Who owns the language?

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is giving local residents £25,000 grants to enable them to change the names of the roads in which they live. Some Londoners, I believe, find it uncomfortable to live in a street which has a name redolent of colonialism. Fair enough. I hope, though, that Sadiq will also give grants to right-wing white neighbourhoods of the capital so that the residents there can change the names of roads to make them more redolent of colonialism — such as Cecil Rhodes Avenue, or Zulus 0 British Army 5 Crescent. Or perhaps install a name which commemorates the mayor himself, such as Vacuous Dwarf Close.

This war on history, tradition, rationality, logic and complexity (known in short as ‘woke’) continues apace. I wondered a couple of years ago if we had reached its peak, but I was being untypically optimistic. In truth, we are scarcely at base camp and the identitarian mountaineers with their corporate Sherpas are busy planning the next ascent.