In defence of wokeness

We have been reading an awful lot about ‘wokeness’ recently. Nobody, I notice, seems to be much in favour of it. In fact, the sharpest pens of the right seem to stab at more or less nothing else these days. Stab, stab, stab, they go. Many incisions are made and much ink and sawdust is spilled. So, being a believer in giving peace a chance, I’d like to sit for a moment on the bar stool still pleasantly warm from my colleague Rod’s momentarily departed bottom to offer a word or two in wokeness’s defence. I worry, you see, that it might be a bit of an Aunt Sally.

Thing is, ‘woke’ is a term that you now only ever see used as a sneer. It performs precisely the role that ‘politically correct’ and ‘loony left’ did in the late 1980s and early 1990s — reducing a whole range of positions to the punchline for a rather threadbare joke.