Has Woke Taken Over Everything? - Dr Joanna Williams

Dr Joanna Williams is the Founder of Cieo, associate editor of Spiked and an author. The last few years has seen progressive ideas capture institutions, academics and headlines. But how much has this ideology actually trickled down to making a real impact in the world? Is it just a moral panic about a moral panic or is there something to really be concerned about? Expect to learn why police officers are being told to actively refer to themselves as woke, how 3 month old babies can be racist, why air conditioning is misogynistic, whether the people pushing these narratives actually believe this stuff, what the future of progressive messaging has in store and much more... Sponsors: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get 2 weeks free access to Wondrium by going to https://www.wondrium.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy How Woke Won - https://amzn.to/38YNu1h Follow Joanna on Twitter - https://twitter.com/jowilliams293 To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #race #woke #gender - 00:00 Intro 00:23 Woke Policing 05:52 What Minorities Really Want 14:36 Origin of ‘Woke’ 20:05 How the Left is Demonised 26:22 The Shift from Class to Identity 36:52 Does the Woke Movement Impact Women’s Rights? 52:06 Adversarial Nature of Current Society 59:28 The Right’s Moral Panic 1:07:04 Is the Panic Justified? 1:12:50 Where to Find Dr Williams - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Babies start being racist from the age of three months old. You know, they become aware of different skin colours and they start showing preferences for the same skin colour as their own. Anybody with an ounce of common sense knows that this is completely ridiculous. The idea of babies being born racist. It becomes an almost religious idea of original sin.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  British police officers have been told to embrace the label woke. What's going on?

• 0:29Speaker 00

  Well, it's a good question because what they're clearly not being told to do is go out there and fight crime. They're being given anti-racism training and they're being told that if they think that this anti-racism training is going to see them being labelled as woke, then they should just embrace that and go with it. I mean, clearly, nobody wants the police to be racist and certainly I don't want the police to be going around targeting people because of their skin colour or anything like that. But I think what most of us want the police to be doing is actually catching criminals and catching criminals irrespective of their skin colour. And nobody has a problem with the police really having training in anti-racism. But the question is, what kind of training they're getting?

• 1:11Speaker 00

  And central to this training is they're being told basically that any racial discrepancies, any kind of where one ethnic group is seen to be kind of out of proportion to another ethnic group is a problem. But you can't really go about fighting crime in that way. It means you're fighting crime with one hand tied behind your back. You're always looking at skin colour and you're left thinking, well, you know, have we stopped and searched too many black people this week? Have we perhaps questioned too many brown skin coloured drivers? Have we pulled over too many white people? And you can't, you can't police properly if you've got one mind on skin colour.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  You've got to be looking at who's committing the crimes, not what colour of skin they've got. So it seems to me that this does make policing woke. And the problem with it is not that they need to embrace it, it's that they need to ask themselves why they're not busy spending the time catching criminals rather than messing about with these things, looking at people's skin colour.

• 2:17Chris Williamson?

  Abimbola Johnson, Chairwoman of the scrutiny panel. What is this? That sounds terrifying. Chairwoman of the scrutiny panel that will hold forces to account over the plan, expressed disappointment that officers refused to say whether policing was institutionally racist as they launched the initiative. Johnson, who was appointed after Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Britain in 2020, said officers should be comfortable with being called woke.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, do you know what? That's the classic catch 22 that woke tricks people into, and particularly around issues to do with racism. So this big thing like, you know, are you going to say that you're institutionally racist? They can't win on that one. So I'm not surprised they didn't answer it because if they say, you know, yes, yes, we are institutionally racist, then it's like, oh my God, what are you doing? Why are you institutionally racist? We better fire you all. We better recruit a whole load of new police officers, send you on a load more training sessions. You're clearly doing something very wrong. But if they say, no, we're not institutionally racist, then by definition of the kind of

• 3:28Speaker 00

  woke mantras, they are racist because they're not admitting to all their innate prejudices. So I, I think if anybody asked me that question, I would avoid it too, because like, say, it's one that you just cannot win in the eyes of these woke people.

• 3:45Chris Williamson?

  It is unfalsifiable, some of the things that get put forward. You think, I'm damned if I do, I'm damned if I don't. And silence is both violence and compliance. So it's, it's not even as if I can't choose to not engage in this discussion. Everything, every single different approach that you could have to that and disappointment in not agreeing to what you said that you wanted it to be from the scrutiny overlord or whatever she's called.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And it's like that classic thing that you used to do when you were a kid, when you tossed a coin, you know, heads I win, tails you lose. They can't, they've completely stacked all the cards in their favour, so that whatever arguments are put forward, they think they can win. So, I mean, if you try and challenge this idea that we've got an institutionally racist society with statistics, if you say, actually, look, you know, look at what's going on in education, look at who's getting the best exam results, you know, look at who's most disadvantaged in education, for example, or, you know, look at who's going to university, who's getting jobs, and point out that there aren't all these ethnic or racial disadvantages that people are making out. Then they say, oh, no, you can't just use statistics, you've got to talk about people's

• 4:59Speaker 00

  lived experiences. You've got to talk about, you've got to look at how black people are actually experiencing racial inequalities and racial disadvantages. Now, there might be some, some truth in that, you know, you, you, it's, I'm not saying it's never worthwhile to consider people's lived experiences. But the problem is, you see, when, when some black people come along and actually they say, do you know what? No, there isn't all the racism that you're describing. I don't feel as if I'm at a constant advantage. Suddenly, you find they're the wrong kind of black person, you know, that their lived experience doesn't count. It's only some people's lived

• 5:39Speaker 00

  experiences, the people who are saying the right things, the people who are going along with what these woke scrutiny committees want to hear. It's only their lived experience that actually counts.

• 5:50Chris Williamson?

  Is it not funny that the most, the, the broadest group of people that seem to be pushing this aren't part of the racial groups that they're supposed to be defending? That, I mean, that we saw this in America, right? That when the defund the police thing came around, that if you actually surveyed a lot of black communities, that they said that they wanted more policing because it was their children that were going to be injured. I had, do you know Mary Harrington from Unheard?

• 6:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:14Chris Williamson?

  So she came on the show and she told me this story about the introduction of the pill in the 1960s increased the number of, number of Single mothers and the dissolving of chivalry norms around not hitting women, holding the door open, being sort of kind and gentle and a protector and a provider, that these disproportionately hurt women from working class backgrounds, but they were being pushed by middle class women. We're emancipating women from the tyranny of the patriarchy. We don't need to be have the door held open for us so that men can stare at our behinds as we walk through. And what you actually look, when you, when you see the stats, it suggests that some women

• 6:55Chris Williamson?

  that were in societies and social classes that maybe needed more constrained norms in order to assist men that perhaps didn't have the same level of education or role models in terms of what is and is not acceptable behaviour around women, they were the ones that were disproportionately affected by this policy that was being pushed by somebody that never had any idea about what was going on on the, at the coalface, so to speak. And it kind of seems to me that it's similar with regards to policing and policies around that, that a lot of the time, the policies that are being pushed forward aren't being pushed forward by people that are in the communities that they're actually affecting. And if you ask them, they might not want what is being promoted.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Definitely. And I think the best example of that is with all the different views around trans, trans activism. If you look at most transgender people, certainly most transgender people who I know, they actually just want to have a quiet life. You know, they don't want to be a political football. They just want to, you know, in the classic, the words of the classic kind of J K Rowling tweet, they just want to dress however they want and be left to get on with living their lives however they see fit, same as everybody else. But the number of people who, it seems to me, the people who are like the most vocal transgender activists are not actually transgender themselves. They're kind of taking it on board to act on behalf of this community, on behalf of these other people in ways that

