My new book Against Decolonisation: The Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West examines the rise of a new decolonisation ideology across the Western world. The killing of George Floyd in America in 2020 and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement put this ideology on steroids, and the global dominance of American culture meant it went global.
In the U.K., the call to ‘decolonise’ British history and its institutions has become one the most important ways to acknowledge the alleged legacy effects of transatlantic slavery. Even King Charles argued that the history of transatlantic slavery should be given the same national importance as the Holocaust.
My new book examines the facts behind this ideology and how it has metastasised from university campuses to British culture. This ideology has several elements.
First, it claims that the U.K. is irredeemably racist, which is now being pushed by major media outlets to reinforce the ideology. For example, a major study found that between 2010 and 2020, “terms such as racism and white supremacy in popular U.K. media outlets increased on average by 769% and 2,827%, respectively”. The report continues that mentions “of prejudice have also become far more prominent in the BBC, the U.K.’s leading public service outlet. From 2010 to 2020, mentions in BBC content of terms suggestive of racism have increased by over 802%… hate speech (880%), … or slavery (413%)”.
But the media’s obsession with Britain’s racism is bellied by the facts. In 2019, the European Union conducted one of the most extensive surveys across the European continent. Its report, Discrimination in the European Union, showed that the United Kingdom is one of the least racist societies in Europe, a continent already characterised by extensive anti-discrimination laws and norms, and that partially explains the mass legal and illegal migration from across the world to the U.K.
Second, this ideology argues that what it calls ‘whiteness’ and, by extension, Western Civilisation is irredeemably malign and must be deconstructed. The U.K.’s leading critical race theorist, Professor Kehinde Andrews, argues that whiteness “induces a form of psychosis framed by its irrationality, beyond any rational engagement”.
Universities across the U.K. have adopted this decolonial ideology to help cure ‘whiteness’. The UUK is the body that represents university leaders. The Chair of its Advisory Group on Tackling Racial Harassment in Higher Education, Professor David Richardson, outlined a bold call for change across the university sector. Arguing that personal transformation or change at a single university is simply not good enough, he says we “must acknowledge the institutional racism and systemic issues that pervade the entire higher education sector, in all institutions, if we are to bring about meaningful change”. He continued that institutional leaders must “turn words into tangible measures that bring about sustainable cultural change”. In so doing, society will benefit, as universities will “shape the minds and attitudes of the next generation”.
One has to admire Professor Richardson’s commitment to institutional deconstruction.
As the Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, he presided over a £45 million black hole in its finances. The Times reported that staff anger is focused on “the ‘fat cat’ salaries of university leaders” with Professor Richardson on a pre-perk packet of nearly £300k – perhaps another systemic issue pervading a higher education sector happy to take the knee to political fads?
In helping this process of mentally reprogramming students and staff, the UUK guidance explicitly adopts a decolonising framework to help transform the U.K., a country characterised by ‘white domination’ that “is normalised and therefore seen as natural” and that benefits “white people, who as a collective group benefit from structural racism overall”.
To help with this transformation process, the UUK report calls on young undergraduates to audit their professors’ courses to ensure diverse representation within materials used in lectures and tutorials. When training their staff, universities should “incorporate the concepts of white privilege and white fragility, white allyship, microaggressions and intersectionality, as well as racialised unconscious bias training”. This way, an “inclusive culture and environment” will be created “by setting the tone and expectations of student and staff behaviour”. In so doing, senior university managers will inaugurate a truly “anti-racist” university and are asked to “commit” to making sure that there will be “consequences” when this drive for inclusivity is in any way “breached”.
The above is all asserted despite figures showing that between 2003/04 and 2019/20, the proportion of white British staff at U.K. universities fell from 83.1% to 70.0%. In contrast, non-British white staff rose from 8.3% to 14.6% and U.K. BAME from 4.8% to 8.5%. Non-British BAME staff also saw a rise from 3.8% to 7.0%. In 2021, 25.3% of U.K. university students were BAME, an 82.3% rise since 2003/04. Oxford’s intake was 24.6% BAME. U.K. 19-25-year-olds were 80.6% white in 2019, yet BAME students comprised 29% of university intakes, including 25% in the Russell Group. British universities employ 670,000 staff and teach 2.3 million students annually. In a three-and-a-half-year period, where 9,200,000 students passed through the U.K.’s higher education institutions, 0.006% of students reported incidents of racial harassment to their universities. Of staff, just 0.05% made complaints.In what sense are British universities urgently in need of ‘decolonising’ to dismantle psychotic ‘whiteness’ and alleged endemic racism?
Third, decolonisation ideology in British universities seems to increasingly prioritise higher fee-paying international students, helping diversity tick-boxing while side-stepping the growing betrayal of white working-class kids. Elite universities show a mere 5% enrolment for underprivileged kids, compared to the 12% average. White students consistently face low entry rates. Recent findings underscore that white British students, particularly those on free school meals, have a lower participation rate in higher education than any other demographic. Worryingly, less than 20% of universities have targets to address this gap, often overlooking class in favour of race, gender, and sexuality in their equality drives.
Fourth, my book argues that by their very nature, historical narratives are often highly potent in shaping national self-understanding; they carry profound political significance.
As noted above by the UUK, cultural reprogramming can help “shape the minds and attitudes of the next generation”. Within our centres of learning, this politics of Western repudiation is rampant. This is a dangerous dalliance in the context of rapidly rising great power competition, and states like China have spotted an opportunity. Its United Front Work Department has over 40,000 active personnel globally. China represents a massive market for U.K. universities. This is an unholy marriage. The CCP’s work front engages in public diplomacy and propaganda as part of its efforts to promote the interests of the Chinese Communist Party both domestically and abroad.
Chinese Premier Xi Jinping argued that the Work Front remained an “important magic weapon for realising the China Dream of the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation”. Echoing the West’s decolonial useful idiots, Yang Jiechi, Director of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission of the Chinese Communist Party, argued that Biden should not criticise China’s stance on human rights as the “fact is that there are many problems within the United States regarding human rights, which is admitted by the United States itself as well… the challenges facing the United States in human rights are deep-seated. They did not just emerge over the past four years, such as Black Lives Matter”. Castigating the Anglosphere intelligence sharing arrangement called ‘Five Eyes’ between the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia, Chinese media argued that this is, in fact, a “U.S.-centred, racist and mafia-styled community, wilfully and arrogantly provoking China and trying to consolidate their hegemony as all gangsters do. They are becoming a racist axis aimed at stifling the development rights of 1.4 billion Chinese”.
In the present context, the West is assailed by a cycle of rising domestic illiberalism and institutions captured by an elite ideology of national repudiation. Global tectonic shifts are already realigning winners and losers in a new world order emergent as the West commits suicide.
Our future has yet to be made and will be shaped by our choices today. My book ends with a desperate plea: as the world returns to a state of great power competition and the West heads further down a path of philosophical deconstruction and decolonisation, we must be careful what we wish for. Failure to grasp the importance of our politics of national repudiation may mean that the precious flame of freedom may be fully extinguished. We must ask ourselves, do we have the will to blow the almost extinguished embers alight again?
Doug Stokes is a Professor of International Relations at Exeter University and Senior Advisor to the Legatum Institute. Subscribe to his Substack here and follow him on Twitter here.
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