Allison Pearson in the Telegraph thinks she’s put her finger on what’s really driving the U.K. labour crisis and putting older people off working: the unrelenting, soul-destroying wokery that now permeates every workplace and makes anyone to the Right of Chairman Mao feel like they don’t belong. Here’s an excerpt:
It’s true that lockdown showed a lot of busy people that time at home with family could be more rewarding than the gerbil-wheel of a daily commute. But something else is going on here, I think: increasingly, the modern office feels like hostile territory to baby boomers. Relentless wokery is driving the more mature into retirement before it drives us round the bend.
Gareth, a Planet Normal listener, wrote to tell me he retired last year from his job as a lawyer to a major public inquiry after three-and-a-half years engaged by the Cabinet Office. “The CO strives hard to promote a ‘woker than thou’ attitude (about the only department in which it does strive hard!) and since the pandemic this went into overdrive,” says Gareth. “It encompassed the entire woke canon from compulsory ‘unconscious bias’ training through finger-wagging lectures on ‘micro-aggressions’, ‘white fragility/privilege’, critical race theory, BLM and structural racism, aka all the shibboleths of the progressive Left, but under a supposedly Conservative Government.”
According to Gareth, the Cabinet Office “is symptomatic of the whole civil-service culture which treats the elected Government with disdain and pursues its own ultra-woke agenda which is entirely contrary to official policy”.
Like many members of staff his age, he was appalled by the “all-pervasive propaganda”. He couldn’t stand a climate in which often entirely innocuous comments were treated as “micro-aggressions” and any deviation from the official view (formerly known as “a difference of opinion”) was treated as heretical.
The civil service, the NHS, higher education and far too many private companies have become a paradise for “recreational offence-takers” who love to air their concocted grievances. On one occasion, Gareth had a complaint lodged against him for using the term Anglo-Saxon. “Apparently, it has negative connotations for the woke. Who knew?”
I reckon there are an awful lot of Gareths out there. Talented, hard-working men and women in their 50s, 60s and 70s who, earlier in their careers, were not exposed to this relentless and rather scary politicisation of the workplace and don’t want to tiptoe about in what Jon calls “this divisive and pernicious Maoist culture”.
Why would any 56-year-old wish to return to work when chances are they will be judged for the crime of not being in possession of the correct pronoun (or even comprehending what that means)? Only recently, a reader told me that a position in the NHS trust where he worked remained unfilled because no one sufficiently “diverse” had applied. It was an important job, one which really needed doing, but far better to leave it vacant than appoint some old white bloke with the right experience, eh?
Allison says that if the Government is serious about persuading over-50s to stay in their jobs, a good start would be to punish employers who discriminate against them.
But that would involve overhauling (or scrapping) the Equality Act, with its ‘protected characteristics’, public sector equality duty and licence for ‘positive’ discrimination, which is the legal fountainhead of all wokery in the U.K. But that’s not something the Tories have shown any interest in in all their 12 years in power.
Worth reading in full.
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Total nonsense.
The countries ignoring the “rules” are the US and it’s vassals who make up their own rules when it suits them.
Russia used UN Charter Article 51 and R2P to stop the ethnic Russians from persecution in Ukraine.
The US is Israel’s best friend who ignore all UN Resolutions and both vote against any UN peace deals along with their puppets in the UK and EU.
Russia and China are more likely to follow agreed rules than the West.
I agree.
Uncle Sam’s hegemony is collapsing. It would be amusing to see how that pans out but I fear that its death throes may do for us all.
Out of chaos is their only chance of survival.
The last great example of the ‘rules based order’ was the liberation of Kuwait in 1991.
The subsequent flouting of that order by Clinton and Blair in the Balkans, the nonsense that was Rambouillet, set the scene for much of what has followed.
Clinton and Blair, the worst pair of Western leaders in living memory……and then it got worse……
This rules-based international order (to this date, one of these rules is that Britain, France, the USA and Russia may chose to invade Germany whenenver they really dislike German domestic politics) is nothing but the league of nations concept reheated, ie, an attempt of the so-called victorious powers of the second world war to lend perpetuity to their reordering of the world by nothing but force by ‘prohibiting’ others from changing it again by use of force. Pretty much everyone except the German pseudo-states aka reservations for ethnic Germans in central europe has ignored all of this since ever.
Eg, probably the first violation of these rules occurred when Poland annexed Stettin after the second world war. That was westward of the supposed border of Poland but (obviously) Germany didn’t have an army which could have prevented this anymore and (as obviously) the proponents of this rule-based international order didn’t care provided the right perpetrator chose an acceptable victim.
Could Dr McGrogan’s opinion be summarised as “The Long March Through The Institutions has begun to eat its own tail”?. Or perhaps, rather than becoming circular, it has blundered into a swamp??
You know what killed the rules based order?
The US-UK invasion of Iraq.
Everything has been unravelling since then.
…and by the time of Lockdown, the general public had long forgotten about the order just went along with whatever wheeze was dreamt up by SAGE or even over breakfast at Downing Street. There’s nothing so effective as a declaration of war in persuading the population to forget the rules, whether the threat is real or invented.
So true. It was the single biggest blunder since Vietnam, if not worse.
Another example of the golden rule, those that don’t follow the rules are getting the gold in ever-increasing amounts.
There was a sense not that long ago that the western countries were far from perfect but nonetheless were responsible for vast improvements. It is still there even in colonised countries the sense they moved to a better place despite their subjugation. Railways for example. People in poorer countris value their railways far more than we do. And of course there is plenty to value. The speed, romance, chance meetings, just the idea of railway stations. They still admire the West as it was a few years ago they are just aghast at what it has turned into and you can hardly blame them.
Don’t destroy yourselves. Accept that by hook or crook you have been taken over and try to find something left to unite with. I know in contemporary Britain it might seem impossible but the chance is still there I think and I wouldn’t wait much longer.
I look back to not that long ago, say the early 1990s and the total takeover of the psyche that has occurred then amongst the British. I don’t know if there is a way back. The people that I get on with best these days are people living in caravans and attempting to disengage. I hope that we rediscover that these people are the best of us. I don’t give two hoots about death or money and I never will. I think that there is enough energy left in this country to re-awaken this spirit. You own nothing and your salary was just a comforting illusion. Can you imagine Iran or Putin trying to take over Cornwall? It will never happen these people are beyond reach. Same goes gor Geordieland.
The biggest irony of R2P is that Putin’s Russia has invoked it to speciously justify their invasion of Georgia and Ukraine (x2) as well. It’s all a load of hooey, or should I say, khuy.
The old Westphalian order is looking more and more like it will win out by default.
Why would anyone make reference to the FT when we know MSM has been telling porkies for over three years now. The last place we should be looking for reliable Information is the MSM. There are hundreds of other sources. Use them.
I may be guilty of not reading this article carefully enough, but I’m not really sure what the precise direction of this article is. True, Putin and Xi have rejected a highly corrupted Western ‘Rules based order’ – and rightly so. Why call Putin, Trump and Xi ‘rogue actors’ therefore, for seeking Realpolitik and practical solutions in a newly multipolar world?!! Whilst Erdogan is clearly not to be trusted (true), Putin is just about the most measured, calm and outwardly ‘moral’ leader around, and the whole of Russian foreign policy these days is very carefully measured and reasoned. Including participation in the United Nations. It is in many cases the West that has flouted UN resolutions. Trump, for his part, had a good record of avoiding war – I’m no expert about that… ask a Russian – they know it all, chapter and verse, just how many countries the USA has attacked. That we have effectively all but proscribed the Russian point of view in the West just about says it all.