CAN the Government’s new pushback on ‘woke’ work? Can Conservative ministers rid us of the doctrines centred around critical race theory and gender ideology that have taken such an insidious hold of our public institutions?
There are signs that they are trying. After years of kowtowing to anti-science LGBT ideologues, the Department for Education has quietly announced a change of heart on the teaching of Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) in schools, as I reported recently.
The DfE has told schools that ‘materials which suggest that non-conformity to gender stereotypes should be seen as synonymous with having a different gender identity should not be used and you should not work with external agencies or organisations that produce such material’.
On race too, we are hearing new noises from the Government. With virtually every public institution metaphorically or actually ‘taking the knee’ in a show of collective guilt about historic and current racism, we suddenly see the Minister for Equalities, Kemi Badenoch, stepping up to challenge this.
In a powerful speech in Parliament last week, she said: ‘This government stands unequivocally against critical race theory . . . we do not want to see teachers teaching their white pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt . . . any school that teaches these elements of critical race theory as fact or which promotes partisan political views . . . without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views is breaking the law.’
At last. Why has this taken so long? One answer is that the Conservatives are not immune from wokeness or, perhaps, the desire to appear woke.
‘It now became the interest of men to appear what they really were not,’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau said. ‘To be and to seem became two totally different things; and from this distinction sprang insolent pomp and cheating trickery, with all the numerous vices that go in their train.’
Many Tories still seem to think there is merit in appearing woke. Sadly, some are woke through and through. But some are coming to their senses.
The problem they face is the sheer scale of institutional capture that must be undone. Here’s but one example of it. Though 99 per cent of the British public would not have known that Wednesday, October 20, was International Pronouns Day (determined or funded by whom is not revealed on the website), our public institutions certainly did.
Its heavy promotion by the various LGBTQ and Pride organisations did not miss its targets. Our NHS tweeted its loyalty and our police confirmed their indoctrination.
Our BBC was without doubt the worst offender, with its Bitesize education arm – aimed wholly at children – tweeting its support. The anger provoked by this was such that the tweet now seems to have been removed.
An illustration on the website showed people of different sexes sharing a changing room. In a school context, that undermines the very notion of safeguarding. The pictures were of adults, though this is material aimed at kids. And the ‘she/her’ in the middle picture was surely a man? What? How?
Given that the BBC has removed the tweet and is clearly aware of the anger, it’s alarming that all the content remains behind the scenes.
Click through and you’ll see that the BBC goes straight in with a discussion about ‘non-binary celebrities’. And – what a surprise – it has teamed up with the LGBT lobby group Stonewall to create this pronoun guide.
The website tells children: ‘Non-binary is an umbrella term for people who don’t fit comfortably into “male” or “female” categories.’
What are these people talking about? Male and female categories aren’t about comfort! They’re descriptive categories of who we are: bodily sexed (but spiritually free). XX and XY.
However, according to the BBC, these are the pronouns our kids should become familiar with: Ne (Ne/nem/nir), Ve (Ve/vis/vir), Ze (Ze/zem/zir), plus a set of pronouns known as ‘spivak’ (ey, em, eir).
Where is the licence for the BBC to make such stuff and spout such nonsense to confuse our children, apparently with the deliberate intention of indoctrinating them?
One of the most concerning Bitesize statements is: ‘Another good thing to do to make people feel included is to normalise using non-gendered language in your everyday conversations. For example, until you have a chance to learn their gender and preferred pronouns, try not to use gendered language.’
So here we have the BBC, under the guise of a ‘constructed’ International Pronoun Day, telling children to change their language from here on in, and not to assume that the boy in front of them is a boy.
Before taking down the tweet altogether in the face of outrage, the BBC initially reposted it, but with our ability to reply switched off – our national broadcaster blocking any dissent.
Political commentator James Lindsay has written: ‘Once wokeness is allowed to enter and stay in an organisation or community, it will increasingly suck up all the time and attention of employees/members away from their original founding mission and core values, eventually corrupt or replace them, demand more bureaucracy and censorship, and establish constant internal division and fear.’
Surely this applies to the BBC? It applies to those Bitesize employees who decided to promote this concocted day, those who prepared the material, approved the budget, arranged the meetings, wrote the tweet and signed off the whole thing.
We must all continue to object to this dangerous indoctrination of our children in the loudest possible terms to our MPs, in the same way the lobby concerned about transgender trends is challenging the NHS.
One thing is for sure. We should not be paying the BBC to produce this propaganda.
