I am woke. Totally woke. If someone wants me to use a particular set of pronouns, I’m happy to do so. I try my hardest to avoid discriminatory language or anything that would cause unwanted offence. I don’t always get it right, but I don’t mind if people point it out.
For me, this isn’t new. Language is always changing and evolving. Each generation arrives at its own consensus about how it wants to communicate. It was no different for my grandparents.
And yet some people are furious about it — including some from ethnic minorities or LGBT communities who you might expect to be supportive. Why do people hate woke so much?
Brazilification and the Middle Class
When globalisation began reshaping business 20 or 30 years ago, there was talk of “Brazilification” — a society with a tiny elite at the top, masses of poor at the bottom, and very little in between. The prediction was that globalisation would wipe out the middle class, and technology would finish the job. Spreadsheets would replace armies of accountants and clerks.
But it didn’t happen.
The middle classes in the UK and elsewhere are still thriving. In countries like India — once far more “Brazilian” in structure — middle classes have expanded rapidly. Parts of Africa too.
This has had profound consequences. India, for example, had a deeply entrenched patriarchy in which boys were preferred to girls. But when Western companies offshored business processes, they simply wanted the best workers at the best price. They didn’t care whether they were hiring men or women, upper caste or lower, straight or gay.
Centuries of tradition were overturned in a generation. The rise of Modi is, in part, a backlash from rural and traditional communities who feel their place in the hierarchy has been threatened.
Class Shifts at Home
A similar shift happened in the UK. Jobs that once paid white men a premium for doing difficult, dirty, dangerous work disappeared. They were replaced by call centres, where women and minorities often advanced more quickly than their white male neighbours.
The old certainties collapsed. The Asian family who ran the local takeaway sent their son to university; now he runs an IT department and drives a BMW. A woman’s place was no longer in the kitchen but managing the outbound calls team.
Workplaces changed too. In the coal mine a mile underground, you could say whatever you liked to men just like you. That world has gone.
The Rise of the Professional Class
At the same time, the owners of businesses became more remote from customers and staff. They relied on a professional managerial class to run things — people who often acted as human shields against the anger of dissatisfied customers and underpaid employees.
Being risk-averse and mistrustful, the owners built vast bureaucratic systems to monitor their managers: plans and targets for everything from sales and P&L to diversity and environmental impact. A whole industry of measurement and management grew up.
Governments, through outsourcing and privatisation, adopted similar methods. Civil servants embraced bureaucracy with open arms. The line between government and business blurred so much that people even blamed local councils for empty shops, as if they controlled the high street.
For people with the right skills, careers boomed — and wages rose. The professional classes also became more diverse than the working classes. As capitalism globalised, so too did its managers.
Visit a business school, law school, or medical school today and you’ll see a student body that is diverse, ambitious, and confident.
For big business, celebrating diversity became a marketing strategy — a way to make rapacious global capitalism seem friendly. Activism became a comms plan.
But too often, the celebration of diversity is really a celebration of a prosperous, professional middle class — diverse, yes, but also smug. They hand out awards to themselves while policing the language and behaviour of the less educated.
Woke and the Middle Class Left
This culture has spread even among people with no direct experience of diversity. Take the reaction to Keir Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech. Most of those outraged were white, middle-class graduates. The fewer non-white friends and family they had, the more likely they were to be furious on behalf of others.
The middle-class left who dominate Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the US were not just incapable of finding a social democratic response to the failures of globalisation. More truthfully, they were unwilling. They were the beneficiaries of globalisation and had no intention of giving up their position.
They are baffled when working class voters (of a Faragist or Trumpist inclination) complain about liberal elite or the liberal establishment. They know of course that this is nonsense. The British establishment, the network of power early and influence that kept the conservative party in power, is just as right wing as it ever was, even more so now it has switched to backing Reform.
Avoe them the real global elite are even more right wing and authoritarian, Elon Musk being only the most public example.
But most people don’t interact with the real elite or the real establishment. All they see are networks of well educated well off middle class professionals making excuses for a failed status quo out of one side of their mouths while promoting woke causes out of the other. The disadvantaged minorities who need special support are too often their bosses, or their bosses boss.
Today’s middle-class left largely come from the professional managerial class, not from the working class they so often sneer at. When crisis hit, time and again they had no answers. They were too dependent on the status quo. Voters looked at them and saw their snobby bosses, not people on their side.
And when communities that felt abandoned cried out for help right-wing populism answered — while the middle-class left were too busy giving themselves awards for being “brave” and “ground-breaking.”
It’s something I have thought a great deal about in recent years and your blog is, as ever, highly thought provoking. It’s too early on a Saturday morning to digest it all and I’m heading off to Spain now. My initial conclusion, however, is that you’re very much onto something here. Like most things that are condensed into a short essay there are nuances and contradictions that can only be explored in a book or at least several chapters. Have you ever thought about writing one? Hasta pronto.
¿Disfrutaste tu tiempo en España? Siempre pensé que escribir blogs cortos era una preparación para escribir un libro, pero los acontecimientos me superaron.
Hablas muy bien español. Eres un hombre con muchos talentos. I am in the process of moving permanently to Spain. Post Brexit was the incentive to obtain Spanish passports for myself and my children. Little is made of our rights to live and work across Europe being stripped away – it was all about stopping immigrants and regaining control of our borders. Well that was a good trade off. I was one of the lucky ones who regained them. The sickening sight of the Union Jack flag draped over the Angel of the North, as I was driven to the airport by my daughte reinforced to me that it couldn’t possibly come a day too soon.
I applaud your common sense in moving to Spain. It is a lovely country. It has isn’t own problems with bigotry but nothing a crass as the movement that is taking over the UK
Isn’t Spain similar to the UK in that staunch unionism (as in opposition to Catalan/Scottish separatism) was historically a common gateway drug to far-right politics?
I should make a correction. It was the England flag. Same symbolism sadly.
“The middle-class left who dominate Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the US were not just incapable of finding a social democratic response to the failures of globalisation. More truthfully, they were unwilling. They were the beneficiaries of globalisation and had no intention of giving up their position.”
It’s more than that: a lot of them believe those working-class people in first world countries that lost out from globalisation had been the undeserving beneficiaries of a neo-colonialist postwar world order, in which the Global South was nothing more than a source of cheap natural resources for the Global North.
Spanish nationalist politics is complex. A lot of the “anarchist” Catalan independenistas are from rich families and their ideology is closer to tech bro libertarianism than the old flags they used to wave
Catalunya is the richest part of Spain (in part because it is the closest region to the wealthy “Blue Banana” heart of Europe) and a lot of the separatist sentiment there is built on resentment at having to subsidize poorer parts of Spain.
It reminds me of how Matteo Salvini’s Lega in Italy used to be the Lega Nord, which wanted to turn the wealthy north of Italy into a separate country called “Padania”.
The equivalent here in the UK would be if there was a movement to separate South East England from the rest of the UK: I wonder why no such movement has evolved.