Fergus Finlay: I'll say it loud — I'm 'woke' and I'm proud

The worst thing you can do is try to be inclusive, celebrate difference, try to understand how easy oppression is — do all that and you’re woke

UK prime minister Rishi Sunak and EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen shake hands after signing off on the agreement on the post-Brexit trade arrangements for Northern Ireland. Picture: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

I’M A senile old fool. An old man out of touch, trying to rack my failing mind for a provocative headline. I’m a limousine liberal hack, who lives on the fat of the land on taxpayers’ money, and a failed champagne socialist. 

I like lecturing plebs, I support apartheid against people who refused to be vaccinated. I’m scum, a filthy planter (whatever that is), a gutter journo, and a clawhammer (I do know what that is, but I just don’t know how it applies). And I do love my foreign child molesters.

And worse than all those things put together, I’ve committed the ultimate sin. I’m woke.

I’m going to be honest. That’s not the wittiest commentary I’ve ever read. Although I guess it’s not the worst either. 

One of the real privileges of being a columnist in a great newspaper is that you get to participate in a lot of discussion. Sometimes the reaction to my column takes off in all sorts of directions, and you end up following other people’s discussions. 

Often enough you get a lot of support for your views, and every now and again, hatred.

The #IrelandForAll campaign group, a coalition of national and local organisations that support diversity and oppose racism, held a national solidarity march and rally in Dublin last week. Picture: Stephen Collins/Collins Photos

Especially when you write about hatred. Last week I wrote in support of the ‘Ireland for All’ march through Dublin, and I wrote about the sub-culture of hate-influenced politics that seems to be growing rapidly, even if in Ireland it’s still only visible in the undergrowth of the internet. The lesson seems to be, if you warn about hate you get buckets of it back.

At least in Ireland it’s still in the undergrowth. I’ve yet to meet anyone in the street who offers me abuse to my face of the sort they offer on Twitter, that bastion of free speech. But you’d wonder how long before it breaks out, wouldn’t you?

The equation between far-right politics and a sort of perverted nationalism is growing too. That’s what “Ireland for the Irish” is — a kind of twisted sense that we are being robbed of our entitlements by foreigners who are an awful lot poorer than we are.

It’s what Brexit is too, of course. A sort of political war is being played out this week over a concept that almost none of the combatants can explain — the Northern Ireland Protocol.

They don’t understand it, but they hate it anyway. It is an economic fact that Northern Ireland is in the best of all worlds when it comes to trade, because of its unique land border with the European Union. But it offends some weird sense of national identity.

If there is the remotest possibility that at some stage in the future, presumably as some kind of last resort in a negotiating process, the European Court might be called on to adjudicate on some rule or regulation to do with exports or imports, there are people who will argue that this undermines their sovereignty — or to be more accurate, their sense of tribe.

The whole silly thing is further complicated, of course, by the never-ending power struggles within the Tory party. There is every possibility now that they’ll seek to tear themselves apart over a sensible and modest set of solutions to a problem they created themselves in the first place. 

Some of the noisier Tory cretins are still arguing that the best possible solution to the problem is to reinstate the border between north and south of this island.

Honestly, the sooner that shower become irrelevant to British politics, the better for everyone. It looks (and I know I’m hoping against hope here) as if the already decomposing carcass of Toryism has about two years of half-life left.

I hope that would allow for a reset in this part of the world anyway. In their desperation the Tories haven’t just made a fool of themselves (and everyone else) over Brexit, they’ve also adopted the increasingly sinister tactic of promoting culture wars.

A culture war is essentially an ideology based on the notion that anyone or anything who isn’t exactly like me is dangerous. It used to be gay people who were dangerous (and hunted down accordingly), now it’s trans people.

Refugees in little boats are an imminent threat to the British way of life. Anyone who can be “othered” is a suitable topic for a culture war.

In the US, some of the culture warriors have gone completely bonkers. In the last week or so, for instance, Fox News has been trying to lead a campaign against Lego.

Lego? Lego? What could Lego have possibly done to offend against the American dream? According to every single source you can find, the American dream is the notion that America is a land of opportunity for everyone willing to work hard, with no barriers based on how or where they were born.

But Lego, it transpires, has threatened the American dream by introducing a piece called Fiona. And Fiona, horror of horrors, has Down syndrome. Her friend, Autumn, is missing the lower part of her arm.

Fox News (and initially some of the British right-wing press, before they guessed there would be a backlash), decided that what Lego did was the ultimate culture war crime.

They’d gone woke. Just like Mars had gone dangerously woke when they redesigned their M&M “spokescandies” to represent a more inclusive society. Here’s what Tucker Carlson had to say, “The green M&M’s got her boots back but apparently is now a lesbian, maybe, and there is also a plus-sized, obese purple M&M.”

The worst thing you can do is try to be inclusive, try to celebrate difference, try to understand how easy oppression is. Do all that and you’re woke.

Culture wars about Lego and M&Ms aren’t as dangerous as culture wars about refugees in small boats, of course they’re not. At least, not yet.

But the point of all culture wars is to make the minority afraid. 

Suddenly, out of nowhere, it becomes offensive to a majority to represent Down syndrome in a universally popular toy. There’s a reason why that offence is manufactured. And there’s a reason why the offence is represented in a sneer — because that’s what the word “woke” is used for.

Woke is the battle cry of the culture war. The culture war in its turn is the vehicle for ensuring that economic and social inequality is allowed to flourish. Social inequality is the basis for oppressing people of colour, people of different sexual orientation, people of different nationality.

So if any of these issues seem trivial, they’re not. There is a growing movement aimed at oppression, and it manifests itself in dozens of different ways. The ones that seem harmless are just as insidious as the more overt racism or twisted nationalism represented by the Nigel Farages of this world.

Throughout all our recent history, far-right politics has grown in the same stealthy way. It always starts with othering and blaming.

It has to be called out in each of its manifestations. The slurs and sneers and abuse have to be recognised for what they are — a weapon designed to make people afraid to speak. We need a new battle cry, I reckon. Woke — and proud of it.