We will remember 2025 as the year that a madness which had gripped us for a decade finally succumbed to that most irritating of things, reality – and the edifice it had built began to crumble like a 1970s brutalist building constructed from high alumina cement. It is not quite the case that woke is over, as Piers Morgan believes, simply that its appurtenances have become despised and those who shout most loudly in favour of its idiotic shibboleths are confined to a smaller and smaller tranche of far-left delusionals.
The decision of the Supreme Court in April that the word ‘sex’ as used in the Equality Act should refer to a person’s biological sex, rather than what they were pretending to be, is usually regarded as the catalyst for a mass volte face on intersectional politics’ most grandly stupid campaign, transgender rights – and it undoubtedly hastened the process. But it was a process that had been under way for at least a couple of years and I do not think that the Supreme Court judges would have made the same decision if the case had been held two years earlier. Their worships, or whatever the hell you call them, are no more above the political fray than the rest of us. Rather, what the Supreme Court judges did was to catch the flavour of the moment – and its decision allowed those weak-spined individuals (and groups) who went along with the whole idiocy without really believing it to reassess their positions. No longer was a tortured Sir Keir Starmer forced to utter absurdities, such as that it was ‘not right’ to suggest only women have cervixes: you could sense the relief rippling through the government’s front bench once that legal verdict had been reached.
It perhaps also allowed the ghastly Emma Watson to recant some of the bile she had flung in the direction of her greatest benefactor, J.K. Rowling (and Rowling, to her credit, told her to get lost). Graham Linehan won his court case too – I doubt he would have done so in 2022, and the Women’s Institute proclaimed that henceforth only biological women – i.e. women – could become members, even if its awful boss, Melissa Green, continued to parrot the nonsense that transgender women were real women (contrary to her own organisation’s decision and indeed reality). The trans business was always the soft underbelly of wokeism, given that its demands were palpably ludicrous and in any case affected such a tiny proportion of people. (A smaller proportion by the year, too – the numbers of students identifying as trans has almost halved at US universities in the past 24 months.) It is at last in abeyance even if parts of the public sector continue to abide by its self-contradictory dictums.
Race has been a trickier issue, but there are signs that the plates are shifting here too, even if the race grifter’s spavined offspring, decolonisation, continues to hold sway in our universities and museums for a while longer. You will never see Starmer dropping down piously on to one knee again, for a start – nor the England football team. We must, in these battles, give honour to those who spoke out against the prevailing tide at the time and risked great opprobrium for so doing – and none spoke with a clearer voice than the mixed-race footballer Lyle Taylor, then at Nottingham Forest. But back in 2020, the fans spoke too and jeered the knee-bending cringe, only to be told by the likes of Lord Finkelstein: ‘The jeering was racial abuse wearing the clothes of political argument.’
You will never see Starmer
dropping down piously on to
one knee again, for a start
That shows you how far the madness had penetrated: Danny Finkelstein sits on the Conservative benches, of course. Since then the organisation Black Lives Matter has receded almost totally from view in this country, while in its country of origin it is being pursued for as much as $90 million in a fraud case which led to the initials being misconstrued for a while as Build Larger Mansions, given the leadership’s predilection for capacious living quarters. More prosaically, you may have seen a change on your TV screens: no longer is every character in every advert black, sometimes with a white wife and glorious mixed-race children, sometimes not. The balance is still way out of kilter for the population, of course, but whitey is turning up in rather more adverts than has been the case for five or six years.
The big corporations – who in truth didn’t give a monkeys about either trans or race stuff, they just wanted to fellate the progressive public and make more money – have, one by one, reneged on their asinine conversions to wokery and in most cases sacked the halfwits who told them to man down and embrace a new philosophy. The chief creative officer of Jaguar Land Rover, Gerry McGovern, was only the latest to be marched out of his office by security guards for having decided that his firm’s macho brand would be better tilted at vegan transgendered folk of colour rather than white men who wish their testicles were larger. I wonder how much wokery cost the big corporations? I hope it cost them everything and gave the execs nasty acidic ulcers.
Even on that last redoubt of progressivism – the patently racist belief that all the problems in the world have been caused by Jews and more specifically Israel, and that if Jews didn’t exist the world would be a pacific utopia and Palestine a vibrant go-ahead Green state resembling Switzerland, if Switzerland was run by Zack Polanski – has retreated a little, partly as a consequence of the Trump-imposed peace plan.
The war is not yet completely won. We still have public institutions in thrall to progressivism – send their leaders to till the fields, I say. Pol Pot was a questionable role model but he was right about the teachers. In short, though, 2025 gives us grounds for more optimism for the coming year, more than we could have thought possible five years ago.
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