Word Watch: Allyship

The Royal Navy is a major national institution, for many people an embodiment of the rules and principles on which ordered life in this country should be conducted. The disciplines that its personnel observe must surely be of interest to the public as a whole. So listen!

The Navy has recently issued an important new set of instructions that all verbally alert people will be anxious to understand. Its new Briefing Notes for Divisional Officers and Troop Commanders, reported in the Daily Express, include this helpful advice: officers are advised that their “chosen pronouns” should be “routinely shared” as an “act of allyship” with each other. Coming from such a bastion of Britishness, this instruction is puzzling for several reasons. 

First of all, are we quite comfortable with the notion of “chosen pronouns”? I had, naively perhaps, been under the impression that this was an idea belonging to the wilder reaches of the “gender wars” waged between those who adhere to the principle that sex is biologically determined at birth and those, more enlightened, for whom gender is a matter of subjective preference or, indeed, mere whim. I certainly didn’t imagine that such concepts had penetrated so august an institution as the Royal Navy, much less that its senior echelons had already embraced the most liberal  – or do I mean unorthodox? – approach to the subject.

Not only have they embraced the subject: they have developed attitudes that involve radically innovative rules of inter-personal behaviour. For instance, individuals are told to refer to colleagues as a “team” and address them not as “guys” but as “everyone”. (I had thought that “guys” was a very informal Americanism, that would be hardly suitable in the Royal Navy, but what do I know?)

I have looked up the word “allyship” in current dictionaries and can assure you that it has not been used in British English at any point in history. The American dictionary Merriam-Webster, however, tells us that it has been in use in America since 1849, when it meant roughly what “alliance” means: the state of being associated with another person or group of people, “union” or “kinship”.

This thoroughly alien word has not only arrived on our shores: it has penetrated the higher echelons of one of our most conservative institutions, and in no casual or peripheral way.  “Allyship” denotes alignment not simply with other naval officers, but with those members of their group who suffer from some “disadvantage”. “Before you voice your opinion on another person”, say the guidelines, “you should stop to think about whether you have the right to speak about them from a position of no direct expertise and consider whether your behaviour is contributing to or alleviating their existing disadvantage.” Ah, I see: officers are being told how to behave towards those who are different or “oppressed”.  

So “allyship” really implies not a union but a clear perception of difference, a difference somehow built in to relationships in the hierarchy of naval command, which surely already has its own very clear notions of hierarchy and responsibility. This directive is actually a disguised reprimand to those who might have the arrogance to imagine that they are in some way superior to some of their colleagues. What? Trained Naval personnel guilty of discrimination among their own ranks? 

The penny drops. These arrogant officers are White. They are therefore almost by definition guilty of White Privilege: an inevitable incapacity to treat other human beings objectively as their equals. A whole new set of criteria for judging human relationships has been winched into the already well-defined structure of the Navy, completely altering its terms of reference (as though there had never been members of the Force from many different racial backgrounds over the centuries).  

Perhaps it needs explaining that these are the tenets of what’s now known as “critical race theory”, which takes it upon itself to brand whole classes of people, races indeed, with characteristics determined by a political agenda imposed from without by agencies that don’t actually declare themselves, but seek radically to alter how we think.

It’s not only the Royal Navy. All our institutions – the courts, the universities – are being infiltrated by this surreptitious political bullying. Those who care for the English language and how it’s used are in a good position to spot the sleight of hand and resist it wherever possible. 

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