So the reason I wanted to think about this on my blog, as opposed to writing about it on a social media feed is for how easy it is to fall fowl when using certain language on there.
We all know that. Indeed this is exactly what Novara are discussing in their 2024 round-up. Woke at it’s core, is a preoccupation with the use of language.
Now you feel in safe hands with the likes of Ash Sarkar, primarily because for reasons totally out of her hands, she had become a kind of poster girl of ‘Woke’ culture, largely from the perspective of those who were being pushed in the opposite, ‘anti-woke’ direction.
Wether it is that these 3 Novara pundits are now veterans of their trade, their thinking, and have matured much since the heady days of Novara’s initial growth (between the 2010 student protests and the beginnings of Corbyinism), their approach to the experiences and attitudes of a wider pool of society and not just Millennial graduates has become evident.
But I think Ash, specifically, has become incredibly good at at importing her empathy and own self-reflection into her own political analysis.
As ‘Millennial graduates’ they understand that we have a large proportion of people who were encouraged to go to University, many of whom were encouraged to go into the humanities, from where the use of language becomes an obsession.
Ash and Aaron conclude on something that I’ve thought about for a long time, but is so bloody hard to communicate without it provoking an eyebrow of suspicion that you’re on a downward spiral towards saying something like “I’m not racist, but..”. It’s not that the values behind woke are wrong, “it’s the style of politics” as Aaron says. Aaron talks about how it’s a politics seems to have no intention to persuade.
I understand how this occurs, especially because of the instantaneousness of online communication, and the immediacy needed trying to make practical incursions into the direction the 21st century can often seem to heading down – we turn for the language weapons with the biggest immediate impact.
But in doing so, we fall into camps. And are very quick to form suspicions and push away somebody who hasn’t learnt the appropriate codes for this moment in time.
I’ve seen friends, and associates, often largely, but not always, ones who didn’t go to university (especially humanities departments) who feel more and more aligned with alt-right attitudes, always there waiting to take over your Youtube, once you type in something relatively innocuous. People who are by and large decent people who hate the idea of suffering, have felt the target of one camp because they don’t quite fit, and have consequently become almost wholeheartedly associated with everything opposite to it.
For me the ‘Summer riots’ of 2024 were of particular, if not deeply distressing, interest. Here in South Yorkshire there were two ‘protests’ on the same day. One in the heart of Sheffield, and one in the heart of the Dearne Valley. In Sheffield a large group of pro-immigration, left-leaning people gathered outside the city hall. In the Dearne Valley the anti-immigration protests focussed on a hotel housing asylum seekers, refugees.
Now, anyone who knows much about the history of South Yorkshire will know that the hotel which endured those pogrom-like events is literally yards from where an event began 40 years ago that is crucial to the contemporary left-wing narrative: The Miners’ Strike.
Not to go too much into the changing cultural geography of South Yorkshire, but the Dearne Valley, and in fact most of South Yorkshire beyond a sliver of urban Sheffield, has changed vastly from 1984. Disused coal mines have been built over by retail parks, and call centres, and lifestyles for those who can buy into it, have largely shifted, and become less community, politically-focussed, and more consumer, family, and car-ownership focussed. Now, this isn’t across the board, but it’s a truth that runs across a lot of the UK that identity has changed for many who find themselves teetering on that line between lower middle class and what my language-obsessed conscience is shouting at me for describing as a ‘white working class’.
Sheffield city centre, or at least a chunk that extends West and South from the city centre, is like an island amidst a contemporary South Yorkshire that bears no relation to it. This part of Sheffield is very much like the the environment that the London-based Novara Media would be more naturally at home in: Urban-to-surburban, multi-cultural, high graduate retention, and a higher reliance of public transport and community institutions.
I can’t even get into the newer kind of alienation that I believe besets a post-political mass of suburban, car-owning Britain. But all I know is that there were two camps in that Summer Sunday in South Yorkshire. Ten miles apart, but a million miles apart in ability to communicate with one another.
Do the people who, maybe out of a broth of anger, racism, misplaced humiliation and alcohol, nearly killed people, deserve being put into comparison with graduates concerned with their use of appropriate language, but probably generally thinking they’re making social progress?
All I know is that 40 years ago I can guarantee that a large proportion of these people’s parents, grandparents would have been directly involved in the battle to keep the livelihoods going – a cause that united people from all different social groups at the time.
I’m not even sure where I’m going with this, just a boxing day ramble. But I was just so glad that some of the most trusted media figures on the left are willing to discuss that there may be some deep problems with ‘woke’, whether you agree that it is dying or not.
John B Ledger 