I might be woke. — Yeah I mean, obviously too woke.
Can we just like finish the interview now? That's a lot easier.
You can't turn on the TV without being told: the woke mob has taken over.
Woke culture is garbage. Woke culture is just the worst.
Don't make yourself and your attempt to virtue signal
more of a victim than the actual people who are being victimised.
As people with opposing views clash online,
we hear that people are outraged, silenced or cancelled.
There's a culture and an atmosphere on the left which
seeks to shut down debate on topics which
throws the word bigger and racist and xenophobe around like it's going out of fashion.
Bbut how did we get to this point and
what the origins of woke and the backlash against it in the UK?
Freedom dies when moral anarchy takes over.
Their fear is that the dam's gonna break and then what was once seen not
acceptable becomes acceptable and then it gets further and further and further
and before you know it, it's the last days of the Roman empire.
Hello, come in. Sorry, mind the cat.
Absolute nightmare! Come on get down.
Let's have a cup of tea, shall we?
The wokest person online?
It's not a word that I would ever embrace because it was a word popularised
by black people in America to talk about heightened consciousness and awareness
of issues around them but also it's then just been used as a pejorative,
negative term by people who often, I suppose in my mind,
just have a problem with the onward
march of the rights of minorities which is just a long-running saga.
I wanna see why is it any different from basically
what we've always had. I want to understand what is aggravating
about where I stand on this. I'm going to learn,
you know, learn myself what am I missing, what's driving people
who see woke as dangerous, as a menace.
I'm going to learn what is it about it, I want to see what makes it tick.
When looking at the backlash against woke in the UK,
we have to start with Mary Whitehouse.
Freedom dies when moral anarchy takes over. That is our message. Let us get it out.
The self-appointed moral referee railing against
a rapidly changing society, she mobilised an army of housewives who believed the
BBC was the cultural indicator for
everything that was going wrong.
Hiya! You are Sarah. — I am!
I'm Owen, nice to meet you. — Nice to meet you.
This is the Mary Whitehouse collection.
It is! Yes!
Mary was a diligent archivist and offered her a collection of letters,
petitions and newspaper clippings which spanned decades
to the university of Essex in Colchester.
Oh, wow! There's a lot of letters. So read this out: 22nd of March, BBC1
programme are you being served homosexual character and it was
transmitted at 7:30. Gays on television at 7:30, Jesus ...
So basically there's a mix of objections ranging from
innuendo, sex education, fellatio, a gay character and communism.
I think I really am Mary Whitehouse's sort of dream character.
In 1977, Mary infamously brought a case of blasphemous libel
against gay news for a controversial poem that they published.
Oh, I can see already why she's not happy. So you've got basically
love between a Roman centurion and Jesus Christ.
There's a lot going on here.
'As they took him from the cross the centurion took him in my arms,
the tough, lean body of a man no longer young,
beardless, breathless but well hung. The shaft still thought ...'
Just imagining Mary Whitehouse reading this ...
I'm surprised she survived. — Her glasses just sprung off her face.
I would imagine today
that would cause a bit of a storm ...
Absolutely.
The editor, Dennis Lemon was fined 500 pounds and given a nine month suspended jail sentence.
He says, 'Mrs Whitehouse is not an evil
woman but a misguided evangelist and I don't
think she represents anywhere near as many people as she claims she does
and small groups in the powerful censorship lobby just don't represent
anyone but themselves.'
The conviction was later quashed on appeal.
Later on in sort of subsequent issues, they actually had pins that you could buy,
sort of as a fundraiser that said, 'gay news fights on.'
And it was a photograph of Mary Whitehouse.
Because she was fighting her political battle with her loyal
supporters but of course the people she was up against, at the time of a
marginalised and frankly widely despised minority in the 60s
70s, but they had their supporters as well. — Absolutely.
And she was their hate figure.
Over the time, I think she ended up to be a caricature of outbreak.
Four decades on, the struggle for minority rights continues
and one of Mary Whitehouse's original targets, the BBC,
is still at the heart of the culture wars.
The most recent charge is that it's a den pact full of left-wing comedians.
So, I am now looking up some videos from the comedian Geoff Norcott who is
a right of center comedian. Let's have a look.
Am I too woke?
Yeah, I mean, obviously too woke and the truth is, right,
is I'm not, like, anti-woke or such, I'm anti unworkable ideas
or [ __ ] ideas, you know? And unfortunately a lot of those to me
do seem to come from that area of discourse and
it's another name for something that's been around a while which is like right
on progressive, you know, social justice warriors, snowflakes,
it keeps morphing, it's still the same sentiment.
How has woke gone too far? What kind of examples ...?
Well, I suppose over the last few years a good example would be Winston Churchill, right?
For a very, very long time, a lot of people's favourite Briton and
then it seemed to, for most people, particularly
who are outside the social media domain, that overnight he's a toxic figure,
you know, he's racist and what happens then is a
lot of people think, well, you know, I really like Winston Churchill does that
mean I'm a racist?
It's too quick to form a very binary view of
something quite complicated.