• 8:22Speaker 00

  actually a lot of transgender people don't appreciate and don't want. And they've ended up with their entire kind of life being politicised, something they've not asked for. And, and this is at People who are not transgender who've done this for them. But you know, just going back to what you're saying in relation to feminism. I mean, one of the things that I really object to with contemporary feminism is the way that it constantly seems to bang on to women that they're victims, you know, that they're really at a disadvantage. And I think that's what I see a lot in critical race theory, politics around race as well nowadays. And suddenly, if I was black and the mother of black kids, you know,

• 9:06Speaker 00

  this idea that that the message goes out that that you're at an inherent disadvantage, no matter what you do, you know, the odds are stacked against you, the world's a hostile place, everybody's racist, society's just out to get you. It's just like, what a message to give to kids, whether that's to give to black kids, gay kids, you know, girls. It just seems like the number one thing of identity politics is telling people or certain groups that they're really at a big disadvantage in life. And and often, like you're saying, you know, it's not people who are in those groups themselves who are doing that. It's other people coming along, telling them, oh, don't you know, everything's going to be

• 9:49Speaker 00

  really shit for you. And and I think that's terrible to to tell people that.

• 9:54Chris Williamson?

  That's how we raise up the marginalized. We'll raise them up by telling them that the world is unwinnable. I would be really fascinated for someone to do some interviews with interracial couples. So let's say that you had a white mother or a white father, that you've got some dominant genetics if you have a black spouse. Your kids are going to be, at the very least, darker than you, if not, you know, very, very black. I would love to find out what their experience of kind of being thrust into a world where they're now very invested in the messaging around race disparities, minority messaging. I think

• 10:36Chris Williamson?

  that would be fascinating, you know, to work out what's it like to be a mother that maybe has lived or a father that's lived their entire life. Observing this from the outside to then be sort of put on to the stadium floor.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Definitely. And the thing that worries me about that is I think suddenly somebody kind of my age, we have this very complacent view. So I'm kind of late 40s now. It's very complacent view that society gets better, you know, that that things are better. Suddenly it does seem true to me that the world is a lot less sexist, racist, homophobic than when I was a kid, you know, think things. You think social, uh, society progresses and this, there's progress in, in, we're more tolerant, we're more liberal nowadays. But my worry is that when you talk about something like that, that the, the old kind of colour blindness that would have been genuinely progressive, but would have meant that, you know, if you married somebody with a different colour skin to you, if you had a mixed race kid,

• 11:32Speaker 00

  you wouldn't even use that term mixed race, you know, it would just be your kid, you know, you wouldn't see your kid in terms of a skin colour, you wouldn't see your partner in terms of a skin colour. It was just your partner, it was just your kid. Whereas I think the really ugly thing about identity politics is it pushes people to see even in like the most intimate, private areas of their life to start seeing kind of differences, different experiences, different skin colours and to, to kind of be walking on eggshells around these issues, which they're told should be really, really sensitive. And like I said, that, that seems a funny kind of progress to me. It actually seems like a big step backwards.

• 12:16Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean when you say the word woke?

• 12:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a really, really difficult question. And in a way, I guess I'm kind of taking 300 pages of my book to answer that question. I mean, in some ways, some people I've heard describe it as a kind of extreme political correctness. But, but to me, it's a bit different than that because it's, it's not just about going around saying what words you can and can't use, although that's a big part of it. It, it's a kind of complete outlook on society. It's a complete way of, of viewing the way the world works. Particularly in terms of race and gender, those are the two big issues that really come to the fore.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  But it it's very much about identity and privileging different, dividing the world up, dividing people up into belonging to different identity groups. And then affording different status, different victim status to each of those different groups. So you create the, they call it intersectionality. You create these kind of pyramids, if you like, of oppression. Where you've got, I guess, a black transgender people at the top and you've got white men at the bottom. And everything that you are expected to need to know about a person. You're supposed to be able to gather just from looking at the color of her skin, their gender, their sexuality.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  And it's horrible, you know, because it it really reduces us down to the most, well, I often think, you know, the most boring facts about us, the least interesting things that that there are to know about a person. But it's also just really backward in the sense that it it doesn't allow us to see the character of somebody, to see what people are are good at, you know, you just become your biology, essentially. And the case of transgender people, not even that, just just kind of some vague feeling that they might have about themselves. Um, so it it it kind of pushes us to recognize identity. It pushes us to think of people as victims.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  It it really combines all these things, but but the worst thing about it for me is is in doing that. It becomes very authoritarian. It kind of tells the rest of us how we should behave, how we should speak, how we should react. Um, based on these characteristics that people have got.

• 14:37Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it interesting that the word woke was actually appropriated itself?

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely. So it was a word used originally in in America, among black people in America, going way back before the civil rights era. And it was a warning, essentially, a a warning at a time when sadly, these warnings were really, really needed. Uh, from one black person to another, you know, watch out for police violence, watch out for white people, essentially, who might be out to get you at at a time when that could be a really um, serious threat. You know, there there were lynchings and violent mobs, racist violent mobs going on. And yet, over the course of kind of, I guess, almost a hundred years now, that word's been taken on board. It's been taken on board, first of all, by trendy white people.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  Uh, particularly took off over the course of the Black Lives Matter movement as that really began to grow. Um, there was a time around twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, when it became really trendy, really fashionable. You'd see lists in magazines, you know, hot woke men, uh, why being woke makes you sexy. You had Jack Dorsey when he was in charge of Twitter on stage in a T-shirt, kind of saying how woke he was. Um, you know, and, and so people were really pleased and proud to kind of own this label woke. And they really wanted to show off how virtuous they were, show off their woke credentials.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  But then as soon as people from the other side started using that label in response to them and kind of saying, so this is your woke then, are you? Uh, they took an objection to that. And then since then, over the course of the past five years, the word's been used as this kind of political football where it's either being taken on board by the left, who are very proud of being woke, or it's been used as an insult by the right to kind of highlight the most extreme and wacky and horrible ideas that are associated with it.

• 16:34Chris Williamson?

  I'm not sure that anybody on the left even likes to reflect. The, the word woke cannot be used unironically anymore. Like, the only way that you can do it, this is something that I was so fascinated to watch. You saw this with political correctness, which was maybe what, the late sort of noughts into the mid teens? And it took a, a little while, but then it became, oh, part of the PC brigade, are you? And you saw political commentators, cultural commentators, comedians start to use PC as a meme of itself, right? And then what you got to see was woke become used unironically. And then within what felt like days, just completely reversed and used to satirise the group or the extremes of the group that were using the word unironically.

• 17:20Chris Williamson?

