We need comprehensive legislation to end the woke terror

“Please note this Registration of Interest is only open to those from an ethnic minority background or women from any ethnic background.” The blatant racial and sexual discrimination of that offensive and exclusive restriction is chilling enough; but even more concerning is its context. That is the wording of an advertisement published by GCHQ, the Cheltenham-based communications arm of the security and intelligence services, seeking recruits for its IT department, the operational core of the organisation.

With China, Russia and even North Korea posing a threat to Britain in cyber warfare, the cyber capabilities of GCHQ are crucial to our security. To exclude almost half of the population – the most IT-inclined sector, as Silicon Valley’s complaints about high tech being white-dominated demonstrate – is utterly irresponsible.

If women and ethnic minorities are to become better represented in IT, that development should be encouraged in education. Our intelligence services should not be laboratories of social engineering: their responsibility is to recruit, solely on merit, the best talent currently available to defend the country. Such job discrimination is illegal, but GCHQ has attempted to circumvent the law with weasel wording, emphasising that this is not a job advertisement but an invitation to register interest; after a few weeks, “When the job advert for this role does go live anyone will be able to apply for it.” Quite. After GCHQ has identified its preferred candidates through a fishing exercise on a discriminatory basis.

To find the “woke” tsunami inundating organisations with a critical role in national security is deeply alarming. Political correctness was not greatly feared when it was limited to a few academics promoting “gender theory” in obscure arts faculties. Now, however, the infection has taken root in even the most important areas of society.

The subversive forces of cultural Marxism are targeting all the key institutions. Both the BBC and English Heritage have used loopholes in the law to exclude white men from internships and training posts which are supposedly not “jobs”. The police, in particular, have been radicalised in the woke interest. In 2019 Matthew Furlong, an exceptionally qualified graduate applicant to join Cheshire Police, was rejected because he was a white heterosexual male, until a tribunal reversed the decision.

The most extreme example of woke policing was the case of Harry Miller, himself a former police officer, who was investigated by Humberside Police for a supposedly “transphobic” tweet. Even the police accepted it was not a crime, yet they insisted on recording it, a measure which may show in DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks, preventing the named individual from getting a job. Miller reported that the police officer who telephoned him said: “I need to check your thinking.”

There you have it: self-identification by the Thought Police. By the end of 2019 the police in England and Wales had recorded 120,000 “non-crime hate incidents” since 2014 – an enormous investment of police time and resources. Why on earth are the police recording non-crimes, when only 7.8 per cent of actual crimes result in a suspect being charged? Police forces routinely fly rainbow flags to express support for a political movement. Are we now seeing the fruits of the irresponsible policy that allowed the Common Purpose organisation to indoctrinate police officers, as well as other key social functionaries, in the first decade of this century?

Across society, grovelling deference to cultural Marxism is becoming the norm. The Associated Press, since 1846 a template for neutral news reporting, decreed last year that, in reference to racial characteristics, “Black” would be spelled with a capital letter, but “white” would be lower case. The hysteria over statues was an attempt to eradicate British history from public consciousness. Museums are being infantilised, likewise the National Trust, the British Library and other totemic institutions in the same cause. Universities, formerly the bastions of free debate, are now the most intolerant places in the country.

Youth has been the main target of the woke revolutionaries, with devastating consequences. In America, where the poison is even more deeply implanted, 25 per cent of Generation Z youth believe they will change their gender identity at least once in their lives. Intoxicated by the success of their project, many of those who have engineered this catastrophe are openly proclaiming their contribution.

Criticising those who want to protect children from inappropriate sex education in schools, activist Daniel Villarreal, wrote: “I and a lot of other people want to indoctrinate, recruit, teach, and expose children to queer sexuality AND THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.” (His emphasis.) Educator and writer S. Bear Bergman, who identifies as a transgender man, wrote an article on Huffington Post, entitled: “I Have Come To Indoctrinate Your Children Into My LGBTQ Agenda (And I’m Not a Bit Sorry)”.

