Yes. Labour will go Woke.
A guest essay by the leading scholar of wokeism, Eric Kaufmann
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The following is a guest essay by Professor Eric Kaufmann, author of the new book Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution, and somebody who through his MA and PhD courses at the University of Buckingham is helping others make sense of the revolution that is sweeping across the West. You can also follow him on Twitter/X.
Now that Labour has won an enormous majority the dogs of woke be released. As if on cue, Prime Minister Keir Starmer used his maiden speech to boast about his party’s world-leading share of LGBT MPs and praise race grievance-monger Diane Abbott. He also appointed the woke one-two punch of Bridget Phillipson as Education Secretary and Anneliese Dodds as Equalities Minister.
Both have incurred the ire of J.K. Rowling because they prioritise the rights of biological males who think they are ladies over the right of women to female-only spaces. This foreshadows the surreptitious manner in which, for the the next five years, Labour will push what I call ‘left-liberal extremism’ —walk softly (talk about ‘centrist’, ‘country over party’, ‘bringing people together’) but carry a big woke stick.
As Matt Goodwin has commented, the woke belief system is not just a sideshow. It threatens the very foundations of Western civilisation. Starmer, as Goodwin notes, is likely to toss red meat to Labour’s radical woke interest groups because he lacks the budgetary headroom to drive growth, boost public spending and increase pay.
His large majority also means he will have to contend with querulous progressive backbench MPs who include Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) such as Nadia Whittome - who has vowed to push gender self-identification ‘no ifs ands or buts’, and described open debate as ‘an effective rollback of assumed equality.’
This doesn’t mean Starmer is suddenly going to start saying ‘transwomen are women’ or Britain is ‘systemically racist’. He knows the British people are not woke. In my own surveys, two-thirds oppose woke policies while we have already seen, in Scotland, how a large majority break against woke policies when they become aware of them.
Instead, Keir Starmer’s stated aim is to shoot down the opponents of this cultural revolution as ‘divisive’, thus running interference for woke left activists in the civil service, schools, universities, public sector bodies, galleries and other institutions.
Already, in her opening speech to civil servants, Lisa Nandy, new Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, has made clear she will drop a ban on rainbow lanyards and other political messaging because ‘the era of culture wars are over’ and ‘[our] entire focus is on the work of delivering change – not lanyards’ (read: green light for culture war activists).
This will be paired with discreet (‘walk softly, big stick’) measures, such as appointing woke ministers to key redoubts in the culture war (such as Dodds and Phillipson), while suggesting that similarly self-identified ‘woke’ activists and supporters of Black Lives Matter take control of Labour’s efforts to curtail illegal immigration.
While the Conservatives did little to combat woke, the differences with Labour are important. The Tories mounted a weak and unfocused effort to rid schools, the civil service, and the NHS of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and gender ideology, failing to stop to these ideas in the wider Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) agenda.
While 2019 Tory MPs such as Caroline Noakes, Crispin Blunt, Theresa May and Dehenna Davison were openly woke, many of their peers were not and some, such as Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman and Oliver Dowden, were willing to combat this poisonous belief system.
The knowledge that the government was at least somewhat opposed to this agenda meant woke activists in the public sector could not fully let rip. But that leash came off when Labour won its enormous majority at the general election, on July 4.
What is woke? Don’t let the left fool you by arguing it is an empty epithet, that it is just about “being nice” or “tolerant”. In fact, it is an analytically and empirically robust concept —a distinctive political tradition or ideology in its own right.
As I explain in my new online course on Woke, and my new book Taboo, woke refers to the making sacred of historically marginalised race, gender and sexual identity groups.
It is a belief system that results in a prioritising of equal outcomes and protecting minorities from emotional harm. Its supporters claim this is about ‘being kind’ but the reality is that, today, kindness to one group, such as biological males who identify as female, entails being unkind to another, such as biological women who want to protect women’s sport and spaces.
Likewise, assailing ‘whiteness’ in the name of making minorities feel welcome is an attack on the identity of the ethnic majority. Punishing people for politically incorrect speech or chilling their freedom of expression might make a few sensitive minorities feel better, but will embarrass and annoy more confident minorities while stifling the majority group’s traditions and free speech.
These are conflicts of group interest in a democracy, not open-and-shut ‘rights’ issues – which is the way the woke media class and elite institutions frame it.
The view of minorities as sacred began with the anti-racism taboo in mid-1960s America, which was the ‘big bang’ of today’s moral order. Then, over time, the magic was borrowed by feminists, gays, and later trans activists to create new taboos in our society around sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, and more.