  And I, I, I think that it's, it's an interesting, um, demonstration of what. comedians and the use of humour and ridicule can do online because you could have tried to mandate that word into or out of law or create some sort of culture around it that was top down dictated but if you make a word socially so toxic that no one dares to use it that's the most scalable way to bring something into or take something out of the culture because

• 17:50Chris Williamson?

  your desire for status and fear of losing it doesn't matter it's just going to scale forever and ever and ever and no one needs to enforce it because the group will enforce it on your behalf.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  No, I think you're absolutely right. And I think that is a really good example, like you say, of the power of turning words around and using them back at people. But it's really interesting at the moment, I think, because on the one hand, as you said, with that, the story about the police that you highlighted at the start of the show, you know, you do have people saying, oh, we've just got to embrace this term and you shouldn't be embarrassed about it. And they go out of their way to say, you know, being woke, it just means, well, just means be kind. It just means be nice and be alert to racial injustice and sexism and homophobia and just being a nice person. But then, on the other hand, like you say, you know, they don't actually own the label, very few

• 18:42Speaker 00

  of them actually own the label directly. So they're kind of trying to reclaim it from this. But I think it is a good term to use because I think it allows us to name something that a lot of people would rather we didn't put a name to. So, you know, all of these different views. I think the way I see, you know, if you were to draw a Venn diagram between people who are kind of really buy into critical race theory and people who really buy into gender ideology, you know, you'd see big overlaps between these these different viewpoints. And to me, that's really what woke is. It's the overlaps between all of these circles. And they would rather, the people

• 19:25Speaker 00

  who were most woke would rather we didn't know who they were, would rather we didn't kind of call them out for their authoritarian ideas.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  And so they don't want the label being attached to them. They're not keen on it. And I think actually being able to call out that there's something going on here. Um, there's something that we should be critical of because they try and pass it off as oh, it's just a question of being kind. It's just a question of common sense, whereas actually, I think there are some very, very good reasons for, for questioning what's going on here. Uh, least of all, because a lot of the time it is actually quite racist, I think, to get people to always be thinking in terms of someone's skin colour.

• 20:05Chris Williamson?

  Another problem that you have here is that moderate, well-meaning, well-balanced, well-educated people on the left that want to genuinely make progress for minority groups and groups that are oppressed. They now also get lumped in from right-wing commentators. Anybody that starts to move toward progressive politics can kind of be smeared with the same term. You know, it's the same as anybody that's slightly conservative being alt-right or a proto-fascist. You know, that's the same dog whistle that comes from both sides. And, you know, there's equivalent terms on both ways and this low-resolution thinking just happens, right? People just aren't bothered with nuance and they want to smear people with a term. But i- if I was somebody that was on the moderate, well-meaning left, I would be so pissed

• 20:50Chris Williamson?

  at the people that are these screaming social justice warrior wildos on the internet. Like, I, I think you're actually seeing this. Who's the guy that writes for The Guardian? The, the, um, Owen Jones. Thank you. Yeah, I knew you had to say just The Guardian and who have hundreds of writers and you already knew who I meant. Owen Jones, to me, i- if I was on the left, I would want to denounce him as quickly as possible. I'm like, yo, you, you are not making this situation any better. Like, not only is he taking ridiculous positions that don't make any sense and making a fool of himself regularly, but then also appears to not really actually care that much.

• 21:34Chris Williamson?

  And as soon as somebody diverges from his view of how the left and how progress should be done, he's very quick to turn on them as well.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, absolutely. And there's so many examples like this, you know, where or you could look at people or, you know, you can look at different ideas that come forward as well. So one news story that was quite big in the UK at the weekend was some, I think Islington, it had to be Islington, didn't it, council in London, which has put out a training booklet for its nursery teachers, basically saying that the babies start being racist from the age of three months old, you know, they become aware of different skin colours and they start showing preferences for different, for kind of the same skin colour as their own from the age of just three months and kind of giving advice to nursery teachers on how best to

• 22:25Speaker 00

  challenge this. Well, you know, anybody with an ounce of common sense knows that this is completely ridiculous, the idea of babies being kind of born racist. It becomes an almost religious idea of original sin and the nursery teacher, a bit like nuns who ran schools kind of in the olden days, yeah, have to beat out this original sin of racism from these three-month-old babies. But, but the problem is, you know, now I do completely take your point. I think this is what makes it very difficult then for, for people who are kind of moderately anti-racist, or not, I don't mean moderately anti-racist, you know, God, I'm, I'm, I would consider myself to be anti-racist. I think we should, we should

• 23:07Speaker 00

  all be anti-racist. But, but what woke's done is it's changed the definition of, of what it actually means to be anti-racist. So I've got this really vivid memory, I mean, must be a good kind of 20, 30 years ago now, but I think, can you remember, I don't know if you remember, you're probably too young, but what like the Benetton adverts when Benetton used to do kind of, yeah, like really political, but also quite shocking adverts as well. I, I don't know if this was Benetton, maybe it was, it was something that was put out actually by one of these kind of anti-racist organisations. But, but this, I'm absolutely convinced this was true and well, you know, people can Google it afterwards and, and I'm sure it would come

• 23:49Speaker 00

  up on Google Images. There was an advert and it had pictures of like maybe five or six babies, all kind of wrapped up in the blankets, talking little, little, like two-month, three-month-old babies, all wrapped up in, in blankets and just their faces and you could see their faces were different colours. And it said at the top, you know, there's one place in Britain where racism does not exist. And, and do you know, it's true, you know, babies are not racist, babies were not, are not born racist. And the definition of racism that I had when I was growing up was that racism was discrimination plus power.

• 24:27Speaker 00

  You know, it wasn't just a question of discrimination, it was a question of you kind of having prejudices, but also having power to kind of put these prejudices, make these prejudices meaningful. It wasn't, it wasn't just a question of kind of, you know, dislike, personal preferences or whatever. It was being able to make these, make discriminatory, put discrimination into practice. And, and the idea that a baby then was able to do that was ridiculous. But, but what woke has done is it's completely changed the definition of racism on its head. So racism is something that's not just in institutions, but that all of us have got inside us.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  Uh, you know, that, that, well, when I say all of us, I mean, white people, that white people are born with this um sense of kind of inherent um superiority, uh, that we've got this white privilege. Um, we, and, and that we kind of need to be educated, have, have this kind of educated out of us from the moment in which, from the moment from which we're born. And like I say, I think that makes it very, very difficult for the people who are um just your kind of centrists. Or, you know, you're, you're kind of moderate campaigners and activists, because when the whole notion of what it means to be an anti-racist changes so fundamentally,

• 25:49Speaker 00

  it's, it's like, how do you then differentiate yourself within that? I mean, either you think babies are born racist or you don't. Uh, and I, I definitely don't, but, but that doesn't mean to say I don't think racism exists in some circumstances. It doesn't mean to say I don't think racism is a problem. It certainly doesn't mean to say it's not something I think should be challenged, where, where it does exist. But the more we start pointing the finger at babies as being a source of racism, the danger is you then actually fail to see the real um racism when it stares you in the face.

• 26:22Chris Williamson?

  What's happened with the shift from class to identity on the left?

• 26:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's a major, major factor of this. And this is again, another reason why I think it's so important that we challenge woke politics. So just that phrase that I was using there in discussing racism, white privilege. It kind of suggests that ideas around privilege have been linked to skin colour. You know, which is completely ridiculous for anybody who's grown up in a working class community, you know, who's struggling to make ends meet now. You know, that privilege is not a question of skin colour. Privilege is very much linked to social class. Whereas I think because the left in particular has really given up on working class people. As not just given up on them as a, as a force for change, but actually now is very quick to condemn working class people.

• 27:12Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that's happened?

