We Happy Few, We Band Of Wokesters

Why Is England Woke?

Assuming the ridiculous gushing over a Cambridge conman was not a national Monty Python sketch arranged for tourists, the Jason Arday affair reminded me of one of the most peculiar things about Britain: They’re more woke than the U.S. Which is weird, because the Mother Country still has a monarchy that rules over tens of millions of white subjects. The closest we have to that in America is the NAACP.

According to the 2021 census, the U.K. is 2.5% Black, but more than half of all its TV advertisements feature black people. (That’s even more lopsided than their representation in the country’s homicide statistics, where Black Britons make up 24% of all convicted killers.)

You’d never know Britain was the first nation in the world to abolish slavery, then proceeded to use the most powerful navy in the world to end the global slave trade. Black lives mattered to them way before Michael Brown got himself killed in Ferguson, Missouri.

At a cost of thousands of sailors’ lives and billions of dollars ($170 billion relative to GDP at the time) British ships patrolled the African coast for 50 years, intercepting more than 1,000 slave ships, and freeing 150,000 humans. British taxpayers finally finished paying off that bill in 2015.

So obviously, Britain has a lot to atone for.

The study of TV ads, undertaken by the U.K.’s left-wing Channel 4 last year, also found that “[m]ulti-ethnic families with young multi-ethnic children continue to be the go-to for family representation,” constituting 47% of all ads with families. Interracial couples in the U.K. are like gay wedding planners in the U.S. Nobody has ever met one, but they seem to be everywhere.

For extra “diversity,” Asians (mostly Indians and Pakistanis), who make up 9.3% of the population, are featured in 28% of ads. To be fair, Pakistanis are also wildly over-represented among leaders of white slavery rape gangs.

The census numbers don’t quite add up, but 81.7% of Britons identified their ethnic group as “white.” At most, 12% of TV ads show White people. On the bright side, gay people in ads were 33% more likely to be White.

London is gorgeous, has more shops than New York City, and fewer muggers, homeless people and pot-smokers than in many American cities. But in some ways, it’s insane.

Plastic is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. More than half a century ago, the civilized world dispensed with rotting fruit and carcinogen-laden paper containers, and embraced the bright new future of plastic bags, cups, and straws that were lighter, stronger and a whole lot more sanitary. Life was better.

But since this is Britain, and Britain is insane, plastic is virtually banned. You have to drink your Starbucks quickly or start eating cardboard. Useless paper straws dissolve in about two minutes. Grocery store paper bags are capable of holding roughly 8 ounces without breaking. I assume dry cleaning is returned to you wrapped in corn husks.

California isn’t this ridiculous, and their state symbol is a passed-out homeless guy in buttless chaps.

Continuing the kookiness: After the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (completely justified according to both the grand jury and the Obama administration’s Department of Justice), idiot British protesters marched through London, chanting “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!”

London bobbies don’t carry guns. In fact, this is a chronic plot hole in British television dramas: You see an officer chasing a suspect and wonder, what’s he going to do when he catches him? Ask about his tweets?

The country is so gun-phobic that a few years back a farmer was sentenced to life in prison for shooting criminals breaking into his home. But wokeness struck back! His sentence was reduced to three years based on his lawyers’

claim that he was neurodivergent: “paranoid personality disorder.” Yes, he paranoidly thought burglars were burgling him.

As the Arday episode demonstrates, the British aren’t sold on free speech either. To hide their embarrassment over the Cambridge fraud, an army of DEI mediocrities exploded in a murderous rage at Professor Nathan Cofnas for his Substack post pointing out Arday’s plagiarism.

Liberals in the U.S. aren’t this demented. A number of black professors have been fired for academic scams far less egregious than Arday’s — and the liberal newspaper of record, The New York Times, didn’t run interference for them. The paper mostly reported those cases honestly, as it did with Arday’s. (The Times’ approach to censorship is simply not to report news that would confuse its readers.)

Meanwhile, the BBC belched out 11 radio shows, four news articles, and two TV interviews fawning over Arday and lustily repeated his preposterous lies — until the truth emerged (thanks to Cofnas).

It’s amazing that Americans got both our First and Second Amendment rights from the British. Their 1689 Bill of Rights gave the king’s subjects the right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” and his Protestant subjects the right to “have arms for their defense.” Now, you can’t even defend your home or speak the truth in Britain if it could hurt someone’s feelings.

These are the same Britons who get snippy about the U.S. — our patriotism, our guns, our directness and (at least when a Reagan, Bush or Trump is in the White House) our Nazi-ness.

Okay, fine. You have more beautiful buildings, accents, traditions, and castles, etc. We’re vulgar arrivistes who eat Texas chili out of a Frito bag. Then why, Britain, do you slavishly imitate the worst woke nonsense America has to offer?

My rewrite of John of Gaunt’s deathbed speech from Richard II:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for her self
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.