Caroline Lucas and the unworkable madness of woke politics

Have you had the call to join the Government of National Unity (GNU) yet? My mobile telephone has been playing up in recent days, which may explain why I have not – at the time of writing – received a summons from Heidi Allen or Dominic Grieve, both former Conservative MPs and the leaders of the audacious bid to unite Britain this autumn. They plan to achieve this by sacking Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, setting aside the result of the 2016 referendum, and establishing a cross party administration to halt Brexit. What could possibly go wrong?

There may be other reasons, wholly unrelated to poor mobile telephone reception, that explain why I have not had the call to join, of course. The country is already in enough trouble. Do we need me involved in running things? No.

Chances are you have not had the call either, and perhaps you are feeling snubbed. Do not be discouraged; many millions of us are not invited. The briefing by the organisers has made it clear that the entrance criteria for this Government of National Unity are pretty strict. To join the GNU you must not under any circumstances be in favour of Brexit. So, that’s half the country out. Most Conservatives are not invited either, even if they voted Remain in 2016, unless they are Conservative MPs from that small Tory clique of Conservatives prepared to bring down their Conservative government.

The bulk of the Labour party and its leadership seem not to be invited either. The DUP – Ulster Unionists, and some of them religious too – are definitely not welcome in the Government of National Unity.

Naturally, Scottish Nationalists are welcome. In the Remain Alliance universe, the Nats, all dedicated to the destruction of the United Kingdom, are the ideal people to be involved in running a government of UK unity.

This GNU is starting to sound more like a Government of National Disunity.

Never one to be outdone, the leader of Britain’s Green party, Caroline Lucas, outlined her own vision for a new government. It should, she suggested, be all female. No Brexiteers, no Tories, and no Northern Ireland Unionists. And now, no men.

“We need an ’emergency cabinet’ – not to fight a Brexit war but to work for reconciliation,” Lucas wrote in The Guardian yesterday.

“And I believe this should be a cabinet of women… I have reached out to 10 women colleagues from across the political spectrum at Westminster and Holyrood – Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Labour, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, the Independent Group for Change and independent – asking that we join together to stop the dangerous pursuit of a crash-out Brexit.”

Alas, in the attempt to illustrate how woke she is on the women-only government front, Lucas had forgotten completely about diversity on race. Her GNU was all female, but 100% white.

The leader of the Greens issued a statement of apology:

Thank you for all the comments on my proposal. I wanted to start a debate, and that’s certainly happened.

Translated: You won’t believe how much grief I’m getting on this…

But I know that it’s thrown up important questions about who is on this list, why all women and why no people of colour. An all-white list of women isn’t right. I should have reached out further and thought more deeply about who, and what kind of politics, an all-white list represents. I apologise.

For total transparency, here’s how I chose the names on the list. I wanted the leadership/deputy leadership of all relevant parties in Westminster – three of the party leaders are women (which is the good news). I wanted two representatives from the main opposition party to represent the diverse views within it. Emily Thornberry is the shadow foreign secretary, who most often deputises for Jeremy Corbyn. Yvette Cooper has led cross-party parliamentary attempts to stop a No Deal Brexit from the backbenches. I wanted all parts of the UK to be part of this conversation. I realise that I did not get this right.

This is not a coalition or “cabinet” to run the country.

Hold on a second. This is not a coalition or cabinet to run the country? Well what is an “emergency cabinet” then? If you want to remove the executive and direct policy you replace the executive, and through a cabinet led by a Prime Minister wield executive power. That’s how it works. If you have the numbers. Anything else is inherently unserious.

Beyond the spat being amusing, this episode illustrates again the unworkable madness of the “woke” politics movement that has got such a grip on political and business elites and the university-educated in the West.

This is not – not – a criticism of the liberations of the late twentieth century, where in societies such as Britain and the United States great transformations took place via equality under the law, thanks to fearless campaigners and technological and economic changes.

The wokeists go much further. They pursue an obsessive and impossible state of grace known as “social justice.”

Anyone who raises concerns about any aspects of this mission – say feminists concerned about women’s only spaces – is an enemy of “social justice” to be fought and eviscerated.

The problem is that if all actions and speech are to be measured against an ever more exacting code of virtue – defined and redefined constantly by angry campaigners – then it is going to be, by definition, impossible to keep up or to meet the standard. This suits the fanatics – theorists, campaigners, student activists – who set the shifting rules. They meet the standard, because they set the standard and bring the charges against those who fail to comply.

Their approach is winning across the West. For all the liberal distress about Donald Trump and Brexit, it is the “wokeists” who are triumphing. In the humanities the syllabus has been re-engineered already. In the arts, “cultural appropriation”  was hitherto one of the main mechanisms for the development of culture, think of the Beatles and the Stones appropriating like mad. Now, appropriation is career suicide.

In business, in public companies, the departments that have grown most in terms of clout are the human resources department and any associated function that deals with the promotion of a social justice or environmental agenda. Even if a big, respected company is not as diverse in its senior management as it should be, it must, because it must, bow in that direction in its annual reports and corporate communications.

The arguments against all this nonsense suffer in comparison because by necessity they involve the acceptance of complexity and contradiction. There is no way life, history or art can be reverse engineered into woke perfection. Life is messy and imperfect because people are messy and imperfect. Equal status under the law is what matters. Opportunity and excellence are what count, or they should do if we want improvement. Incidentally, the most pious class in Britain (my class, the middle class) is the class where all the most woke people are, yet the middle class is endlessly self-perpetuating and determined to protect its interests.

Their woke racket owes a great deal on terms of style to the more fundamentalist aspects of the Christian tradition, or perhaps to the puritans and the presbyterians. We are all sinners, and so on, even when we try not to be. At any moment judgment can strike any of us down if we deviate from the true word.

Indeed, it is the most woke people who make the best targets for a woke backlash. Jokes are particularly problematic in this regard. The American comedian Sarah Silverman lamented this week that she has been ostracised for taking part in a comedy sketch in which she wore “blackface” (black make-up) a decade ago. She was satirising racism and says she is an extremely liberal person herself. Now the image has appeared again on Twitter and film producers dropped her, and so on.

No, I am not defending actors “blacking up.” Silverman was ill-advised on the grounds of basic taste and good manners. But she’s a comedian. They are supposed to be transgressive? Aren’t they? Or maybe they should just focus on being… funny.

Silverman’s response – complaining of “righteousness porn” – was both poignant and pathetic. It was like hearing a penny only partially dropping.

“I think it’s really scary and it’s a very odd thing that it’s invaded the left primarily and the right will mimic it… It’s like, if you’re not on board, if you say the wrong thing, if you had a tweet once, everyone is, like, throwing the first stone… It’s so odd. It’s a perversion. It’s really, ‘Look how righteous I am and now I’m going to press refresh all day long to see how many likes I get in my righteousness’.”

Well, indeed. Welcome aboard. The woke movement cannot be satisfied and it even eats its own.