This week proved wokeness ain’t dead yet

Rather than being dead, or in the process of dying, wokery remains very much alive. In fact, the corrosive politics of identity is in rude health.

We saw this in evidence this week with the news that the authorities refused to detain the Nottingham triple killer Valdo Calocane because they were fearful of the ‘over-representation of young black men’ in custody. We saw it in the pious and hysterical response to the Tourette’s activist who uttered the n-word at the BAFTAs. The politics of identity were openly weaponised by the Greens at the Gorton and Denton by-election, who in releasing a campaign video in Urdu, both stoked and helped to entrench sectarian divisions in this country. And it arrived with the news that rather than being a fading presence, the rule of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace is a more imposing behemoth than ever.

According to a report by the Policy Exchange think tank, the human-resources industry – that chief purveyor of DEI doctrine – now costs businesses an estimated £10 billion a year, having swelled its numbers in the UK by over 80 per cent between 2011 and 2023. Arguing that measures such as diversity-hiring targets ‘reduce productivity’ and ‘create division’, Policy Exchange calls for the government to repeal the ‘positive action’ provisions in the Equality Act, which permit programmes aimed exclusively at minority groups.

The fact that DEI still wields such power in Britain, abetted and enforced by state legislation, goes against the accepted narrative. Ever since the beginning of last year, when Donald Trump opened his new presidency with an assault on DEI measures in government, many have felt confident to declare that woke is over. Yet headline after headline continues to remind us that this is not the case.

Woke is not dying because the society that spawned it has not changed sufficiently. Hyperliberalism was the fruit of a culture in which vaunting one’s compassionate politics towards the downtrodden was a surefire means to achieve higher status, a society which valorised the plight of minorities, feelings and victimhood.

Showing empathy for victims, speaking on behalf of them, or aspiring to be a victim oneself: this remains a core virtue. Whether you are seeking to ally yourself with ethnic minorities, the colonised, the Global South, women, trans people, the disabled, or the neurodiverse, the currency of victimhood is just as valuable as ever. This fundamental ethos of Western culture has scarcely changed since the 1990s, the decade when people started to notice the new prestige attached to victimhood.

Victimhood has never gone out of fashion because it’s so personally advantageous. To be a victim or to cosplay as one allows one the luxury of self-righteousness. The outrage goblins crying racism over the BAFTAs incident are little different to the guests on Kilroy back in the 1990s who used to holler: ‘How would you like it if you were raped?’ Having fortified oneself with bullet-proof sanctimoniousness, victimhood status grants the possessor the liberty to behave in whatever fashion they please, no matter how awful or unpleasant that might be.

To be a victim gives the holder of this position permission to forever talk about themselves with melodramatic self-pity. To be a victim is to be in touch with one’s feelings, to be governed by feelings and to seek to legislate through feelings – to oppose ‘hate’ and ‘hurt’, ‘fascists’ and ‘racists’. To be a victim is to be on the right side of the cosmic battle between good and evil.

That’s why DEI programmes remain, and elite ‘anti-racism’ has never been more sinister. Wokery is not going away, because being the victim allows you to get away with so much.

The fury of the London diaspora

The interminable debate as to whether London has become a hellhole may not be to everyone’s interest. But it does matter, because London is one of the most important cities in the world, and because it has undoubtedly changed in recent decades.

Whether you think the place has improved or deteriorated often depends on your politics. Those who retain a sunny perspective on its fortunes tend to be more progressive, and live in its affluent, unchanged and mostly white enclaves. Those who are inclined to see it as having become a crime-ridden and Balkanised basket case tend to lean to the right and tend to live outside of it.

This polarity broadly holds true. Yet the quarrel over London’s decline is often less one between the capital and the periphery, between left and right, and more between resentful ex-Londoners and current London residents.

The rancour directed at London these days doesn’t so much come from Yorkshire or Newcastle, from places that have never cared much for the capital anyway. It emanates from places such as Kent and Essex, from those adjacent places inhabited by millions of those who have departed the capital in the past two decades, many having upped and left owing to the now exorbitant price of living there. Their resentment at having felt pushed out of their hometown is aggravated by the huge number of outsiders who now live where they once did – either wealthy incomers from the provinces, financial types from the global elite or the unprecedented number of migrants.

To understand why they are sometimes given to exaggerate London’s downfall, or are liable to be rosy-eyed about its recent past, you have to understand where this resentment is coming from. They believe their home has been taken from them. That’s what rankles.

Why the far left is turning to violence

The brutal killing of a far-right activist in Lyon by far-left street-fighters earlier this month has sent France into a period of grim introspection. Many are now asking the question: why are ‘anti-fascists’, who purport to be the good guys, so fond of violence?

One French eco-feminist politician has an explanation. She blames the killing on a culture of ‘virility’ within the left. Writing in Libération at the weekend, Sandrine Rousseau of the French Greens called upon her country’s left to recognise and condemn the ‘white masculinity’ systemic in French politics, exhorting the left to become more feminised as a counterpose.

Blaming masculinity for a political murder is a predictably trite response for our times. But there’s a more obvious diagnosis. The far left today loves violence because those with righteousness on their side think anything is permissible, if it’s done for the right reason.

Patrick West is a columnist for spiked and author of Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times (Societas, 2017). Contact him on X at @patrickxwest.