• 27:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's something that's been going on for a long time now. I mean, probably since like the nineteen seventies, really as far back as that. And I think they look at how people are voted in elections, for example, like their own failure to be elected. Uh, other than obviously during the Blair era, you know, the Labour Party's not been electorally very successful in the UK. And rather than turning the spotlight inwards and thinking, well, why are we not appealing to the electorate? What's, what's wrong with the policies that we're putting forward? What's wrong with the ideas that we're putting forward? It's much easier to point the finger outwards and say, well, obviously we're brilliant.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  You lot are obviously thick and ignorant and racist and sexist and backward for not voting for us. And I think you see, right, like I say, right, dating back from the nineteen seventies, nineteen eighties. The left has just increasingly lost touch with the working class. I mean, and, and through its own failures. It, it's rather than trying to think about, you know, what, what's wrong with what, why are we not offering something aspirational? Something um that's exciting, a positive. Like really, to me, like the, the sentiment that, that I think all people share, but, but working class people in particular. Is this desire that you want a better life for yourself?

• 28:35Speaker 00

  If you have kids, you want your kids to have a better life than you had when you were growing up. You know, you you want the best for your kids. And to me, that's a really normal human instinct. And and like I said, the less you have, the more you want your kids to have a better life, the more you want a better life for yourself. But the left just seem completely incapable of tapping into that, you know, too often. That, I mean, if you look at the way they've bought, so I know the right have done this as well, but the left so much bought into the kind of like environmentalism. Um, the idea of of net zero, you know, really gone big down that line. And you can't at the same time say to people, you know, you've got to have less.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  And tap into the aspiration for people to want a better life, you know, the two things are fundamentally contradictory. But you look at, I mean, another thing happened this weekend was Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef. Uh, doing big protest outside Downing Street against the government, um, for the government's stopped. Uh, overturned its ban on supermarkets doing buy one, get one free deals on food. And Jamie Oliver, you know, is is there kind of like the revolutionary outraged? That poor people might be able to get food a little bit cheaper. In the middle of a cost of living crisis, rather than the left actually saying, yes, what's really important is that we do make food cheaper.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  Instead, you've got this idea that, you know, well, these people, they're so fat. They're so not in control of their own lives, they're just going to go out there and. Buy all this unhealthy food and cram their faces full of fat and become obese and unhealthy. When you've got that really contemptuous view of the working class, you, you know, you you're. Really looking at them in disgust, you know, you're not selling something that people actually want. So I think the left, then, having abandoned the working class in disgust. Has looked to different identity groups to provide them with a constituency. So it's much easier to think instead of looking to working class people.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  You know, let's let's try and focus on black people or transgender people or, you know, these different. Identity groups as a way of kind of trying to find some people you can still appeal to and make out like you're a really nice person in the process.

• 30:57Chris Williamson?

  Peter, the plebs are uprising. We don't know what to do. They're going to the supermarkets to buy too far. Rally Jamie Oliver. We'll get him in. He'll come and fix it. Jamie, get yourself out there. These poor people, these fat bastards. Let's go and get them sorted. Yeah, it is. It is so bizarre because remembering that working class cuts across the racial lines, right? So if you help people that are working class or underclass, you're helping black, white, Asian in the UK as well. A lot of Pakistani, a lot of Indian, a lot of Bangladeshi. And you think, okay, how's that not a better policy? It does, it just seems like a really stupid way of trying to, of signaling virtue whilst not

• 31:40Chris Williamson?

  actually doing anything that delivers it. The thing that surprises me is that the left has really sort of stuck at this point for so long, because at least in the UK and almost in the last US election, you know, so if Biden only really pipped it to the post, in the UK, it was a complete landslide. It was obvious that the left messaging didn't resonate with the electorate. And the bottom line is, your job in government should be, should be to actually make the country better, but in reality is to get elected. So it's kind of impressive that you are sticking to a rhetoric and a type of ideology that is so evidently unsuccessful in the one thing that you're sort of primarily here to do. You're sticking at that. You're sticking at this messaging which doesn't resonate.

• 32:22Chris Williamson?

  I mean, losing places like Ashington, which is not far away from where me and you were born, and was this Labour stronghold, you know, pit village miners, no one would be able to understand what the accents of the sort of thickest people on there. And you think, how would that flip, right? How would that flip to actually become a conservative constituency? And the finger gets pointed at these people and they say, these sort of idiot backyard mining town hicks, you know, these chavs in tracksuit bottoms that don't know what's good for them. And that's the preachiness that you see with the, let's rally Jamie Oliver, let's get him out there. These fat fucks everywhere. Like, that's the same sort of sense that I get. And even if that's not true, right? Even if it is

• 33:07Chris Williamson?

  the case that, um, Everybody that's putting forward these sort of progressive policies that focus on gender and race, even if they are coming from a good place, that's not how it's perceived, right? So either you, your messaging is way off base and your, your, um, the shop window is kind of a little bit ruined, or this is genuinely what you mean to do and you're a perverse idiot.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  No, absolutely. I mean, I think the truth is a bit of both for those things because it's, I mean, I think one thing is, you know, who, who is the Labour Party trying to appeal to now? And again, I'm saying the Labour Party, but I do think there's some strong elements of this in the Conservative Party as well. You know, I think they, they worry far too much about how something plays out on Twitter, for example. You know, when you look at somebody like Jess Phillips standing up in Parliament, giving her, um, gobby speeches, you know, you just get the sense that they're far more bothered about how many retweets and how many likes they're going to get for recording that, or whether people are going to say bad things about them on social media, or whether this is going to kind of appeal

• 34:12Speaker 00

  to their friends, essentially their, their middle class bubble. Will they get approval from, from the narrow, um, social bubble? And, and you, I mean, I think one thing that really shows this is the case is again, you know, I'm, I'm into my Venn diagrams this evening, but if you look at kind of the people who will make up the political journalists, the media class, academics, politicians, even the political class, you know, there's so many kind of overlaps between these. I mean, even look at kind of literal marriages between political journalists and politicians and, you know, who was best man at whose wedding?

• 34:54Speaker 00

  The kids go to the same school as each other. You know, these people hang around on sports days at their kids' schools, barbecues at the weekend, they live in the same, even in the same few streets in London, you know, never mind, um, anywhere bigger outside of that. See, they, they create these kind of bubbles for themselves and they become interested then in how this plays out in their bubble, rather than how this plays out with. The people who are likely to vote for them. I mean Brexit obviously is the number one example of this. I mean, I'm absolutely convinced that what's lost the Labour Party to the North is Keir Starmer, you know, as soon as he became the PM, you just, you know, sorry, as soon as he became

• 35:36Speaker 00

  the leader of the Labour Party, you just thought this guy is never, ever, ever going to be voted as PM because he was the architect behind Labour's decision to try and hold a second referendum, to try and overturn the referendum result. And really, the message that that was sending out to millions of voters in the North East of England and, you know, across the UK really, who voted Leave was, well, your vote counts for nothing. You know, we, we don't care how you voted. We're going to make you vote again. We're going to look for ways to overturn your vote. We're going to use the legal system to try and get around whatever, what, what you thought you were voting

• 36:20Speaker 00

  for. You were obviously too thick. You didn't know the consequences. We know better than you. And we're going to override it at any cost whatsoever. And people don't forget these things, you know, precisely because people are not thick. You know, they, they know that Keir Starmer played this role. They know what was meant, what he was meaning to do. And they know that he's never apologised for that or never, you know, really changed his mind on this. So yeah, I think, I think the Labour Party certainly under Keir Starmer have really got a long way to go.

