The astroturfing of woke

The woke love to claim that they are the authentic voice of the oppressed. But unlike past struggles for equal rights and civil liberties, the causes championed by modern ‘progressives’ – from trans rights to climate extremism – have the fulsome backing of the state. These campaigns tend to be astroturfed, rather than grassroots.

Take Pride, for instance. The early gay-rights campaigners who established the first parades faced extraordinary hostility. But now that Pride has become a celebration of trans and so-called LGBTQ+, all that has changed. Earlier this week, the Daily Mail revealed that police officers in Scotland have been encouraged to attend Pride parades as part of their official duties. Police Scotland said that they would pay their uniformed personnel to spend the day at LGBT marches. Presumably, getting covered in rainbow facepaint, or taking selfies with blokes in bondage gear, is a better use of their time than fighting crime.

To be clear, officers don’t even need to actually police the parade in order to get paid. They are just expected to take part and ‘show support’ for the LGBT community. Because, apparently, Pride ‘is a community-engagement opportunity, therefore participation will be considered a duty day’. Officers taking part can choose between either receiving normal pay or getting a day off in lieu.

The wisdom behind this move is questionable, to say the least, given that Police Scotland’s resources are currently spread incredibly thin. In March, they announced that officers would no longer be expected to respond to every crime, instead leaving ‘minor’ incidents uninvestigated. Already, non-emergency 101 calls can take up to 20 minutes to be answered. Encouraging officers to spend a day doing the ‘Macarena’ seems like a colossal waste of time and money – and indeed a stunning dereliction of duty.

Needless to say, it is not actually a police officer’s job to take part in Pride – or any kind of political demonstration. But officers are not alone in this. The Times reported this week that UK Sport, the government agency responsible for investing in Olympic and Paralympic sport, has been training athletes in how to be social activists.

UK Sport currently runs two such programmes for Team GB. ChangeMaker is aimed at helping athletes returning from the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic games to campaign in their local communities. Similarly, Powered by Purpose wants to turn athletes into ‘agents for social change’ by encouraging them to pick a cause like ‘sustainability’, ‘accessibility’ or ‘gender rights’ to champion.

UK Sport has been running its Powered by Purpose programme for a couple of years now. After a pilot in 2022, a report was published a year later, claiming that ‘100 per cent of athletes benefited’ from taking part. Apparently, 39 per cent of athletes felt a ‘lack of purpose’ before the course and 67 per cent felt they ‘lacked knowledge’ on social issues. Who knew that it was the job of the state to fund these political campaigns? And whoever thought social activism was meant to be about giving a sense of purpose to the activists themselves?

At the time of the launch, Katherine Grainger, chair of UK Sport, said: ‘We are lucky to have a generation of athletes who are prepared to use the power and platform of Olympic and Paralympic sport to inspire positive change for people, communities and the planet.’ But surely, the best possible use of the Olympic and Paralympic ‘platform’ would be to display some sporting prowess? It is alarming that the head of a sporting body seems to have forgotten this.

Perhaps what is most irksome about all this astroturfed activism is how it is always limited to the same few woke concerns. There is rarely any deviation from the causes of ‘trans rights’, ‘mental-health awareness’, ‘anti-racism’ and ‘climate change’. There are surely thousands of injustices that are worth fighting against, but don’t fit into these limited categories.

Let’s be honest, none of these causes has bubbled to the surface due to popular anger or concern. Their prominence is clearly not the result of grassroots activism or hard-fought struggles. Rather, they are the pet causes of an elite. They are top-down impositions, shoved down the throats of the long-suffering public.

Ordinary people are absolutely right to bristle at all this astroturfed politics.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.