Just a few years ago, when the ‘culture wars’, ‘political correctness’, ‘no platforming’ and ‘wokeness’ first burst – or rather slunk – on to the political scene, I remember being irritated by them, but only mildly. I recall just one occasion when I was personally taken to task on PC grounds. This was after a public lecture I gave in Melbourne, Australia, when a young feminist in my audience objected to my referring to nations as ‘she’. (What I should have told her was to try that in la France; but I thought of it too late.) A few months afterwards I was reluctantly persuaded by a publisher’s reader to replace all the ‘shes’ (used in that way) in one of my books by ‘its’; but that marked the limit of my submission to the new fashion. It didn’t much matter either way, I thought; except perhaps to the young students I was teaching, who would later come to realise what was really important in life. It was never going to affect politics for example, with few adults being sufficiently riled by this kind of nonsense – as some of it was – to allow it to affect their broader political views.

How wrong I was – apparently! At the present time anti-wokery features as a powerful weapon in the hands of the British and American Right, who attribute much of the perceived decline of their countries to this insidious element that has, they sense, infected the public discourse. Trump and Farage are full of it. ‘Our country will be woke no longer,’ the former promised recently’ (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-trump-says-u-s-will-be-woke-no-longer). Farage followed this up with a similar attack on ‘wokery’ early this year (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgenl77d50wo). They both use the word – whose real meaning is somewhat vague and malleable – to attack mainly ‘progressive’ causes and policies – in Farage’s case here solar panels to counter climate change – or even simple virtues like compassion, charity, and probably the majority of the Beatitudes.

I suspect however that the main attraction of ‘wokery’ as a target is its association with intellectuals, and with Trump’s hated ‘Radical Left’ universities; which Rightists nearly everywhere viscerally distrust and despise. But of course it’s useful for wokery to be around, if only to stimulate discussion, and because of the truths it may embody. After all, anti-slavery was probably considered to be ‘woke’ once. Not to mention Jesus…