• 36:52Chris Williamson?

  How do you think that all of this relates to sort of women and women's rights? I know that you've done work on feminism and the relationship between women and feminism in the past. How does all of this play into that situation?

• 37:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think in a number of ways. I mean, when I was writing about feminism five years ago, well, I mean, things have changed a lot in a very, very short space of time. So when I wrote my book, Women vs Feminism, Never occurred to me to think that you would need an introduction that was actually about defining what is a woman. You know, I just completely took it for granted that feminism was about women, was concerned with women, and everybody knew what a woman was. If I was writing that book again today, I think I would need to start with chapter one, page one. You know, feminism is about women and we have to say what a woman is. And I think that means, again, another way in which we've actually gone backward as a society. I don't know

• 37:51Speaker 00

  if you saw it, but it was in Manchester, not this weekend just gone, but the weekend before. Women were holding a protest around the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst.

• 38:01Chris Williamson?

  Was that where Posey Parker went and spoke?

• 38:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And you got transgender activists in, fully masked up, balaclavas, all dressed in black, kind of violently stopping these women from going to stand next to the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst.

• 38:20Chris Williamson?

  Who's Emmeline Pankhurst? Why is she important?

• 38:23Speaker 00

  Oh, sorry. So she was one of the key suffragettes. She was involved in fighting for votes for women, which obviously, like, goes without saying, is major, major step forward for women's rights. You know, these were kind of heroes. She's somebody who would be a personal hero of mine and changed the nature of politics. You know, by giving women the vote, allowed women to have their concerns dealt with in Parliament, taken seriously. You know, we wouldn't have had things like the Equal Pay Act. You know, all the important legislation that's enabled sexual equality would not have happened without the suffragettes

• 39:06Speaker 00

  and without women being able to have the vote. And yet then for these masked men, it seemed most of them were men, to be standing there, stopping women now celebrating. I mean, to me, it just turns the clock back on women's rights, potentially a hundred years. You know, if you're not allowed to say, we want to have single-sex spaces for women, you know, this is what it means to be a woman. When woman becomes this kind of unsayable swear word, almost, you know, you can't defend women's rights, you're left unable to do that. And this is, should be something that really, really worries us.

• 39:47Speaker 00

  But prior to that, though, something that really strikes me about feminism that ties into something that you were talking about earlier that I kind of missed, but I really wanted to come back to, when you were saying about the importance of class and how if you, if campaigners did just focus on class, they would actually end up improving the lives of a lot of Black and minority ethnic people. Because I think that's so true and such a really, really important point, because you look, a lot of the time, there is a correlation because of historical disadvantage, historical discrimination, you know, patterns of immigration that we've had into this country going back over many, many decades, where, you know,

• 40:29Speaker 00

  you look at the kind of Pakistani community around parts of Yorkshire, for example, really is very economically deprived. Now, you think if you did just focus on working class people, you would raise up the living standards, the job opportunities, the educational opportunities for people in those communities, whereas instead, what these woke activists do, which I think is so terrible with their focus and identity, is it's almost like they take those disadvantages, the disadvantages experienced by some women, by some Black and minority ethnic people, and they kind of take those disadvantages and they appropriate them for themselves. So they, they look at kind of what's a correlation, you know, Black

• 41:12Speaker 00

  people might be more likely to be in poverty, or, you know, women, there might be a gender pay gap. But that's not for all women. It's not, you know, you look at the women who work in the BBC, for example, as presenters, who have been bringing court cases for equal pay. You know, those women are hardly hard up, you know, they've got six-figure salaries, they're kind of doing all right, thank you very much. But the way they kind of talk about the gender pay gap, you think that they were the most disadvantaged people in society?

• 41:45Chris Williamson?

  What's the, what's the update on the gender pay gap at the moment?

• 41:48Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, it's very controversial. I mean, how do you define gender? No, I'm joking. But it depends. I mean, it's a how do you measure it? And this is the issue with it. So if you take an average pay gap, and this is the one that the campaigners always like to use, basically adding up all the money earned by men and dividing it by the number of men compared to all the money earned by women, dividing it by the number of women, you can get quite a big difference. You can get, I mean, between about twenty and fifteen percent pay gap, which is a lot lower, in historical terms is lower than it's ever been.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  But of course, that average figure ignores a lot of facts, like men and women don't always choose to go into the same jobs. They don't always do the same degrees or training courses. And particularly when women reach the age when they start having children, that's the point at which you see quite big differences, that women might go part time at work or might drop out of work altogether for a few years. And obviously, the way campaigners have it is that this is something which is forced upon women by a kind of prejudiced and discriminatory society. You know, there may be an element of truth in that because childcare is very expensive, so you end up making choices, you know, who's earning the most money at that point, and then you make a choice.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  But what it ignores is any element of women actually choosing, you know, it kind of says that no woman chooses, that she wants to take a year out, a couple of years out when she has children now. I mean, certainly, I did my children are grown up now, you know, they're a bit older now. But when I had two children, kind of under the age of three, you know, I did stop work for a couple of years, and then I went back very part time. So clearly, my pay fell at that point, you know. Clearly, if you don't work, you don't get paid, or if you work part time.

• 43:46Chris Williamson?

  That's your internalised patriarchal oppression that you've now, your Stockholm syndrome is coming back out of your mouth and leaking into your career aspirations. The fact that you decided to play the game that Men had made for you because no woman would choose to actually spend their time at home looking after their children because two three year old children and spending the only time that you're ever going to get with them, which now you can't because they're fully grown up. There's no reason that you would want to do that instead of putting in numbers onto a keyboard or writing articles for some company that you don't take any of the money home for.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  You know, you're right, clearly. I know it was a choice that I made. And I think, I think that the thing is you feminism almost pushes you into this narrative where it becomes easier to present yourself as a victim. It became a lot more socially acceptable. I know in my own circumstances to say, oh, well, the reason why I'm doing this is because the childcare is so expensive. And, you know, it's very difficult for times and everything. And actually, just owning the choice and just saying, you know, I've chosen to do this is is kind of made very difficult for you.

• 44:53Chris Williamson?

  Celebrating, celebrating motherhood seems like such an uncool and unpopular thing to do. And the only reason that any woman would choose it is because of their internalized patriarchal oppression. And that sucks. We're having this discussion. I was at the International Fitness Summit last year. Right. So you've got it was 60 40 girls to guys, maybe even more, maybe 70 30 girls to guys. And they were talking about the fact that women in the fitness industry, there's still sort of objectification of how they look of the way that they're presented. I was looking around the room and I was like, well, there's two to one outnumbered here with girls. The girls are putting their hands up and they're making insane amounts of money. And why is it that women are being paid this and so on and so forth? One of the guys just

• 45:37Chris Williamson?

  put his hand up and said, Well, what about women that actually want to be mothers? You're saying that it shouldn't be the case that women have to take time off that there should be more. I think it's Australia that has a way that you can alter the men's and women's time away from work and you can kind of share it overall. He said, Well, hang on, what, what if you just want that? What if that's something that you're looking forward to? Remembering as well that in the same breath, people will complain about the fact that it's almost impossible to raise a child on a one parent income so that both parents actually do need to work. And yet, if you have one parent that chooses not to work, that's somehow seen as making a suboptimal decision because of internalized patriarchy.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  No, absolutely. And again, you know, I think a lot of these decisions are quite class based as well, and that's not given credit for because ultimately, if your job is going to sit in a nice office, you're a nice warm dry, you're sitting in front of a laptop, you can mess about on social media for a good part of the day, you've got coffee on demand and interesting colleagues that you can gossip to whenever you like, actually doing that in preference to being at home struggling with toddlers. I mean, it's not easy. I've got to be honest, it's probably preferable, you know, and also you've got that status of saying you're going out to your busy job. Whereas if your job is kind of being a carer, physically demanding, low paid, working in a supermarket,

• 47:07Speaker 00

  long antisocial hours, you are going to have more status, more control over your life by being a mum. But again, what feminism can do often is look down on working class women who've made that decision, you know, for, rather than kind of looking at why people have made this decision, it just kind of comes across as very snobby that they've made the wrong decision.

