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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Thanks for this – interesting.
Seems like governments were responsible for a lot of it, directly and indirectly. So much for the government being pushed into action by the public clamour.
I think the biggest reason the press followed government policy on covid is money. Always follow the money. At the beginning of lock down most corporate advertising plummeted, at the same time money from government advertising for covid measures rocketed, along with money from “vaccine” manufacturers. No journalist was allowed to bite the hand that feeds.
Spot on. They were paid. Who are the biggest financiers of the fake news? Government and Pharma. UK Guv spent some £500 million on the BBC et al to spread the propaganda?
Funny how the ‘money’ never makes into these useless whitewashing Covidiot inquiries.
Medical Nazism. TPTB learnt that the sheeple love to follow and will happily kill themselves ‘if it saves one life’.
Which shows they were and are in the wrong job.
They could have parroted the official line perhaps with a quizzical look to imply their hands were tied. Algorhythms are not so clever as to pick up body language.
No – I firmly believe the vast majority of journos were as stupid and credulous as my neighbours and swallowed the lies whole.
Honourable exceptions exist but they had to speak via podcast or substack- I’m thinking Planet Normal and the many people of integrity on substance.
“We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practised since.”
Lines from the preamble to “Journal of the Plague Year”, Daniel Defoe’s forensic reconstruction in the year 1722 of London’s Great Plague of 1665.
Meaning British media has been going for over three hundred years. Over the last thirty years, the silicon chip has taken invention to a whole new level. Witness the pandemic that never was and the climate heist.
The madness of crowds has a lot to answer for. Keep those critical faculties primed.
In my mind there is no question it was ordered at a global level, which applies to the whole ‘pandemic’ narrative – and not only the latter: where is the media questioning of Net Zero, of the gender narrative, of the billions and billions senselessly spent on Ukraine?
Unlimited immigration is only now being questioned – after how many years? – because so many populations are becoming sick and tired of the various atrocities performed by our invited guests.
Richard Nixon warned in 1983 in this short video against the power of the media – perhaps hardly surprising – but his comments were very intelligent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEX6ONLvJg0.
The world’s media are currently owned by a surprisingly small number of individuals. The questions is, who are they taking their orders from?
Thanks for that Richard Nixon link. Can’t find link to cassette recordings, but Nixon tapes from inside Oval Office make for interesting hearing:
https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/white-house-tapes
Very interesting, thank you. Does every ex-President have such a library? That would make a lot of fascinating reading.
The saddest thing is that the mass psychosis and hysteria of the Covid crisis is nothing unusual. Which, unfortunately, implies it can happen again.
In Adolph’s Germany most of the population believed in and supported the great leader.
Likewise Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, all totalitarian systems were capable of whipping up mass hysteria.
We laugh at the medieval witch hunts – human nature hasn’t changed that much.
It is happening again right now – Climate hysteria!
I never understood why journalists were afraid to do their job. But it’s clear they were psychologically nudged by government groupthink and captured regulatory agencies in cahoots with big pharma to peddle a false narrative. David Southwell’s article is an honest and articulate exposé of what went wrong during the pseudo pandemic. Well done.
Money – they have mortgages to pay and families to feed like everyone else…
The BBC was probably one of the worst. I recall a highly plausible story of a BBC reporter sent to cover an anti-lockdown protest, with the sole purpose of capturing any violations of social distancing rules. The reporter admitted this when asked.
“..is fed to us by governments, authorities and experts even in, or especially during, ’emergencies’.”
Like so many well meaning articles what is missing is what really matters. Nothing about the paymasters of all those listed. The Big Pharma. Strange omission for an experienced journalist.
6. Unlimited taxpayer funded government advertising in MSM, printed and broadcast.
No excuses.
The only questions were asked by Mark Steyn, who was sacked, is now wheelchair bound, bankrupted by the establishment.
Every ‘journalist’ who submitted copy to either justify or disregard the greatest crime in British history should resign.
Now.
Articles such as these tend to discount the enthusiasm with which ordinary citizens were torch-carriers for extreme Covid policies. Determining whether media was responding to that, or driving that, is chicken and egg.
Julia Hartley Brewer of Talk Radio appeared to be a lone voice of sanity. The BBC a government mouthpiece, as it is with the Climate lie
I always found it strange we were shown videos of Chinese people collapsing in the street with covid but never saw any such thing in the West. Was it a Chinese invention Psy Ops to break Western economies.
They are still not doing their job now. They should be calling out the climate nonsense all those dangerous clowns in Davos, questioning Nut Zero and basically anything that comes out of a politician’s or scientist’s mouth. There are some brave ones Neill Oliver, Mark Steyn, Bev Turner and of course all those at TDS to name a few but the rest are just abject cowards.
Indeed, and look at what happens to them; quietly sent into the dusty attic, if they keep their jobs at all.
What this article fails to mention is the role played by the mainstream media (and the BBC in particular) in bullying the Johnson government into adopting such over-the-top and excessive policies in the first place. If you remember, Boris Johnson was initially favouring a ‘herd immunity’ approach, one which might well have seen the UK following a similar path to Sweden during the pandemic, a country whose population suffered far less economic and societal dislocation and whose excess deaths ended up the lowest in Europe. The general media ‘pile-on’ during that period in March 2020 when scare stories from Italy and elsewhere were circulating daily proved far too much for Boris and his ministers to withstand. So the path we eventually chose reflected possibly a lack of moral fibre amongst Conservative ministers and the change that seems to have taken place during the last 30 years in which governments, lamentably, often change course and have their policies shaped by the hue and cry emitting from a generally shallow, left-leaning and holier-than-thou media.
If journalism has a public policy role beyond mere description or stenography, it should be to relentlessly question what governments, authorities and, yes, even ‘experts’ are saying and doing.
I would suggest from that paragraph – especially experts!
So-called Experts got us into that mess (and others – Climate, Ukraine). In the case of “Covid” only a small subset of credentialed experts were listened to, other critical experts were shunned, shamed and silenced, and that is why the whole horrific debacle was as bad as it was!
Neil Fergus – Good
Sunetra Gupta – Bad
Jay Bhattacharya – Bad
Martin Kulldorf – Bad
Anthony Fauci – Good
Bill Gates (!!!!!) – Good
“This is Why the Media Failed During Covid”
And failed over immigration, rape gangs, climate change, the 70 year long failure of the NHS, anti-white racism, “transgender” crap, wokery, debanking, EEC/EU and Brexit… it’s a long list.
Is there a pattern I wonder?