While proportionate norms against racism and prejudice are important, taboos are tripwires that activate our disgust reflex, reducing complexity in our society to binary and simplistic debates in which those who deviate from the new, stifling orthodoxy are silenced or stigmatised as racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on.
These stigmas are the ‘North Star’ around which today’s moral system revolves. Until we undo that, cancel culture, gender ideology, critical race theory, and routine attacks on the history and collective memory of Western societies like Britain will not just continue; they will accelerate and intensify.
As African-American writer Shelby Steele, who lived through the civil rights struggle, recalls, in the 1950s African Americans in the South had to kowtow to whites, who at that time held the cultural power.
But from the 1960s whites had to genuflect to African Americans, who had acquired cultural power because whites had confessed to having mistreated African Americans. This was an unavoidable response to the dismantling of racial segregation.
In order to recover moral authority, Steele writes that white people and American institutions had to virtue signal they were ‘good whites’ by praising minorities, denigrating their fellow white Americans, or adopting policies like affirmative action, which arguably do more harm than good to African Americans.
We see this, for example, in studies which shown how white liberal progressives in America dumb down their speech when speaking to African Americans, tiptoeing around groups they revere as sacred rather than treating them as equals.
The power of identity stigmas, like kryptonite, can be used to disable opponents, rending them radioactive to others. The political left, whether radical or liberal, drew on newly sacralised minority groups like African-Americans as a source of meaning and direction for their politics.
But this also meant they could borrow cultural power from minorities and use it against the right. In other words, the moral revolution brought about by the race taboo did not just involve a transfer of power from white to black; it also involved a shift of moral authority from right to left.
When a party is in government they make the laws, and when an ideology has cultural power it makes the norms. The new cultural order gave the left the authority to use epithets like racist, sexist or transphobe to shut down democratic debate in numerous policy areas. Immigration, crime, education, health or any other sphere of policy that could plausibly be associated with race or sex thereby came to slant left.
The fear of being irradiated by the kryptonite of the race taboo – and thus socially ostracised – could even turn conservative politicians into useful idiots, such as when Theresa May called the Conservatives the ‘nasty party’ and pushed the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) agenda as a way of deflecting the charge of racism levelled at her government by progressive media because of its efforts to cut immigration.
In this way, as I argue in Taboo, the political left’s strategy across the West has been to launder its illiberal ideas by badging them as liberal. Who could possibly be opposed to ‘anti-racism’, ‘inclusion’, ‘diversity’, or ‘trans rights’, they ask?
Those who try to argue against such policies are smeared as racists, Islamophobes, transphobes, or simply ‘hateful’ figures. We saw this, tragically, with the grooming gangs scandal, where public officials routinely failed to act against Pakistani Muslim gangs that preyed on young, white, working-class girls for fear of being seen as ‘racist’.
In fact, the cultural left deploys a ‘radioactive velvet glove’, involving both a carrot and a stick. The carrot is that you get to think of yourself as a good person if you agree with this new moral order; the stick is you are cancelled if you are dare disagree.
My research shows that the carrot is actually far more important. For instance, as Matt Goodwin has shown, academics who are teaching in the world’s most elite universities support the use of mandatory ‘diversity statements’, whereby academics who are going for jobs or prestigious research grants submit a sheet of paper making clear their allegiance to the DEI agenda. They support this by a ratio of two to one, without any compulsion, reflecting how they implicitly endorse the new moral order.
Or consider that most Americans oppose discriminatory race quotas in hiring and university entrance but support access to abortion. Why then have just four Republican states banned affirmative action while 14 outlaw abortion? Or why was Donald Trump the only one of 17 Republican primary candidates to make the border central to his first pitch for the presidency, in 2015-16?
The answer, as Richard Hanania notes, lies in the fear many Republican politicians have of being accused of racism. Going hard on well-ploughed furrows like abortion, taxes, or guns was a lot safer than tackling affirmative action or mass immigration.
This also explains why many British Tories avoid the same issues, viewing debates about immigration, the borders, and what we are teaching schoolchildren about race, sex, and gender as ‘low status’ debates that might get them ‘cancelled’.
Another advantage for the political left in the so-called culture wars is that their people disproportionately control the institutions, wielding an enormous amount of power they use to further embed this moral order. By contrast, the only possible institution the right can control is elected government.
The left’s tactic, therefore, is to deflect conservative governments from reforming institutions by accusing them of ‘stoking the culture wars when people are worried about paying their bills.’ Funny how that point is never made when the left wants to talk about an isolated incident of racism or sexism.