• 47:31Chris Williamson?

  As a bloke as well, I really love the idea of being able to say, I've spent most of my twenties and so far most of my thirties as well, working, building up businesses, accumulating wealth, investing really, really smartly. I didn't update, I haven't updated my car for seven years. I really like the idea of being able to give the gift to my future wife that, look, if you want to take time away from work for three, five years, that's fine. I'll go do my thing. I still want to spend as much time with the kids as possible. But I've constructed a life that facilitates my future wife and the mother of my children to be able to go and do that. And then for me to be told that that's what? Me oppressing or restricting the career opportunity of my, I mean, my future

• 48:16Chris Williamson?

  wife is going to be incredibly well balanced. So this isn't going to be a problem. But my point being that I have a bunch of friends, a bunch of guy friends who are older than me, who have done this. And they're so proud, right? That's such a sense of fatherly protector, provider, presider, pride for them, right? Like, it fills a, and I can't think of anything that would be better than that than coming home and knowing that all of the hard work that you've put in, not just now, not right now. But that you did from the degree at university, from all of the hours of applying to jobs or starting your own thing, or uncertainty or insecurity, all of that stuff has led you to the point now where you can create a family life, which is like the one that everybody says they want it to be.

• 49:00Chris Williamson?

  We want it to be like the 60s and the 70s, where you could achieve on a single parent household's income. And you go, okay, if I've worked really, really hard and managed to get myself into a fortunate position where I can do that, why wouldn't I? Oh, right. That's because it kind of highlights that not everybody's allowed to do this. And there's disparities and inequality.

• 49:19Speaker 00

  But I think what's really important in what you've just said, you know, right at the beginning, when you're saying, you know, you would like to be able to make this as an offer, you know, you're talking about the conversation you would have with your poor future man, future wife, you know. But that's the key thing for me, you know, you're not saying, and you must stay at home, I'm ordering you to stay at home. You're talking about a dialogue, you're talking about a conversation that may not take place at some point in the future. But to me, that is like how the vast majority of people I know run their lives, you know, it's a relationship, it's a partnership, it's not one person saying you must do this, and another person saying, I will only do this,

• 50:03Speaker 00

  you know, it's a negotiation. And obviously, everybody's making these negotiations in different circumstances, in different contexts. But I think the problem with a lot of feminism and identity politics more broadly, to come back to the book, is it pitches people against each other. It suggests that, you know, what's good for men is bad for women, and the other way around, you know, that we're we're kind of locked into some competition, one against the other, that, you know, if I want to get a job, I've kind of got to get one over on my husband, or he's constantly trying to get one over on me. And actually, that's not the way it is in real life at all. You know, you've got families together, struggling through often, you know, trying to work out how to bring up children,

• 50:47Speaker 00

  how to make ends meet financially. But they're doing this as a conversation in partnership with each other and and not as a competition.

• 50:55Chris Williamson?

  I like the idea of thinking about the fact that not all people are in a position where the most important thing in their life or their sense of purpose actually comes from their career. You know, that's for me right now, that is the the thing that I have. But you you're totally correct. For a ton of working class people, what is it? Uh, seventy percent of people are uh not engaged with their job and fifteen percent of people are actively disengaged. That's eighty five percent of people are either unengaged or actively disengaged with the work that they do. So you're talking about only fifteen percent of people, and I think this is across men and women, who actually really care and love the work that they do. And you go, okay, so you're going to deny this person the ability to take something which may give them way more fulfillment because of an arbitrary decision

• 51:40Chris Williamson?

  that you've made about the fact that raising children is somehow seen as lesser. And also talking about the the like adversarial nature that is seen now from any identity versus any other identity, it seems to me that women are fighting a war on two fronts. They're fighting one against what it means to be a woman, and then against real and imagined patriarchal oppression and systemic, and this still is. And this is the thing, this I I always get to this when I'm having this conversation. It's so easy to tumble into woke bashing and this ridiculousness that's coming from the left and progressives with blue hair screaming on the street and gluing themselves to the road and stuff like that. And there's always a bit in the back of my mind where I go, all of the sympathy that

• 52:24Chris Williamson?

  should be focused toward people that really, really need it here is being forgotten because there are these very loud idiots in front of them that is super easy to mock. And I I have to constantly check myself. I really dislike the period in which I find myself watching too much right wing content. If I find myself watching too much reactionary right wing stuff.

• 52:47Chris Williamson?

  It always makes me feel, it's like icky, it makes me feel a bit icky, it makes me feel reactionary, adversarial, defensive, uncompassionate, all of these things.

• 52:59Speaker 00

  No, I agree completely, I really, really agree with you. But you know, I, I actually blame the woke left for that, because I think the more you get the message to see racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, everywhere, you know, in every little interaction, to go back to the babies we were talking about earlier, you know, when, when we're told that these things are everywhere, it kind of becomes nowhere, you know, and, and you look at, then, then you, you kind of, like I said, when, when it's everywhere, you, you kind of become blind to the real instances, that's one thing. But I think the other thing is, it, it creates,

• 53:43Speaker 00

  particularly, and I'm going to say perhaps something sexist now, but I think perhaps particularly in young men, and I'm talking kind of teens, early twenties, you know, where there's like a shock value, a bit like kind of farting loudly in the library, or, you know, saying fuck off to your mum for the first time, or something like that, you know, where you feel like you're living in this quite oppressive culture, where you've got to watch what you say constantly, you know, you, you, you're being monitored all the time. And so kind of going to quite an extreme anti-woke position becomes a form of rebellion, it actually becomes a bit of a kind of shock value attractive thing to do. And I don't

• 54:25Speaker 00

  agree with that, and I don't think it's helpful politically. But at the same time, I can kind of get why they do this. So if you look at students in universities, for example, I think universities is unfortunately nowadays, some of the most censorious places, where you've not just got the kind of Like you said, the kind of blue haired people going around banning speakers or getting petitions to stop people coming on to campus. But then you get the reaction, but you've also got this, just a very strong sense of what you can and can't say, you know, even when it's not protest, there's this sense that some views are just not to be said in a seminar room or, you know, on university.

• 55:09Speaker 00

  So then you look at students who kind of want to protest against this. And so they, they think, you know, right, who's the most radical, controversial person we can invite to come and speak, you know, let's go to the real experience.

• 55:26Chris Williamson?

