone who is so alarmed by this swing to the extreme right that they do want to join the organisation.
I’ve seen a couple of videos about them on YouTube already. In one of them, various attendees were claiming that it was for small ‘c’ conservatives and that while some Conservatives were there, most of the attendees didn’t belong to the party. Hmmm. The problem is, some of the speakers were very definitely big ‘C’ Tories, like Rees Mogg and Braverman. They also had the former MEP Daniel Hannan, dubbed by Guy Debord’s Cat as ‘the Lyin’ King’, a hard-line Brexiteer who’d like to sell off the NHS. Politics Joe put up a video in which they interviewed some of the people going to the conference outside. One of them was an older man, who lamented the lack of sexual restraint in modern society and said quite plainly that if a man fathered a child, he had a duty to support it. Now I didn’t watch all of the video, and perhaps this gent said something far more extreme later on, but I don’t think what he said was particularly controversial. I think the traditional attitude among intellectuals at least until the middle of the last century was that restraint was one of the key elements of civilisation. It was what made us civilised beings instead of animals. And sexual restraint, finding appropriate channels for sexuality like marriage was an intrinsic part of this. As for men supporting their children, again I can’t see anything wrong or controversial about it. Not on its own, unless it’s coupled with more extreme policies, like attacks on gay marriage. But I don’t doubt that as a whole, the Nat Cons are indeed a deeply unpleasant, highly reactionary movement.
Okay, I’ve got to confess to making another mistake. Earlier today I put up a piece reporting that Starmer had told the leaders of the Labour party that people weren’t interested in woke, and condemned the Tories for being ‘out of touch’. This had been covered in a video put out by That Preston Journalist. I watched it and got the wrong end of the stick. He seemed to me to be saying that Starmer had decided that woke policies weren’t appealing to the public and was ready to ditch them. At the same time I thought that Starmer was also attacking that part of the Conservative party that is woke.
How wrong I was! It seems Starmer isn’t prepared to ditch ‘woke’ at all. He just doesn’t think that voters care enough about it to vote against Labour because of it. Instead they’re more interested and concerned about the NHS and the cost of living. When he said that Sunak and the Tories were out of touch, he meant that they failed to appreciate that these issues took precedence over the woke policies Starmer is promoting and defending and that the British public generally didn’t share their concerns about woke policies. This is how it’s been interpreted by GB News and their presenters.
Before I go further, let’s try and unpack what is meant by the term ‘woke’. Gillyflower, one of the great commenters here, remarked that I should refresh my memory over what it means. As I understand it, it’s Black slang meaning being awake to injustice. Looking at how it’s now being used, it seems to have replaced the old term ‘political correctness’ for extreme and intolerant anti-racist, feminist, anti-homophobic and anti-transphobic views. More narrowly, it’s being used to describe the various Critical Social Justice ideologies derived from the Postmodernist, Critical Theory revision of Marxism which narrowly sees societal issues through the lens of privilege and oppression. These differ from previous forms of anti-racism, feminism and so on in rejecting individualism. In Critical Race Theory, all Whites are privileged because of their skin colour and the fact that some Whites are less privileged than some Blacks is ignored. It isn’t enough to be non-racist, and judge people on their merits and character regardless of race. You must be positively anti-racist and fight against White privilege and for Black uplift through social programmes that demand the granting of opportunities to Blacks and other underprivileged minorities simply because of their colour. For example, in America Black and Mexican students generally do less well at Maths at school than Whites and Asians. So some schools in California are trying to even these results out by giving pre-calculus lessons only to Black and Hispanic students to the exclusion of Whites and Asians.
In the eyes of GB News’ Mike Graham, however, woke means just about every anti-racist, feminist, environmentalist and radical gender view or ideology. Yes, he conceded, people did care about the NHS and the cost of living, but people also cared about: woke teacher telling kids there were 73 genders, environmental protesters gluing themselves to the road, petrol and diesel cars being phased out in favour of electric vehicles, and the cost of power rising due to green energy policies. And so on.
Piers Morgan also did a piece about whether people cared about ‘woke’. This included Reform’s Richard Tice and a woman from the Labour party. Unsurprisingly, Morgan and Tice believed that people did care about ‘woke’. The lady from Labour didn’t. She didn’t like biological men being allowed into women’s private spaces and sports, nor rapists in female prisons, when asked by the former editor of the Mirror. He replied with, ‘Ah, but they’ve prevented you from talking about this’. She replied that they hadn’t, and she’d been talking about it for a year or so. This contrasts with the case of Rosie Duffield, who has been isolated and shunned by Starmer and other senior Labour members for her views. I can’t remember whether the lady believed that people didn’t care about woke policies, or did, but that they were far more concerned about the cost of living and the NHS. I think Morgan had claimed that it was because Labour was pushing these woke policies that it looked like they would not have an absolute majority at the election next year.
My guess is that the Labour lady is probably right. People are directly affected by the cost of living, and wondering how they will afford food, heating and their rent or mortgages. The latter was one of the major issues on the local news tonight in Bristol, which has been revealed as the most expensive city outside London. One woman spoke of how she had been forced to move back in with her parents after the landlord raised the rent by 66 per cent. And they are very much concerned about getting hold of a doctor, thanks to all the wonderful privatisation that Rishi’s so proud of. These are issues that immediately affect everyone. I’m not sure how many people are aware of the debate over transgenderism, let alone so concerned that it affects the way they vote. Some are, and it may become a more important issue in the public consciousness by the time the next election comes round.
But Starmer’s less than exciting performance can also be blamed on other problems apart from the ‘woke’. Like he broke every promise and pledge he made, and has done his level best to purge the left. Corbyn’s policies were genuinely popular, and he enthused and inspired the public in a way Starmer can’t. The turnout at the local elections was low, and my guess is that many of the people Corbyn had appealed to didn’t vote. They had been alienated by a party leadership that was actively hostile to them and which to many people just offers the usual Tory policies, or something not too different from them. Tice, I think, said that Labour’s woke policies wouldn’t appeal to the socially conservative voters of the red wall. He might be right, though if they do become disenchanted with Labour, it’ll be far more to do with the lack of proper, old-style, socialist Labour policies.
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