The Woke pandemic is rampant, but a vaccine is on its way

When Millwall football supporters have become icons of free speech, we have to recognize that 2020 has been a year apparently scripted by Lewis Carroll. When Eton College, in a similar transformation, has become a byword for censorship and nannying of supposedly snowflake pupils – whose forensically crafted letter condemning the intolerance of their headmaster in sacking a staff member showed them to be anything but the timid group-thinkers his action had presumed them to be – that impression is reinforced.

Across the whole institutional spectrum, the “woke” virus has reached pandemic proportions. The BBC plans to make homage to Black Lives Matter the focus of the Christmas Day comedy special edition of The Vicar of Dibley. How very humorous. Laugh? I nearly cancelled my licence fee. In fact, I did. In fairness, we expect that from the BBC, with its tired leftist obsessions, but in recent months it has been joined by an unending procession of other institutions, virtue-signalling corporations and NGOs.

The Football Association, the National Trust, the British Library – just about every household name apart from the Chelsea Pensioners – has seemingly joined in the lemming stampede to embrace the agenda of a political movement whose programme, if ever implemented, implies the elimination of every last one of them. Across the water, Amnesty International Ireland has joined other NGOs in signing an open letter demanding that politicians should “no longer provide legitimate political representation” to people with critical views on transgenderism and gender ideology.

That’s right: Amnesty, which was established to defend those stripped of political representation by totalitarian societies, is now campaigning for people who do not agree with an extravagant woke theory to be denied political representation. One of the grounds on which Amnesty says offenders should be stripped of political representation is opposition to “affirmative medical care of transgender people” – that’s wokespeak for putting children on hormone therapy to “change” their sex, the subject of a recent British court decision.

Remember, in the chilling Cold War days, that reassuring emblem of the candle encased in barbed wire, testifying that some dedicated freedom fighters had not forgotten the millions in the gulags? This is what it has been debased into. The freedom fighters have become the oppressors. Amnesty wants people who hold incorrect views to be debarred from standing for political office and to be denied airtime. It is as if the Howard League for Penal Reform were demanding the return of the stocks, pillory and public executions.

So, in this Lewis Carroll world, Millwall supporters are representing the right to freedom of expression, while Amnesty and other “liberal” bodies are hell-bent on suppression. It was a breath of fresh air when George Eustice, the Environment Secretary, declined this week to join in the knee-jerk condemnation of Millwall fans for booing their team “taking the knee” to Black Lives Matter.

If people go to watch their team play a game of football and find it has been hijacked by virtue-signalling busybodies forcing them to witness an act of quasi-religious reverence to a political movement that is Marxist-inspired, anti-capitalist, in favour of the same transgender extremism as Amnesty, wants to abolish the family, to defund the police, and has injured police officers in riots, as well as defacing monuments to national heroes – why should they not express their dissent from a political agenda being imposed on them, when all they want to do is enjoy a football match?

Black Lives Matter, from its inception, was a political movement. In October the Electoral Commission received an application for a Black Lives Matter group to register as a political party. Would the FA favour acts of obeisance to the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, or the Liberal Democrats (if they still exist) as a curtain-raiser to football matches? Bringing politics into sport is not only disgraceful, it is also provocative.

Nor is it only Millwall supporters who have reacted unfavourably; recordings from last weekend show that West Ham fans responded similarly to the pantomime knee-taking. That bodes ill for the woke agenda when capacity crowds are readmitted to football grounds. The reaction, too, of BBC viewers – a diminishing entity – to the politicised Vicar of Dibley may prove instructive. All of this would be funny, were it not for the toll it is taking in the destruction of liberties, political micro-control by a faction that has never been elected, and increasing numbers of people losing their jobs for failing to embrace “woke” prejudices.

Even the use of the term “woke” is prejudicial: it is a euphemism for Marxist. The toxic creed of Marxism murdered more than 100 million people in the 20th century; it is incredible that such a pestilence – violent, homicidal, tyrannical and economically illiterate – has not gone the way of the smallpox virus, but continues to mutate into still aggressive strains.

If current “hate” legislation passes unamended in the Scottish parliament, it will be possible for people to be sent to prison for opinions expressed in the privacy of their own homes. That, to the point of caricature, is the ultimate definition of an unfree society. This drift towards totalitarianism must be stopped.

The well-spring from which this toxic situation derives is the totalitarian concept of “hate crime” – thought crime, in George Orwell’s prescient vision. “Hate”, in this context, means nothing more than presuming to disagree with the prescriptions of social radicals. All hate laws should be excised from the statute book; there was never any legitimate reason to put them there, since previously existing laws provided ample protection against incitement of violence or aggressive discrimination against individuals or groups.

The concept of “aggravated offences” is the negation of the principle of equality under the law, painfully achieved over centuries. The law must no longer be used to repress free speech, for which so many fought in wartime. In recent years, racial integration has been obstructed and is now going into reverse, as identity politics Balkanize the nation. Some people from ethnic minorities are beginning to object to the term “BAME” – and so they should. It is a ghettoizing terminology. This might seem a wildly radical, even reckless, proposal, but how about calling our fellow citizens by an alternative name: British?

It is not coincidental that the tsunami of woke aggression in Britain comes in the wake of Brexit. The liberal ideologues are looking for an alternative power structure and totem to unite around, to replace the EU. The people behind this blizzard of fatuities are the old, discredited leftist elites, homeless since Brexit. By putting Oxford and Cambridge – and now Eton – in the vanguard of the Long March, they imagine they can perpetuate the patronizing, self-regarding elitism that, pre-Brexit, disregarded ninety per cent of Britain as flyover states.

Just as they did not believe Brexit would topple their earlier Camelot, they are again disregarding the forces of history preparing their downfall. Their downright silliness has deprived them of the authority with which they once postured: kneeling before football matches, denouncing transgender heretics for the crime of “defending biology” (i.e. science) – who could take these clowns seriously if, though numerically insignificant, they did not occupy the commanding heights in our society?

They may not do so for much longer. There is a canary in the coal mine: watch the fortunes of the BBC over the next five years. With the EU outsourced, the Corporation is the next liberal bastion in the firing line, its woke extravagance and bias becoming more extreme in the face of criticism, just as was the case with Remainer intransigence. Rebellious football fans and mutinous schoolboys are the first straws in the wind. The woke pandemic may currently be running wildly out of control but, as with the Brussels bacillus, a vaccine will eventually arrive.