  Let's resurrect Milo Yiannopoulos and bring him back to, no one's seen him for five years, but we'll bring him back to have him on campus. Yeah, I know what you mean. I mean, that's just troll mentality overall, right? That's the sort of troll sphere of the internet, people saying that which is unacceptable or unbelievable. And this has been the case ever since, like, was it Steak and Cheese dot com that was people who would be losing fingers in videos and, you know, all of the stuff that would be forwarded around on BlackBerry Messenger a decade and a half ago. And it's just the new version of that. But because the Overton Windows come in so much, your ability to step outside of it has become easier and easier.

• 56:03Chris Williamson?

  I don't know, I think it's, it really is, it makes me uncomfortable to think about the fact that virtuous social justice, like genuine social justice campaigns have been hijacked, weaponized and then caricatured by people that have seen something that they think they can kick around as a convenient political football. And I would be, I would be very, very pissed if I was somebody on the moderate left. And I don't, I don't know what the solution is for that.

• 56:31Speaker 00

  No, I mean, I think one thing is just to always ask, you know, who's benefiting from this, you know, whatever the particular campaign might be, who's gaining from this? So you look at so much of the kind of critical race theory training that goes on, for example. Well, you've got some people, particularly in the US, but to a less extent in the UK as well, who are really raking it in, you know, on, off the back of, say, diversity training programs in the workplace.

• 57:02Speaker 00

  Who, you know, I would describe as kind of race entrepreneurs who claim to have some special insight that other people lack. And like I said, I think, I think the problem is it, it does become genuinely, I think you're, you're really touching upon something here because I, I think it does become genuinely very, very difficult then to be a kind of more political moderate in this, in this climate. I mean, goes back to what we were saying earlier about the way even being an anti racist to me, this is why I'm so opposed to woke. Cause to me, it's just racism rehabilitated. To me, the, the whole kind of debate around transgender is sexism rehabilitated.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  You know, it's all the old fashioned prejudices that, that all my kind of childhood and youth, you know, um. We were talking earlier about Stockton Sixth Form College, you know, where, where we both went to at very, very different times. But, you know, it was at Stockton Sixth Form College, I picked up a leaflet one day, um, from some people outside the gates there. It was the Youth Rights Campaign, turned out to be the, a kind of junior wing of militant, um, very kind of big in the Labour Party in the kind of nineties and early nineties, late eighties, early nineties. And from there, you know, went to the Socialist Worker Party, um. Revolutionary Communist Party was where I ended up. You know, my political background, very, very much on the left.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  But it's like every principle that I had that was a left wing principle about the importance of free speech, for example, about the importance of transcending race, I believe that there's one race, the human race. About the ability, about the idea that you, you didn't buy into gender stereotypes, you know. Women didn't have to wear pink dresses, but to be a stereotypical kind of feminine woman, you know, you could dress how you liked, but still be a woman. It just seems like all those really backward ideas that I was challenging when I was young and revolutionary and, and left wing have, have become completely flipped three hundred and sixty degrees.

• 59:08Speaker 00

  They now mean the absolute fundamental opposite to what they did twenty five, thirty years ago. And I think that makes it really difficult for people who want to campaign genuinely for social justice nowadays.

• 59:21Chris Williamson?

  Rehabilitated racism and sexism masquerading as compassion.

• 59:25Chris Williamson?

  That's it. Like, that's exactly what's happening. Do you think that there's a little bit of a moral panic on the right as well about this? So I look at the cultural commentators, the people that are crushing it on YouTube, the people, the sort of stories that we see. And I understand how it's sort of red meat for the mob. If you have another ridiculous, woke headline about something that's insane. But how much is this actually capturing the things that we really care about? Like, it doesn't seem to me that real world change that affects actual people appears to be happening. And I think that a lot of my moderate friends on the left would say, look, the moral panic that you see that's allowed from the blue haired people on the left

• 1:00:06Chris Williamson?

  is equivalently being reacted to by the people on the right, that they're saying that all of these policies around woke and transgenderism and racism and sexism and stuff like that, they're not actually trickling down to sort of grow any corn in anywhere that's real. It just exists kind of like arbitrarily or culturally within media and within some higher circles of academia. But it's never actually hitting anything. Do you think that there's a moral panic on the right about this stuff too?

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, I kind of think both the things that you've said there, like, two different things are actually both true, which is probably not helpful. So I'll tease out what I mean by that. So I do think there is a danger of moral panic. And clearly, a lot of people nowadays, as we were talking earlier, are into the social media clicks. And I think that's definitely a thing on the right as much as on the left. And I mean, I know I run my own website, Kio, our little think tank. And I know if I publish something with trans or woke in the headline, you know, the number of hits it will get will go through the roof. And I do consciously rein myself in because I think, you know, I can't just go around kind of writing about trans or

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  woke every week. It would be an easy thing to fall into. And if you were addicted just to getting those clicks, then you could do that, you know, that's what you would do. And it's kind of a cheap thrill, if you like, it becomes a way of kind of appearing to have a lot of bravado in a way that I think I agree with you is unhelpful. But, you know, at the same time,

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  Just when I, every time I say to myself, you know, now calm down, don't get carried away, don't inflame moral panics, you open the newspaper and there's some story, like again, exactly the one that you kicked off with, you know, about the police having this training, being told to embrace the word woke, where you just think, oh, for God's sake, you know, could we not just stick on the fighting crime bit? You know, why do you have to go down this? Why do you have to provide the fodder for the next headline writer to come along and cry out, you know, the police awoke? Of course, people are going to say the police awoke if you're there saying as the police trainer, oh, we really want our officers to embrace

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  the word woke. You know, why provide this, um, pour fuel on the fire, if you like, for the extremists?

• 1:02:32Chris Williamson?

  There's an ever escalating game of tit for tat that's going on here. And I don't know how you get this to stop, right? I, I noticed this, uh, two, two years ago, I did this really short video, it was about three minutes long. And it was looking at, um, would you have had the reaction of BLM and stuff had Charlottesville not happened? Then BLM, would you have had January 6th? Then January 6th with whatever. And you just see this constant sense that because a thing was done, we are justified to do the same thing in the opposite direction. And this exactly occurs online where the right wing commentators, they feel justified because they say, look, here is a ridiculous story about the police

• 1:03:15Chris Williamson?

  that's going on. If we don't push back against this, then we're seceding ground to people who are trying to take over the lexicon, or they're trying to take over institutions or academia. So this is the weapon that we have to go back, back to them. And you go, okay, well, who's the first mover here? Because is it, you know, chicken and egg? Is it the fault of the news stories? Is it the fault of the policy? Is it the fault of the right wing commentators for actually promulgating that? I mean, we saw this with Jordan Peterson with the Sports Illustrated cover. The most number of clicks that Sports Illustrated has ever got probably came from the fact that he highlighted it. So you go, okay, so who's at fault here? Is it the fault of the people that put the policy out? Is it the fault of the people that bring more attention to it by pushing back? Would

• 1:03:59Chris Williamson?

  it be better to not push back? All of these questions, I think, are really interesting. But to me, it doesn't. It's definitely not getting us anywhere. It's one of the reasons why conservatism generally just isn't very exciting. I don't know why, as a young person, you would be enthralled by conservatism at the moment, because you go, well, what are you, what are you proposing? What, when was the last time that you actually proposed anything that wasn't you playing defence? It's permanently the right playing defence and the ref, the left proposes, the left proposes something crazy, online, policy, transgendered, new words, new lexicon, whatever, and then the right plays defence against it. No one's making progress here.