As Andrew Doyle masterfully writes, protecting women’s prisons, shelters, sports and other single-sex spaces is termed ‘divisive’ whereas championing the right of biological males to enter such spaces is ‘inclusive’. Pushing unscientific ideas such as systemic racism and unconscious bias isn’t stoking a culture war; resisting it is.
Ultimately, this means that defending our truth-based order, free speech and national identity is considered undignified while sacrificing these values in the name of ‘equal outcomes’ and ‘emotional safety’ is not.
This is masterful framing, with plenty of useful idiots on the right falling into line, such as the liberal Tory Reform Group who recently took to Twitter/X to virtue-signal to the liberal progressive establishment that:
“The Conservative Party has to think very carefully about the type of campaign it wants to run, and the longer term impact of stoking culture wars. It is clear that voters are rejecting the politics of division. We must not run on “wedge issues” for a narrow core voter base alone”.
Actually, I find that two-thirds of British voters back the anti-woke side on so-called wedge issues, so the Tories very much do need to run on them.
While it is true that some of these issues are often not high on the list of priorities for voters, they can suddenly acquire enormous political and cultural power, especially when politicians are willing to target them and push them into the debate, as the Isla Bryson debacle in Scotland shows.
A culture war strategy must therefore focus on easily-grasped images, such as that of the tattooed rapist Bryson, forging links between this and high-salience issues like immigration and crime, much like Nigel Farage, in the 2010s, successfully connected what was once the fringe issue of Brexit with the high salience issue of immigration.
Of course, Labour is also proposing innocent-sounding legislation on hate speech and racial equality which will further supercharge this woke cultural socialism, shutting down offensive speech while pressuring organizations to discriminate against whites and males to achieve equal outcomes for identity groups.
Labour’s mooted new Race Equality Act would impose a new duty on public services, including the NHS, police, schools, and councils, to collect and report data on staffing, pay, and outcomes by ethnicity. This approach aligns with Labour’s broader initiatives, such as mandating ethnicity pay gap reporting, anti-racism training for police officers, and a curriculum review to ensure ‘diversity’ in schools.
As Richard Hanania shows, in America this means legal compliance and bureaucratic pressures compelling organisations to impose speech codes and diversity training on workers in case they are inspected or sued. Activists will over-interpret the new law to indoctrinate a captive audience in the classrooms and workplace. This will put cancel culture and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion agenda on steroids.
Will Britain wake up in time to prevent a similar erosion of our long traditions of free speech, free expression, objective truth, equal treatment and due process? Will future generations be taught to hate the British past and the white men who played an outsized role in creating our national community?
At best, I think we have one or two decades to reverse the march of wokeism before today’s Zoomers and Millennials, who prioritise ‘emotional safety’ over free speech, become the median voter and the country reaches a point of no return.
So let me be clear and underline why I’m drawing attention to these issues: unless a much larger number of people wake up to the cultural stealth campaign that is taking place and signal to politicians they will punish those who acquiesce to this woke takeover then this will soon be the end of Britain as a free, truth-based, and socially cohesive nation. And I don’t think any of us want to see that.
Matt Goodwin’s Substack goes to more than 55,000+ subscribers from 167 countries around the world and thousands of paying supporters who support our work. Like our stuff? Then help us expand by becoming a paid supporter and access everything —the full archive, exclusive posts, polling, leave comments, join the debate, get discounts, advance notice about events, and the knowledge you’re supporting independent writers who are not afraid to push back against the grain. You can join us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X and Facebook.
Good article, thank you.
PLEASE Eric, stop putting the word “biological” before male/female or man/woman. This implies there’s another type of male/female or man/woman.
Of course, there isn’t. Language changes the way we think, it’s one of the reasons we are where we are.
The history, traditions, and culture of England are being undermined, subverted, and rewritten and in so doing what was a "we", a nation, is unraveling. Instead of a home our country is becoming a large, multicultural hotel in which the elites stay in power over a demoralised, balkanised demos unable to organise any push back.
Badenock only pushed back very occasionally and has stated she does not want to be seen as an anti-woke warrior. She is now in a cat fight with Braverman the one Tory left who is the only culture warrior left in politics. And look how she is being demonised, even by her own party, for some very straighforward comments.
Labour's legal and institutional framework will strangle citizens' push back. Dismantling woke will require a government in power that understands what has happened and has the backbone to roll back the legal framework. It can only do that if it has, for example, an 80 seat majority over a poltical re-alignment except we won't see that again so deep is the anger, hatred even, for the Tories.
Labour and its running dogs in the media will put a cordon sanitaire around Reform which, as on the continent, may take years to breach. The future is bleak indeed.