Labour’s election manifesto may not have much in terms of extra spending, or any substantial plans. But it sends a green light to activists in government, schools, universities and corporations to carry out their illiberal cultural revolution without restraint.
It promises to introduce ethnicity pay gap reporting requirements for ‘large employers’ and upgrade the focus on hate crime. Compliance departments will emphasise going beyond the letter of the law, leading to discriminatory quotas and speech suppression. The manifesto promises a ban on ‘conversion therapy’ for trans people that will make it risky for adults to question a young person’s decision to change pronouns, take puberty blockers and undergo gender reassignment surgery.
But the biggest change is in mood music, with Labour enthusiastically embracing the identitarian Equality Act, which activists in institutions have used to justify speech policing, political indoctrination and anti-white male discrimination. This will accelerate an ongoing shift in the country’s public culture.
Woke is not – as the left has convinced itself – a simple right-wing epithet, but an analytic concept that describes something real in the world. Woke may be precisely defined as the making sacred of historically marginalised race, gender and sexual identity groups. From these hallowed attachments comes the view that the overriding aim of society is to enforce equal outcomes and emotional harm protection for historically disadvantaged groups.
The ideology’s power does not stem from a system of thought, like Marxism, but from emotional attachments to the experience of particular identity groups: blacks, gays, women, transgender people. This means those who offend even the most hypothetically sensitive member of a sacred group must be cancelled while institutions should discriminate against whites, males or Asians to hit their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) targets.
The culture war between woke activists and those who resist them is not an amusing sideshow, but a struggle for the very heart of our civilisation. Will we be free, truth-based and a cohesive nation, or will we descend into an Orwellian nightmare of speech policing in which we are forced to mouth false mantras (‘trans women are women’, ‘systemic racism’, ‘diversity is our strength’) we don’t believe while the state turns British schoolchildren against their national past.
This is not confined to the campus but reaches into almost every aspect of public life, from schools, universities and government to the military, police and private sector.
Starmer chastises those who worry about Social Justice indoctrination as distracting us from real problems like the cost of living. This is what authoritarian regimes tell protestors in Hong Kong, Iran and Georgia.
Would he stand by as every Union flag is replaced with a Chinese flag – after all, what does it matter when people are focused on their pocketbooks? If not, why are we supposed to keep our heads down as Progress Pride or Black Lives Matter insignia conquer public spaces while a new Calendar of Saints decrees a parade of identity festivals, from International Transgender Awareness Day and ‘International Day to Combat Islamophobia’ to Black History Month?
Labour wants conservatives to stick to the sandbox of economics and foreign policy, leaving culture to progressive experts in the institutions. Their top line is that the nasty right is ‘stoking the culture wars.’ The subtext is that Labour will deflect political scrutiny away from the cultural revolution in our institutions so it can continue to fly under the radar. ‘Dear activist teachers, civil servants and DEI administrators, the Tory restraints are off and you are free to let rip.’ The messaging has even worked with an important swath of Conservatives who are willing to act as its useful idiots.
Of course, the culture war concerns more than culture. Woke hypersensitivity means we can’t openly debate immigration, crime, the family and education without being accused of racism or sexism. This leads to difficulty deporting illegal immigrants, addressing fatherlessness or punishing bad behaviour, whether in the street or in class. This produces multiple policy failures such as the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal, world-leading levels of single parenthood or Clapham ‘acid’ attacker Abdul Ezedi who entered the country illegally, committed a sex crime and was permitted to stay because he claimed to be Christian. An insufficiently patriotic young population combined with DEI virtue-signalling also likely contributes to the country’s failure to meet its military recruitment targets, kneecapping Britain’s foreign policy.
This is not a passing fad, but an acceleration of our post-1960s left-liberal moral order. Where McCarthyism cut against the grain of the younger generation, woke is being propelled by them. For instance, Britons under 25 split over whether J.K. Rowling should be dropped by her publisher while few over 45 think this way. No wonder a majority of British young people agree that ‘Israel should not exist’ while just a fifth demur. It will take more than the Cass Review and free speech editorials in the mainstream media to reverse this slow-motion train wreck.
Beneath the noise of the news cycle, the most far-reaching legacy of New Labour was its unspoken cultural revolution in the form of large-scale immigration and a surge of institutional Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) on the back of its 2010 Equality Act.
Likewise, the most significant impact of Starmer’s government could be to unleash the full force of progressive illiberalism in British society.
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