I think you are wrong Mr West. I have come round to the opposite point of view – that dealing with ‘Woke’ should be one of the Conservative government’s high priorities.
Here’s an example. We have been trying to influence the UK Domestic Abuse Bill but are completely swamped by the ‘women and victims’ lobby. Despite government data which shows that 35% of DA victims are male, both major parliament committees called only female victim representatives to give evidence. The peers have been bombarded with ‘briefings’ by Women’s Aid, Refuge, Victims Commissioners etc all giving the same distortion – that domestic abuse is principally against women. Men as victims are mentioned in the debates at least 10x less than women.
It is inconceivable that this bias can be removed by simple discussion as this bit of Wokeness has invaded the whole system. The only way it could be countered would be for the government to recognise what has happened and take central action.
…and that is just one example. I have watched black labour MPs claim that the claimed higher incidence of COVID among BAME is down to ‘institutional racism’.
As others have pointed out in these comments, the Woke are not open to discussion of facts. They are not interested in personal responsibility etc.
The use of facts has been labelled by the intellectual post-modernists as white/male dominance.
This is not peripheral, Ed, it’s central to the agenda (as it is so unheard)
Statues is/was just one manifestaion.

It’s Christianity without redemption. If you’re white you are dammed as are all your generations. If you made an off colour joke or slapped a girl on the arse in the 1970s you are double dammed. It’s an inhuman and very bleak ideology.

“”Maybe I’m not good enough or noble enough to be woke. I want to be woke.” Rather than getting excited by statues, Vaizey said, the Government should “lean in” to issues of social and racial justice, and be more like Joe Biden ” “woke in the best way” ” by celebrating both tradition and diversity.”

A perfect illustration of the kind of vapid unthinking rot that passes for political discourse at the moment. A series of soundbites and half-heard phrases from twitter cobbled together to say precisely nothing, with an added obsequious reference to the US establishment.

“Statues and street names don’t actually matter,” says Ed West. What should matter, according to West, is fighting woke ideology on ideological grounds, with an opposing “conservative” ideology.

I’m no conservative and I don’t give a fig about battling ideologies. But I do care about statues and street names. “Woke ideology” is just a power grab (all ideologies are fundamentally bunk) and erasing the past is one of the woke left’s most terrifying and effective new weapons.Compare this famous passage from George Orwell’s !984:

“Do you realise that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has
been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don’t know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories.” (Thanks to Will Jones.)

A good article, as ever, from Mr West. However, I would take issue with the statement that ‘their all-American narrative of slavery and redemption echoes the country’s Christian ideals’. The problem is that it is actually a dangerous inversion of the Christian ideal.

Christ’s sacrifice was to redeem the repentant sinner, not to raise up
the Jews oppressed by Rome. Indeed, Jesus more than once reached out to Roman soldiers.

Woke, in contrast, seeks to raise up the non-white oppressed against the white oppressor, and offers no promise of redemption to the latter (even if they repent), least of all through the abnegation and self-sacrifice of the woke priesthood.

Left to itself I suspect ‘woke’ will eat itself.

Let’s not forget that the one time High Priestess of all things inclusive, one JK Rowling is now condemned as transphobic.

If things carry on as they are in 10 years Owen Jones will probably be considered beyond the pale!

A real danger for the left is the determination to place everyone in ever-smaller boxes. So you can be gay (as I am, full disclosure) but in terms of the progresssives this is somehow less valid that being gay AND black, for example. My suspicion is that many gay, black people would feel justifiably patronized.

In short, tempting though it is to engage, the Tories should probably resist the temptation to get too excercised about all this stuff. The left will tie itself in knots and the electorate will deliver their verdict accordingly.

Wokeism seems to be a stupid persons understanding of critical theory/post modern deconstructionism. I had a clown on here telling me the other day that identifying people with their culture and origin (redneck, peckerwood etc) is bigotry. Tell that to David Allan Coe or GG Allin. (who says rednecks gotta be southerners).

As a thought experiment Derrida, Foucault et al are interesting, as is Nietszche. As a manual for how to live your life and treat others its a disaster. Since wokeists offer no alternative to whatever theory they are “deconstructing” it is pointless to debate with them. They have the
intellect of a rat but lack the social skills and raw cunning of those critters. Good news is if you do a real job where objectivity needs to be shared with other parties wokeism offers no threat. A ton of beef is is still a ton, a sick person with kidney failure still needs dialysis, however much you argue that “beef” and “dialysis” are the inventions of white supremacists. The problem seems to be when the ideology becomes a fashion. Like heroin chic or pacifists with Che Guevara posters 1. it doesn’t work and 2. its not fun. As the ephemera of fashion, post modernist critical theory allows people to break stuff, go on demos, rebel against authorities that don’t fight back and generally make whoopy. Which is fine but has all the intellectual depth of football hooliganism.

No.

Woke is simply the new name for political correctness. It’s certainly true that – whichever you call it – it has become more and more extreme, to the point where even moderate, go-along-to-get-along types are starting to notice how evil the whole thing is. One can argue that the loss of this or that statue is trivial, et cetera; but the aim of the statue smashing, and the pronouns, and of all the rest of it, has become obvious: to obliterate reality and replace it with a leftist mythology full of counter-factuals, where criminals become heroes and women become men purely because a sufficiently pious virtue-signalling leftist says so.

