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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The resume suggests that the book is an important work and deserves to be widely read. Regrettably, our society is now so polarised – reason and the culture of discussion are now so corrupted – that the book will chiefly be preaching to the converted: only those already sympathetic to the argument will be likely to buy the book. Those who need to read it will steer clear. Still, the book will provide ample material for individuals wishing to alert the silent majority to the fact that society is going through a revolution as radical and as destructive as the Communist revolution which took over Russia and China. It’s frightening, and it’s frightening that people don’t perceive that this urge to ‘deconstruct’ western (i.e. Christian) civilisation is essentially the destruction of civilisation tout court.
They don’t perceive it so far for the simple reason that their sources of information have been slanted and the institutions they trust have been suborned. Beyond that, the shadow of illegality hangs over serious dissent with a host of lesser, informal penalties – ie, “debanking” – in the wings.
With everyone afraid, moreover, dissent is an excuse for ostracism; and because nobody likes admitting to living like a cowardly louse, those still comfortably inside the tent pretend that it is just as big as it was and pitched in much the same place, whereas in fact it has become a narrow and marginal indoctrination space.
Snobbery is very helpful here, for the isolated dissenter – jobless, impoverished, lonely – is easily made out as a failure or a “low-life”.
Worst of all, the process is multi-generational; all the coordinates of who is “in” or “out” have been subtly tuned towards Marxist insanity over decades. Look at the progress made in selling perverted, deviant and sterile forms of sexuality. From toleration of abnormalities we have been pushed in fifty years – as Lionel Shriver notes in the Spectator – towards the promotion of those abnormalities and beyond – into the emasculation of little boys and the equivalent mutilation of little girls.
Nothing can better reflect the left’s basic premise that reality and nature are illusions fostered by “ideology” from which it will “liberate” us – with the surgeon’s pitiless scalpel if necessary.
And at a deeper level, this is what happens when the life of the mind is so privileged over reality, nature, culture, feeling, the mass, the nation, tradition and family that it seeks to live not only independently of those structures, but actively against them. To answer the question so often posed among right wing thinkers – what has fathered “woke”, Liberalism or Marxism? – the answer is BOTH, for Marxism is what happens when Liberalism runs to seed.
I shall certainly be buying a copy of this book. Well done for writing it.
But if I may offer my own in-a-nutshell refutation of “woke”, it depends on a trick, which confuses identity with “supremacy” where whites are concerned; and allows pretensions to supremacy to masquerade as mere “identity” where non-whites are concerned.
And the supremacy / identity confusion is just one of woke’s lies; by “whiteness” the wokestapo in fact mean whites, a people whom they aim to destroy; by “fragility” they mean any white person’s attempt to resist defamation; by “positive” discrimination they mean discrimination and so on.
Their poisonous perversion of language and morals has seeped so deeply into the minds of the idiot “bourgeoisie” and our corrupt establishment that vicious brutality – such as that taking place in northern town against white girls, or that taking place in South Africa against white farmers – is ignored or even excused.
The left, intellectually bankrupt and infiltrated by fourth phase Marxism, is now no more than a gnostic and narcissistic exercise in self-mutilation. In its vile decadence, it has taken control and unless it is swiftly removed from power we are finished. In short, we need a new 1989 to remove a corrupt, Marxist uniparty from office and start the rescue of our civilisation.
They (until it happens to them personally) would typically hand wave and excuse away what is happening now in South Africa as “karma” for the past injustices of apartheid and imperialism, of course. But two wrongs do NOT make a right. Evil + Evil = Twice the Evil.
“But those big bad white folks started it!” is basically their argument. One that would have miserable failed the kindergarten (Reception) test. It’s NOT about who “started” it, but rather it is who is mature enough to stop it. The onus is on everyone to STOP THE MADNESS!
Also, “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”, according to the ultimate authority on very literal decolonization himself, Mahatma Gandhi. If you fight fire with fire, everyone ultimately gets burned.
“Decolonisation” has nothing to do with slavery or colonialism. It’s simply a war on white European people and culture, because white European people and culture have achieved so much more than everybody else, and continue to do so. I’m not saying this because I’m a white European, it’s just an observation based on people across the globe voting with their feet and coming to countries based on white European people and civilisation. “Decolonisation” and those who advocate it pose an existential threat to white European people and civilisation. The end of this will be ugly. I will be long dead, but it will be brutal and bloody.
I hate to agree with such a bleak and depressing outlook, but I’m afraid you may be right.
“Even King Charles argued that the history of transatlantic slavery should be given the same national importance as the Holocaust.”
Why? 6 million Jews and many others were murdered in the most callous and brutal way in less than 10 years. What is the similarity with the Atlantic Slave Trade? The Jewish populations of a few European countries was almost wiped out, while the black population on both sides of the Atlantic has only grown.
Maybe the 25 million Whites enslaved and murdered by the Musulmans can also be given the same importance as the Holocaust.
Can we decolonise the UK of Indians, Muslims, Asians and Africans? Or is that racist? Even if it is I don’t care. Why are Whites colonising parts of the world ‘racist’ and not the reverse? We can also conclude that decolonising curricula of whiteness is also racist given it attacks a skin colour and related culture. This is called a logical deduction.
Racism is the new anti-racism. Destroying your health is the new protecting your health. Abusing children is the new caring for children.
Self destruction is the new normal.
Who would want the west to self-destruct? That’s what we should be asking.
Follow the money.
As with Covid, Climate hysteria and transhumanist ideology, I don’t believe that any of this is organic. It’s an ingenious systematic disassembly of an entire culture by people who don’t think there’s any longer a place for western ideas.
This is what asymmetric warfare looks like.
We always believed that WW3 would be nuclear; in fact it’s biological and, as with critical race theory, psychological. Why bomb a country when you can get it to tear itself apart.
The figures and percentages quoted in this article come from the same provenance as all such – they chart the march of Puritanism. It’s a seesaw equation – for every extra percentage point of righteous indignation there’s an equal and opposite point lost to ‘having a laugh’. It’s a reminder of the famous definition of Puritanism: ‘the continuing suspicion that someone, somewhere, may be happy’.
Indeed, it is basically thinly-veiled, warmed-over Puritanism at best. With perhaps some neo-Victorianism thrown in for good measure as well. UGH.
White people are an invention of the American chattering classes, same as black people, by the way. Obsessed with their custom navel-gazing, they simply haven’t yet managed to understand that a world outside of the USA which is materially different from it exists and they wouldn’t want to know about, anyway. For an American university professor who genuinely believes US forces liberated Auschwitz where they found heaps of dead bodies, that is, who remembers that US forces liberated the starving inhabitants of some concentration camp after the people who had fed them were forced to flee because of said American forces, and who remembers that a concentration camp was called Auschwitz, hence, they must both be the same — Only small-minded people would worry about getting the names correct when the big picture is all that matters! — I may be a (privileged) white person. To someone from England, I’m an Are you Polish? guy, something the professor is quite unable to understand.
Decolonize the world! is a slogan of American and America-centered academics unwilling to accept the fact that the systematic American abuse of black Americans is their very own contribution to the history of human atrocities. The sons and daughters of God’s own country cannot be guilty themselves. They also certainly haven’t reintroduced aimless torture into the judical process and never burnt any witches!
BTW, has Puerto Rico meanwhile been decolonized? And how independent are the Philipines really? Asking for a friend …
There is only ONE race: the HUMAN race.
An inverted pyramid hierarchy of dominance is still a hierarchy of dominance, the same old “power over” dominator model of social interaction. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.