Woke warriors who preach inclusion but stoke division, says LEO McKINSTRY

For centuries, Britain has been renowned as a land of liberty. Our nation created Magna Carta, pioneered parliamentary democracy and conquered Nazi tyranny. But today freedom is under attack as never before, not from a foreign force, but from the destructive woke agenda that has seized control of our public institutions and major corporations. The social justice warriors behind this revolution have no electoral mandate. But their lack of accountability does not prevent them from bullying their critics into silence. John Hurt in the film 1984, under the eye of the ever-vigilant Big Brother (Image: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock) They are Orwellian in their methods. They call for tolerance but are intolerant of dissent. They pose as the champions of progress yet are the architects of oppression like Big Brother in 1984, crushing rebel Winston Smith. They preach inclusion but feed division with identity politics. Left-wingers are fond of denouncing the anti-Communist campaigns led by Senator Joe McCarthy in mid-1950s America. But US McCarthyism is dwarfed by today’s woke culture. Censorship, witch-hunts, blacklists, indoctrination and character assassination all come easily to the ideologues, helped by corporate cowardice and the mob mentality on social media. This pattern is epitomised by the politicisation of the banking industry. Once content to provide financial services, it now increasingly sees itself as an instrument of social engineering. After Nigel Farage revealed that his account had been closed, other former customers came forward to reveal how they had been ostracised, including Brexiteers, gender-critical feminists, and opponents of uncontrolled immigration. Tellingly, there have been no allegations of left-wingers suffering such treatment, no matter how extreme their views. Instead, it is the anti-woke heretics who are targeted. One outrageous case is that of Richard Fothergill, an Anglican minister from Cumbria who had an account with the Yorkshire Building Society for 17 years. Like many firms, the Society bedecks its branches and website with politically correct material such as the Pride rainbow flag. When the Reverend Fothergill raised mild objections to this practice as well as the influence of transgender dogma on children, he was told that his views were ‘intolerable’ because the Society was ‘opposed to discrimination’. Like a religious heretic of the 17th century, he had failed the new purity test, and his account was shut down. In parts of our public life, Britain is coming to resemble East Germany before the Berlin Wall came down. It is an extraordinary development that would have been unthinkable only a decade ago. Because of their supposedly unacceptable views, people are losing not just their right to banking, but their jobs, their livelihoods and careers. Nigel Farage (Image: Getty) Only at the weekend, it was reported that Felix Ngole, a devout Christian who came to this country after suffering persecution for his beliefs in his native Cameroon, had a job offer withdrawn as a mental health support worker because the company found that his reluctance to ’embrace and promote LGBT rights’ did not align with its ‘ethos and values’, despite his pledge never to discriminate against anyone. No setback seems to halt the woke juggernaut. Its advance is relentless. Typically, the hardline transgender pressure group Mermaids recently tried to shut down the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Alliance, which holds gender-critical views and therefore has been labelled ‘transphobic’. The bid to crush the LGB Alliance was refused by a tribunal hearing but that will not halt the social justice campaigners. Their values now dominate the public realm, as illustrated by the sea of rainbow flags across Britain and the growing indoctrination of school pupils. Lobby group Stonewall, which is in the vanguard of change, has even called on nurseries to do more ‘to help children recognise their gender identities’. Woke bureaucracy is rife, reflected in the army of equality managers and identity monitoring. Yet political correctness actually breeds resentment and division, as exemplified by the report at the weekend from a primary school in Haringey, north London, where white pupils have been excluded from extra weekend literacy classes. It is the same story in the RAF, whose latest recruitment drive rejected ‘useless white men’ in its drive to boost diversity. In the name of fighting discrimination, the ideologues end up entrenching bias. That is just part of the grotesque nightmare that this ugly, illiberal programme has inflicted on Britain. If we still cherish freedom, we must resist and fight back.