Though wokeness is a vile thing, it has contributed to our culture in one fortunate way – by inspiring brilliant books which refute it. The woeful lack of anything passing for analysis (probably a colonial tool of oppression, like brunch) on the SJW side has thrown into gloriously sharp relief the difference in the intellectual firepower between those who believe in free speech and those who resemble Veruca Salt after joining the Stasi. We have Andrew Doyle’s The New Puritans and Remi Adekoya’s Biracial Britain; they have Laurie Penny’s Sexual Revolution and Jolyon Maugham’s Bringing Down Goliath – the latter category comprising unintentionally hilarious scribblings which will soon be up there with The Diary of a Nobody as proof that pomposity is one of the most enjoyable forms of humour.
We can now add this excellent book to the first list. Sunder Katwala was born in Yorkshire to an Indian father and an Irish mother, both of whom came to England to work for the NHS, recalling Trevor Phillips’s beautiful line about us being ‘the only country where a significant mixed-race population has come about through romance rather than rape’.
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