‘Woke’ has become a conservative fetish in Britain

There’s been a late entry in the competition for most cretinous misunderstanding of international trade policy. For anyone who’s been distracted by the ongoing meltdown of the global order, this week Britain finally signed a deal with the EU. The deal is sane and sensible enough to be slighty disappointing all round, which has not stopped the post-truth peanut gallery from freaking out.

For the Brexit fundamentalists, any form of deal, indeed the whole business of international diplomacy, is now for cucks and simps. If we were real patriots, we’d be marching through Normandy with the muskets out and banners flying to force the French to buy our sausages. There is no place for grown-up politics in the febrile imagination of the terminally anti-woke. 

For former member of European Parliament Dan Hannan, this relatively inoffensive deal means that “Britain will become the EU’s gimp, trussed up in black leather and zips, with a ball-gag in its mouth.” Let’s linger for a moment on that uncomfortably specific image. It is, of course, an unhinged thing for an adult politician to say in public, let alone one who actually had a major role in the Brexit negotiations.

There’s something increasingly pathetic about the bravado of the pre-canceled

I am uninterested in policing what Hannan or any other consenting adults want to do with rubber and floggers in their free time, nor do I wish to insult innocent kinksters by comparing them to members of the House of Lords. But the thrill of imagined victimhood shines a bit of a blacklight on the past ten years of culture war.

“Imagined” is the important word there. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the thing about people who wear gimp masks and ball gags is that they are usually doing it on purpose, for fun. It’s pretend oppression with pretend weapons specially designed not to do anyone permanent damage. Actual kidnappers tend not to shop at Ann Summers and nor do police officers – at least not professionally. Hannan seems to be among that rarefied slice of society who still think this is all some sort of racy game – the people who are still bleating about treachery while the rest of us have to get on with trying to repair our lives and undo some of the damage.

There’s been a vibe shift, you see. Going postal over “Brexit betrayal” is a painfully mid-2010s mood. But it’s taking some people a while to adjust. Months after the official “end of woke,” a certain sort of public thinker still seems to be salivating over a funhouse-mirror version of, well, me and my friends. Stuck on a train with last week’s issue of The Spectator, I found myself flipping through page after page describing the wickedness of the woke. It’s almost like they miss us.

Woke people have long been press-ganged into being part of this tedious public roleplay. Even in my personal life, friends of friends will respond to my rainbow hair by flashing their predictable opinions and waiting for me to tell them how very, very bad they’ve been. I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, but the ignorance has become insulting – because from where I’m sitting, the people most gluttonous for pretend punishment aren’t the ones with their material safety on the line.

Actually, for some reason, I have a track record of total strangers trying to recruit me into acts of punishment, and the one common factor was that they had more power than me and felt vaguely weird about it. This started with the manager at the cafe I worked in in my late teens, whose persistent back issues could apparently only be solved by having one or more of his petite employees walk up and down his spine in big boots.

There is a time and a place for persecution fantasies, and it is not in an average workplace, let alone in policymaking. Among my fellow leftists, when call-outs and cancellations do happen, I’ve always considered sadism the distinguishing factor: if you’re actually enjoying hurting another person, your motives are suspect and you should probably stop. But I can’t help thinking that political masochism is just as much a part of discursive chaos – and wondering if there’s a safe word for those of us recruited into the fantasy without consent.

There’s something increasingly pathetic about the bravado of the pre-cancelled – those who live in panting expectation of their own martyrdom at the hands of conniving wokesters whose sole purpose is to punish you personally for failing some notional purity test.

There’s a long queue of eager martyrs who are apparently still anxious to be burnt inside this straw man, and it’s getting tiresome. If you’re prepared to pay for the column inches, I can probably be persuaded to describe your moral, personal and aesthetic defects in depth, but it’s not my favorite way to spend my one wild and precious life. Besides, I’m burdened by the one thing that always ruins the fun in this sort of shadow power-play: namely, sincerity.

I discovered this one night in 2012, when I agreed to assist a professional dominatrix friend at the sort of club where men are expected to enter on their knees. There was a long line of prospective victims waiting to be disciplined, and my job was crowd control: I was supposed to fill time by telling them precisely why they were disgusting and deserved to be punished, then send them in to Mistress Lash, who had a much harder job.

After five minutes, I definitively discovered that cruelty doesn’t come naturally to me. I soon ran out of insults, especially because the gentlemen all seemed so sweet and polite that it was hard to stay cross with them.

Casting about for material, I started asking them if they had ever voted Tory, what their position was on abortion rights, and how they felt about wealth redistribution. This was South London, not Chipping Norton, so I was surprised to find that they were all conservatives, apart from one shy Green party member in snazzy sock-garters and not much else, who had voted Lib Dem tactically in a swing seat. And the prospect of actually having to be accountable for their actions seemed to spoil the game for everyone. Well, almost everyone.

I will always treasure the memory of a gentleman in his fifties with steel-gray hair and rubber underpants who seemed to have something to get off his chest. “And you?” I asked, doing my best impression of Brian Blessed in I, Claudius. “Have you ever voted Conservative?” “Once.” I had to bend down to hear him. “Just once. I’ve never told anyone this, but… Margaret Thatcher’s first government. I thought, because she was a strong woman…”

The poor man seemed genuinely contrite. “I was so wrong. Perhaps – perhaps I could be punished for it?” I patted him on the head and called out to Mistress Lash that I was sending in a likely one.

Wherever that man is now, I hope he’s found a little peace. For the rest of us, playtime is over. The lights are up and the music is off and everyone’s going back to their lives, where adults are required to negotiate in the shadow of actual violence. Not the fun kind. The kind where your trans friends get assaulted in bathrooms. 

Anyone competent enough to engage responsibly in sex or politics knows that it stops being a game the moment anyone might actually get hurt – and to pretend otherwise is despicable. I won’t tell you exactly how despicable. Someone might get overexcited.