Case in point: it was still called political correctness back when the Civil Service started to refer to ‘partners’ instead of ‘spouses’ in official documents. The aim, even back then, was to blur the distinction between a lifetime commitment and a one night stand.

“And conservatives will lose because our own thought-leaders will convince the world that this is about well-meaning kindness vs the performative toughness ” vice-signalling ” that characterises so much Right-wing politics.”

Exactly. “I am tough and I will say pessimistic things” is a pathetic way to respond to the wokists. Osborne was like that sometimes, and I think that is one of the things that drove IDS out of government.

Anyways, the wokists want to breed out certain ethnicities in Britain. Some of their methods in doing so are somewhat colonialist. In keeping us tied to the EU, their methods were also imperialist. Ironically, if the conservative party gets its skates on and combats all that, it will be more anti-imperialist than the wokists.

Having just met an old friend of 15 years who, after a bit of a hiatus, discovered he became a woke cultist during that hiatus when he was apolitical before, and in the space of 20 weeks lost him as a friend purely because of his batshit politics which he wished to insert into every conversation like a monomaniac, and his desire to try and give me a struggle session over the phone when I finally had enough, I can say that woke is most definitely a problem.

It is, at root, a deeply collectivist, even racist ideology, which punishes or rewards people based on whether they fit into a designated victim group or oppressor group, a million miles from what conservatism should be, and scarily close to 20th century totalitarianism.

Ridiculous lack of logic: Coronavirus is bad, so Woke is OK – just ignore it.
While politicians sit at home with nothing else to do than enforce that we do nothing other than sit at home, I see no better way they could spend their time than working to unroot evil identity politics and wokeness.

If I had a genie to grant me one wish, and my wish was: “Please preserve western society”, I don’t think COVID would disappear. I think BLM, Antifa, and most grievance studies programs and profs would disappear.

‘Unlike political correctness, however, woke ” originally an
African-American term to mean “awake” to social justice ” is primarily
about race.’

I’m sorry, Ed West, but that is complete nonsense. ‘Woke’ is a term coined from The Matrix (1999) series of films, where the character Neo is given a red pill by the rebel leader Morpheus – who happened to be black. Upon swallowing it, the ‘reality’ he thinks he’s in falls apart and discovers to his horror he’s simply one of millions in an artificially induced coma by the IT system which really controls the world (Huxley’s Brave New World taken to 2001 extremes)

‘Woke’ is merely the new twist of all the old conspiracy theories about Jews, the Illuminati and other such nonsense controlling the world. Currently it has taken an identitarian form – rather ironic considering those now propagating it are the very career ‘anti-fascists’ warning the world against it ten years ago when the far-right adopted it as a way of attempting to become popular again.

Once again one comes across an Unherd thread that disappoints. No attempt to self reflect on any failings; just pillory the ‘other side’ for being self-righteous and morally superior – qualities that many posts to this thread seem to have in abundance. What appears to be equally troubling is the author’s misunderstanding of the term woke’s historical provenance (the film the matrix comes to mind) and the latent identification of conservatism with a form of respect for Royalist authority and something betrothed by ‘our forefathers’. No wonder some of the posts here seem to be calling for something akin to blood and honour. A shame.

A good read – though neither the conservatives nor the woke will win. When the dust settles, democratic society usually finds a balance somewhere between two extremes. We did not get the Sixties in the Eighties, but, many of the ideas of the Sixties radicals became norm in the Eighties, and, Jerry Rubin became a stockbroker millionaire! When a balance cannot be found, therein lies the danger. History is pockmarked with examples.

I doubt there ever was a statue erected to a slave trader to praise him as a slave trader. He must have done other things in the course of his life., quite apart from his slave trading, that seemed worth honouring. As some other contributors here have suggested, one of the problems of defacing or taking down some statues because they are seemed to honour persons guilty in slavery is that it soon degerates into vandalising any statue including those who risked their lives fighting slavery. France’s Macron had his finest moment when he proclaimed that no statue in France will never be taken down since every statue there exists because it belongs to France’s history. No one ever seems to think that most people don’t pay much attention to statues they see every day until a big deal is made about one of them.

Thanks for getting me to look up Jacob Rees-Mogg’s attack on wokeness, Tom. A great effort by Jacob. I didn’t know that Gordon of Khartoum had helped wipe out the slave trade. It is always good to learn more about history. Anyway, you have an anti-woke Conservative government in the UK and we have an aggressively pro-woke Liberal government in Canada. You have the third fastest rollout of COVID vaccines per capita in any country and we were in 21st place on Thursday, and now seem to be even lower, in 30th place. You ask why the Conservative government should be distracted by its fight on wokeism. It doesn’t appear to be seriously distracted at all. It is our Liberal government, that has egged on the thugs that toppled and beheaded a statue of our first PM, John A. Macdonald, in Montreal, that seems to have dropped the ball.

We need to get our politicians to properly start the process of pulling down the woke who now infest our universities and taking a hold in our civil servants and police forces. The woke are nothing more than left wing criminal thugs using the banners of BLM, X rebellion etc to promote their criminality of disruptive and damaging acts to our democratic society and property. We should not over intellectualise this just act and defund any institution or groups that will not support mainstream society.

God, what has happened to your brain?