• 1:04:38Speaker 00

  No, completely. I mean, I, I, I think one way to look at this, though, is to ask who really has the power in our society. You know, what do the people who hold the most powerful positions, what do they think? And, you know, I think it is the case for me that woke ideas have gained ground within schools, within universities, within the civil service, you know, that they are the powerful people nowadays. They are the, the source of influence in society, not just kind of because it's where most of the middle class are at, kind of, or lots of the middle class

• 1:05:22Speaker 00

  ideologically, but they're actually the people who really wield power. But the way they do it is, is very discreet, you know, and they try to, because of the victim status thing that we were talking about earlier, they try to deny the power that they possess, you know, that they will claim to actually be victims, not to be powerful. But I think what that means then is that when they engage in a particular act, for example, a cultural act, for example, renaming a street, renaming the school, removing a statue, contextualising a statue, or taking the national anthem, or whatever it is, out of the Last Night at the Proms, you know, that for them is just like

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  a neutral, common sense, just a kind of under the radar, progressive thing to do. And then, when there's a reaction to it, because you're, you're absolutely right, you know, there is always a reaction to these things, they then...

• 1:06:22Speaker 00

  Point the finger and say you're starting a culture war, you know, how dare you insist that this statue stays in place, how dare you insist that we maintain Royal Britannia, you know, or or continue to fly the Union Jack, you you're starting a culture war. Well, they only talk about culture wars when it stops going their way, you know, if they can do these things under the radar, if they can just give it a veneer of common sense, you know, why wouldn't you um stop flying the Union Jack, why wouldn't you remove this statue, then then they they would much rather do that without anybody challenging or questioning what they're doing, and they only call culture war when they get challenges to that.

• 1:07:05Chris Williamson?

  What would you say to the people that argue those are not big, important decisions? That, yes, maybe this might be something that's happening, and yeah, it might be a little bit silly, but in the grand scheme of things, that doesn't matter, and this proves that there is a moral panic on the right about stuff that's going on on the left?

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  You see, I I think these things do matter, and they don't, they're not just because, like, I don't think the Union Jack's like the most amazing thing ever, I don't know the words to Royal Britannia, you know, I'd struggle beyond the first few lines of God Save the Queen, or whatever it is, you know, I don't think these things are important in their own terms, but I think I think the debates are very, very important, because particularly with the cost of living crisis, you know, spiraling inflation, there are a lot of people who are saying, you know, well, now we'll have the time to get back to real politics, this is what's really important to people, if you don't have enough money to heat their houses, put food on the table for their kids at the end of the month, you

• 1:08:07Speaker 00

  know, this is when real politics starts to to um dig in, and we'll forget all about statues and Royal Britannia and flags, we'll get back to the real stuff, but the problem is, you know, you you can't do that when all these cultural battles are still what's dominating politics, because in order to actually, as we were saying earlier, make the case for people having more money in their pockets. You can only do that when you've got a strong, powerful, working-class voice. You know, when you've got people in communities in the North East, you know, who are not in your London bubble, getting their views heard about what they want, how they want to run their lives, what's important to them. When you've got a position where you're in, when you're in a situation where

• 1:08:52Speaker 00

  all the cultural values of working-class people are being completely trashed at every available opportunity. And that really means trashing working-class people themselves. You can't then turn around and say, oh, but, you know, economically, what, what are they going to get? A few crumbs off the table, a bit of charity. Oh, we'll make a few more donations to the food bank. Actually, you know, that's not what working-class people want. They want to be able to earn money. Fair day's wage for a fair day's work, you know, they don't want pity. They don't want charity. They don't want food banks. But, but whilst you've got this contempt, this disdain for the culture of a working class, all you're ever going to get is at very, very best pity.

• 1:09:36Speaker 00

  And, and to me, pity is only one small step from contempt.

• 1:09:41Chris Williamson?

  I think you're wrong. I think that what the working-class people really want is for office aircon to no longer be sexist to women. So I found this article in Newsweek that said, "A study on office temperature complaints has suggested that women are less likely to be comfortable with their workplace temperature than men are." Did you see this?

• 1:09:57Speaker 00

  I've seen it.

• 1:09:58Chris Williamson?

  Uh, it found that a phenomenon dubbed overcooling during the summer in which air conditioning systems cool down more rooms more than is necessary may lead to women in particular feeling uncomfortable. The study concluded there is a need to rethink the approach to air conditioning office buildings as a result of its finding. The US study involved data from lots of people. The tweets were limited to the US and said, "The study alone found that 38% of people who said they were dissatisfied with office temperature, 64% of them were women." So you've got disproportionate office, air conditioning offices. This is the real coalface of the issues that we're coming up against.

• 1:10:35Speaker 00

  Well, the good news is we've got the perfect solution to this. Uh, we just don't have people working in offices anymore. The middle classes now work from home or work from home whenever they feel like it and want to. And I think there's a growing class divide now, um, you know, given that we've been talking about class here. Um, there's a growing class divide between the middle class people who can choose to work wherever they can sit with their laptop. You know, they can put the washing on, be there when the children get home from school, answer the door to the Amazon deliveries. Um, you know, that they've got, can create this really comfortable life for themselves, saving money on commuting, saving money on the, the cups of coffee.

• 1:11:17Speaker 00

  Whereas you've got a working class who actually still needs to leave the house to go to work. Um, who actually, if, you know, again, to use it. Examples chosen at random of working in a care home, working in a supermarket, working as a delivery driver. You know, you, you can't do those things working from home, that's the bottom line. But, but what's really interesting, I think, is how the Labour Party is on the side of the working from home. People, it's on the side of the laptop classes. The Labour Party is there talking about the importance of quality of life and how we mustn't rush people back to the offices. Um, absolutely scathing of the fact that Jacob Rees-Mogg has gone around leaving notes on people's desks, saying you should get back to the office.

• 1:11:59Speaker 00

  I mean, sod the fact that people, you know, waiting weeks and weeks for a passport, missing holidays, missing funerals of relatives abroad. Um, people who are wanting to work as truck drivers, can't get the paperwork signed off, can't get the, um, driving licences that they require. You know, and so I think we've created this really, I think, the whole kind of COVID and pandemic experience the past two years has massively exacerbated. The class divide, but it's also really shown us where the allegiances of the Labour Party are nowadays. And they're not with working class people, they're with the laptop people. And, and they're using woke as a way of kind of covering up for this. They're using woke to pretend that they're still virtuous and on the side of the victim.

• 1:12:44Speaker 00

  And really, like I say, they're on the side of the elite.

• 1:12:48Chris Williamson?

  Joanna Williams, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do, where should they go?

• 1:12:53Speaker 00

  Well, I'm on Twitter at JoeWilliams293 and I write a weekly column for Spiked, so definitely check out Spiked every day, but you'll find me there at least once a week.

• 1:13:05Chris Williamson?

  Thanks, Jo, I appreciate you.

• 1:13:07Speaker 00

  Pleasure, real pleasure, you know, you've really put me on the spot this evening, but in a very, very good way, thank you.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd.

• 1:13:18Speaker 03

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me.

• 1:13:23Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Ravenant.

• 1:13:30Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:13:38Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd, rated R, under 17 out of 10 without parent.