The increasing triumphalism of the victors further exposes the lies of those who have for so long attempted, via Wikipedia articles and other channels, to claim that cultural Marxism does not exist, is a far-right “conspiracy theory” and similar claptrap, always transparently false, but unsustainable now that we see the outcome all around us. Cultural Marxism began as a conspiracy, a century ago, but is now so diverse and dispersed as to represent a movement that has taken on a life of its own, far beyond any unified control.

For only the name “woke” is new. As long ago as 1919, in Hungary, under the brief but murderous Communist dictatorship of Bela Kun, the deputy People’s Commissar for Culture and Education was Georg Lukacs. Under his system of “cultural terrorism” he imposed pornographic sex education in schools, promoted promiscuity, demonised the family and encouraged children to mock their parents and religion.

The Kun regime fell, but Lukacs escaped and his claim that cultural subversion was the best means of promoting revolution impressed Lenin. In late 1922, on Lenin’s orders, a meeting was held, attended by Lukacs, Karl Radek, representing Lenin, Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka/NKVD/KGB, and Willi Munzenberg, a leader of the Comintern, later liquidated by Stalin. The strategy decided on was to subvert intellectuals “and use them to make Western civilisation stink”, in Munzenberg’s words, and to graft Freud’s ideas onto Marxism, exploiting sexual anarchy to provoke revolution.

The following year, an Institute of Marxism was established in Frankfurt, which soon changed its name to the more discreet Institute for Social Research; its cadre of cultural Marxists included Max Horkheimer, Erick Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. In 1933, when the Nazis came to power, the Frankfurt School Marxists migrated to America and based themselves at Columbia University. Herbert Marcuse, an admirer of the Marquis de Sade’s “polymorphous perversity”, promoted “pansexualism”, key to the 1960s sexual revolution and the origin of woke sexual nihilism today.

The term “political correctness” was coined by Anton Semyonovich Makarenko, Lenin’s favourite wordsmith. It is clearly incompatible with a pluralist democracy, yet today it is enforced by intimidation in the world’s two leading democracies, Britain and the United States.

A recent article in City Journal, by Bari Weiss, “The Miseducation of America’s Elites”, recounts the experiences of today’s aspiring Ivy League families, paying $50,000 a year to educate a child at elite private schools where “critical race theory” has become a reign of terror. To complain would ensure their offspring’s expulsion and end any prospect of admission to Harvard or Yale. The children themselves live in fear of a careless word leading to their denunciation by schoolmates. America’s elites are now living in a climate of fear similar to the nomenklatura in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The woke tide is roaring on. The Scottish parliament is processing the final stages of Nicola Sturgeon’s totalitarian hate crimes legislation that proposes imprisonment for politically incorrect sentiments expressed in one’s own home, in Sturgeon’s Stasi state. But things are little better south of the Border, where a consultation document from the Law Commission has similarly proposed new “hate crime” laws to criminalise domestic conversations about same-sex marriage, transgender ideology, etc.

This is intolerable. The government must act vigorously to restore freedom. When people can lose their livelihoods for expressing the objective scientific truth that human beings cannot change sex and that gender is defined by biology, the efforts of our heroes in two World Wars have been vitiated. The sole reason that concepts such as a “womxn” are not laughed to scorn is the legal protection afforded such absurdities, thus shielding the intellectually indefensible from dialectical challenge.

We need to take an axe to the roots of the protective tree – the Equality Act 2010 – by removing it from the statute book. The concept of “hate crime” (in reality, Orwell’s thought crime) must be abolished, along with the concept of “aggravated offences” attracting harsher sentences for offending against people with “protected characteristics”. Until this aberration, the last people to enjoy protected characteristics were Norman barons. The centuries-long struggle for equality under the law has been reversed. What kind of “equality” legislation is it that privileges certain sectors of society over others?

We need a clean sweep. Commentators keep asking what is Boris Johnson’s project? Here is an urgently needed project for him – to reverse the cultural Marxist takeover. That would be infinitely more worthwhile than tunnelling under the Irish Sea. People of all ages and conditions have been schooled to self-police themselves, struggling to find approved language, even pronouns, to appease the new order. When people cannot express even unpleasant opinions, they are unfree. That liberty, formerly the key characteristic of life in Britain, must be restored. Wokery must be buried stone dead.