It strikes me that a lot of people from minorities with a platform, when they speak out
about racism, you know, they often then get
a deluge of really quite vile stuff, they'll get death threats,
rape threats ... If we're gonna have this discussion
about people who think woke's gone too far,
to do it in a way without them getting piled up without often quite vicious abuse ...
Oh yeah, but that's my view as somebody
that believes in free speech is that people should be able to express all opinions,
you know, without losing their jobs.
It's worrying to me the idea that somebody that works
in a job that's perceived more left-wing would be concerned about even saying
that they were coming to see my show.
You know, we went to the archives ... University of Essex
of Mary Whitehouse and it was interesting reading the correspondence ...
She didn't like the fact ...
Homosexuality appeared on TV or the radio and a lot of people, they were scared.
It's that fear of ... — It's really interesting for me that
you've mentioned ... I don't think that being suspicious of ...
Or certainly having reservations about woke culture
is for me has anything to do with minority, it's not fear of minorities,
it's simply about a way of understanding
people that's trying to move so fast, it, like, gets hot housed on social media
and, you know, conclusions can be reached in a very short amount of time.
I mean, you mentioned Mary Whitehouse, that's the irony.
Is that, to me, certainly some of the debate coming
out of woke discourse sounds brutish in a way, you know?
It's probably according way too much power to language than actually exists.
I don't think it's as clear cut as just being left versus right.
For the right, it's a useful political approach because it
forces the left on more defensive grounds
and it often can cause a split between the sorts of people who are attracted to
the less economic message but are frightened
about social change.
Paul Embery, like me, is someone who backs the Labour party but he believes that woke culture has
been fundamentally damaging to the left and to its success.
Am I too woke?
Are you too woke? — Yeah, am I too woke?
Well, I wouldn't want to make it personal but people who are now described as woke,
on virtue signalers, are generally people
who like to gain by expressing a particular fashionable,
moral or political opinion, often I've got no experience or no
interest in grassroots political campaigning and organising
and think that, you know, going on Twitter and sending a tweet condemning
someone for expressing an unfashionable view somehow, you know,
takes the place of proper debate and proper argument.
The people who are going on about how woke the left are and how they're obsessed
with these issues, it strikes me spend far more time,
far more time speaking about it that the lefters.
With respect, that's rubbish.
I think that it's a reaction to much of the comments and much of the drive for some of these
fringe issues that's coming from people on the left but it hasn't come
out of a clear blue sky, you know? People didn't wake up and say, you just create
this thing called woke and rail against it, people now say,
well that's offensive as if that is the moment that debate should shut down.
The minute someone says, 'I'm offended', it means you are inherently wrong and
the debate should go no further. — I mean, these claims have always been made.
It's this idea of you can't say anything
anymore which was a cliche in the 1990s ... Political correctness gone mad.
I mean, these things have always been said.
Well, they may have always been said, but the reality is now they're having an effect.
Both Geoff and Paul talk about people being cancelled for expressing socially conservative opinions.
But what happens on the other side?
Those deemed to be too woke or too progressive?
Hello! How are you?
Professor Priyamvada Gopal found herself at the center
of a firestorm after a white lives matter banner was flown over Burnley stadium.
I tweeted 'white lives don't matter
as white lives' meaning quite clearly that it wasn't whiteness that ought to
give life's value. I didn't think much about it,
I went off and I logged back into Twitter a few hours later,
and it was just volumes of hate mail
and what you see in this dossier and it comes with a content warning
is explicit rape threats, the n-word, the p-word, other racist slurs ...
Yeah, I mean, here's this one I won't read it all out but, you know, 'listen you
ugly cow worshipping something that baits in [ __ ] and pisses in the river of
the Ganges'.
'White lives are the only ones that matter.'
How would you categorise it? What is this phenomena?
So there's a real eagerness, ironically, to claim the mantle of victimhood,
to paint the political right or a white man for instance
as the real victims of woke cultural left-wing, communist, socialist warriors.
What is that? What is the dynamic there?
The idea is that any concession of absolute power
is equivalent to becoming oppressed and to losing all rights and privileges so
it's a kind of offense' defense if you like that the wall
should not be breached even a little bit
because we will make such a song and dance about it
and silence you by abuse and threats
that far from the social order changing, we will not even give an inch.
Mary Whitehouse clearly saw there was a culture war as
she saw it going on and she felt that she was on the losing side,
I mean, although ... I don't know what do you think?
Culture wars are routinely declared
by the right and they are declared when the right feels itself
or thinks itself or believes itself to be on the back foot
from a series of claims for justice. If you think about the world as a series
of pushing back against oppression,
then culture wars have been with us from the dawn of time.
Either that or culture wars are completely
made up whenever it is suitable to make it up in order to discredit a legitimate opposition.
The battle between the socially conservative
and the socially progressive,
those now called woke, certainly isn't new.
But it's louder and more aggressive than it's been fuelled by the
hot house of social media and escalated by political upheavals.
But is it really a culture war?
It's hard not to conclude that the most intense moments are yet to come.