The Big Word of recent years has been woke. It’s a lovely word, meaning that one is alert to racial prejudice and discrimination, as well as describing someone who is empathetic, educated and enlightened. I am, out and proud, 100% woke. If you call me woke, I see it as a compliment. But hang on: according to the polling company YouGov: “One in ten Britons (10%) see woke as being a catch-all term for the overly sensitive, linking it with “people who are offended by everything”. Some go further, with 5% using primarily pejorative words to describe the term, including “rubbish”, “insanity” and “brain dead”.” It’s all very odd, isn’t it?
How on Earth do people see woke as somehow meaning overly sensitive and associated with “people who are offended by everything”? I don’t consider myself to be offended by all that many things. I’m not even sure offended is even the right word in particular circumstances. If someone says something racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic or whatever, I am likely to call them out and have nothing more to do with them.
I don’t consider myself to be what others call a “snowflake”, which according to the Cambridge dictionary “an insulting way of referring to someone who is considered by some people to be too easily upset and offended”. And there’s “emotionally fragile”, which bears an alarming similarity to the occupational health service of the evil British Red Cross who, after I was bullied and abused by local managers, described me as “emotionally weak”. So, maybe I am a snowflake in some ways, in the same way as far right figures like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage can dish it out but can’t take it. Hell, I rarely “dish it out” to anyone. I’m to kind for that, too woke, maybe.
This is part of new words and phrases that have turned up in our language. The so-called “cancel culture” and threats to “freedom of speech”, both appearing from political figures who are to the right, shall we say. The cancel culture doesn’t exist, other than when people are called out for things like bigotry, racism, homophobia and all the rest of it. “You just can’t say that” anymore, meaning “you just can’t be a racist anymore, without someone woke, usually a snowflake, calling you out.” As for free speech, it is the rich and powerful, essentially the right-wing establishment which controls most of the media and complains about attacks on free speech. But the freedom to say what? The freedom to say horrible things, which unless they are libellous and defamatory, is still permitted, and the freedom to tell lies is stronger than ever. Just ask Boris Johnson who has made a lucrative living out of lying through his teeth. The cancel culture is a myth, the threats to free speech are almost entirely from the establishment. You and I enjoy a brand of freedom by way of being allowed to vote every five years, but we have no access to the establishment media.
The establishment polemicist Piers Morgan, a journalist of modest ability and an average TV presenter, recently wrote a book called Woke Is Dead, where he welcomed “the return of a common-sense world”. The advertising blurb continues: “He exposes the hypocrites, destroys the myths, and celebrates the heroes who refused to surrender to the woke brigade.” But there is a fairly obvious problem here. No such brigade exists. Then, he completely loses it as he takes aim to:
- Hollywood hypocrisy – when celebrity virtue-signaling became it’s own performance
- Environ-mentalists – how saving the planet turned into shouting about plastic straws
- Go Woke, Go Broke – from brand deals to the price of moral posturing
- Word Police – the battle over language and what you can and can’t say
Do I really need to dissect this sheer stupidity? Surrounded by luvvies, Morgan lives in a very different world from the rest of us. Most of us don’t, and have never, paid much mind to anything a few celebrities might say, but then again, if they have a particular point of view, are they not allowed to express it? Is Ricky Gervais calling out cruelty to animals “virtue signalling”? Saving the planet never turned into “shouting about plastic straws”. They were just one example of how certain products were causing incalculable damage to the environment. Go Woke, Go Broke is just made up bollocks and there has never, ever been a “battle over language and what you can and can’t say”, other than in Morgan’s mind. Language evolves. Something that was viewed as acceptable many years, which in Morgan’s world must include the N word, the P word (in relation to Pakistani folk), poofs and shirt-lifters and those all-time classics spastics and retards, just don’t feel right today. So why mourn the evolution of language? I grew up in times where words like these were the norm. Didn’t we just grow up and become better, more respectful and kinder people?
I sense some anger in the YouGov poll. A significant minority of people clearly share Piers Morgan’s view that we are all victims of the cancel culture, that you can’t say anything nowadays, that political correctness (which I say doesn’t exist and never had existed) has gone mad and all these terms made up by people like, well, Piers Morgan, are preventing us from living our lives.
As with many powerful, wealthy, establishment figures, they invent a construct that describes a world that doesn’t exist. Proudly woke people like me have no power and no influence. I suppose those who cling to the 1970s ideal world of Jim Davidson, Bernard Manning, Enoch Powell, the Black and White Minstrels, the National Front and especially Thatcher are offended that society as a whole has evolved, as has the language we use, not because the mythical PC and Woke brigade has somehow imposed on us: it’s just happened.
If Piers Morgan thinks woke is dead, then that’s a matter for him. Maybe he just hangs out with the wrong crowd? Every day in almost every way, I see and hear about folk doing good things in a world a million miles away from Morgan’s hate-filled world in the popular media. We’ve seen often enough in 2025 that there’s still a place for hate in our world. I’ve had enough hate to last a lifetime, thank you very much. I’ll stay woke and proud and I’ll keep trying to be a better person.
