First they came for the statues of slave traders and confederate generals, and many of us applauded.

If you applauded those events, because you didn’t realise at the time that these things never, ever stop where you’re comfortable, then you need to urgently and significantly reassess your outlook on life. The hardest-earned insight of human history is that freedom of expression has to be universal, even for those we hate and despise the most, or it quickly becomes meaningless.

Regrettable we are in a “one issue” timezone and when a single issue takes control rational thought tends to fade. Right now the single issue is “racism” and it clouds everything. The issues raised in this article fall under the “silence is violence” doctrine.

Under this doctrine a simple game is no longer a game, it is a multi layered argument in which every movement, no matter how small, must be scrutinised, dissected and put back together for it’s racist undertones. The players intention does not enter the equation.

Listening to the Pogues and Gilbert and Sullivan this week and reading some PG Wodehouse for a little light relief from the endlessly grim news of global crisis. They are all unacceptable to the woke stasi, and will have to go on the bonfire.
What an utterly bleak and humourless future these philistines are trying to forge.
Oh dear, I’ve got some David Starkey DVDs too…

Nicely written article; thank you. I damn well hope it doesn’t catch on – that way madness lies.

Should any of you want to rebel, I can recommend a version friends and I cooked up to play on a very drunken New Year’s Eve once. ONLY rude words allowed. Spell them how you want (so long as you can justify it, which in English is pretty much carte blanche), and you have the perfect right to lie if you can get everyone else to believe that what you put down was a rude word (works best with teachers, who just c**k an eyebrow and suggest you aren’t down with the kids if you challenge them). I can’t remember if anyone has ever won a game, as we’re usually three sheets to the wind before we even start, but it’s great fun.

The attacks on tiny and harmless activities only point to the reality that most of the big battles have been won. Those still remaining are too hard, hence the need to signal virtue rather than fix anything. The failure of such interventions to make any meaningful difference is so painfully obvious it does bring into disrepute the description of the typical woke campaigner as an ‘educated elite’. It was obvious to me that scoper (I actually imagined scopey) would replace spastic as soon as the name change was announced and I was only about 12 at the time. Hardly degree level thinking. Although maybe it is, these days.

It’s so much easier to weaponise other people’s speech and use it to bully people online than actually do something about it though.

Two minor quibbles, one of which may be with the sub editor not author.

1) whenever you use the argument that “X is wrong and anyway there are more important things to focus on” you incentivise your opponent simply upping how serious they consider a problem to be. Argue on its merit, not its relative worth.

2) Naomi Klein is massively wrong (as usual) about her generations efforts on language. Nick Timothy wrote a great piece in the Telegraph outlining the policies and primary legislation which so much of the modern left have claimed their influence over institutions in the U.K. and it harks back decades. Kleins generation won the war By taking out the defences before the real battles were being fought.

Duplicate by mistake — kindly remove