Politics has been colonised by fanatics and bores

Labour MP Dawn Butler’s attack on the new Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, might have been demented, but it wasn’t surprising. Butler is a figure immersed in a simplistic ideology derived from critical race theory, which insists that everything can be explained in terms of race. Her rhetoric over the years – and her infamous retweet last weekend, suggesting that electing a black woman as leader of a right-wing party in a white-majority country represents the epitome of white supremacy – might have appeared deranged to the rest of us. But it was entirely in keeping with a certain unthinking, obsessive, monomaniacal mindset.

This is why we constantly hear ‘whiteness’ talked of as if it were an invisible, malignant force. It can be blamed for anything, with no proof. This kind of monomania is rife. We can detect it among anti-Israeli fanatics, who also employ simplistic and unfounded hyperbole in their repetitious rhetoric. Their particular favourite word in this regard being ‘genocide’. They believe that we should talk of nothing else but Israel, and never the crimes and human-rights violations committed by the likes of China, Iran or North Korea.

As the interruption of a Thom Yorke concert in Melbourne last week illustrated, we shouldn’t even be enjoying music. We must be railing against Israel. ‘How many dead children will it take for you to condemn the genocide in Gaza?’, a concert-goer barked at the Radiohead lead singer. Nor should we allow Israeli authors or lovers of literature to enjoy books, insist the likes of Sally Rooney and her chums. Such is the deep and wide loathing of these myopic fanatics.

Free thought and free speech are notions antithetical to the minds of obsessives – even, perversely, for authors who ostensibly make a living writing about the human condition in all its nuance and complexity. It’s no surprise that trans activists, with their parallel philistinism and brittle worldview, have also coerced publishers into dropping children’s authors who question gender ideology, such as Gillian Philip.

This belligerent monomania is also an established feature of the environmental movement, with its fringe activists, epitomised by Just Stop Oil, placing saving the planet above all other considerations – not least the ability of ordinary people to pay their bills, drive to work, or even fill up their petrol tank. Everything returns to climate change. As George Monbiot put it blankly on X recently, accompanied by a photograph from the floods in Spain: ‘They say climate *protesters* are disruptive. Valencia today.’ No context, no nuance. To infer a conclusion from one incident is as erroneous as peering out the window on a cold, rainy June day and muttering smugly: ‘Whatever happened to global warming?’

Still, the fanatics are with us. They won’t change the subject and they won’t change their minds. Just observe the Rejoiner types on social media, such as one-time philosopher AC Grayling and former television host Terry Christian, who waste their lives with their futile grumbling about Brexit. With their simplistic diagnoses and mechanical responses, these monomaniacs are everything that they accuse conservatives and populists of being.

The rise of black African Britons

Dawn Butler and Kemi Badenoch aren’t only divided by politics, but by ethnic background. While Butler was born in London to Jamaican parents, Badenoch (née Adegoke) was also born in the capital, but to Nigerian parents. And this difference is important.

Black West Indian Britons and black African Britons have always had an awkward relationship. A few weeks back in his Times column, Trevor Phillips wrote of how his parents from British Guiana warned him as a child to beware those of West African descent. These were the people, Phillips was told, who sold for profit his ancestors into slavery. More benignly, back in the 1980s, this tense rapport was represented in the Channel 4 sitcom, Desmond’s, in which the character from Africa was a haughty Gambian forever extolling the superiority of his people from the old continent.

Back then, to be a black Briton was usually to be of West Indian stock. But today there are twice as many black African Britons as there are those of Caribbean heritage. The multilayered make-up of the category ‘black Britons’ is important to bear in mind. As writer and journalist Tomiwa Owolade, who is also of Nigerian background, wrote in his book, This Is Not America: ‘We are affluent and educated immigrants from Nigeria and Ghana… and now live in Kent and Hertfordshire and send [our] kids to private or grammar schools.’

Not only do many West African Brits occupy a different socioeconomic demographic, but they tend to differ in their politics, too. Nigerians who have settled here tend to be from the Christian part of the country, and they are often deeply conservative by temperament. Indeed, the strictness of Nigerian parents has long been a staple of comedians here, from Gina Yashere to Stephen K Amos to Andi Osho and, most recently, Babatunde Aléshé.

The traditional outlook of Nigerians and West Africans reminds us that the term ‘black Britons’ is useful only up to a point. Even to regard ‘Nigerian’ as a monolithic entity is unsatisfactory, given the tribal divisions in that country, exposed most grimly in the Biafran War of 1967-1970.

Nevertheless, Nigerian Britons have now arrived in earnest, with their own brand of free thinking and outspokenness that their opponents just don’t understand.

Woke is not dead yet

Despite repeated comment pieces in the past few years telling us that woke is dead or dying, the news pages continue to suggest otherwise. This week we have read how Marks & Spencer has been selling bras for ‘young things’ (not young women). This story came days after a report that the Scouts is encouraging gender-neutral language among its members, urging children to drop the terms ‘mum’ and ‘dad’; news that councils in Leicestershire and Southampton are encouraging school pupils to play a form of ‘anti-racist Monopoly’; and reports of a literacy charity for children, the Scottish Book Trust, having changed the words of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ to make it gender-neutral.

Today, while elderly patients in hospitals are asked for their preferred pronouns, children are similarly cajoled into speaking and thinking in accordance with the new dogma. This political ideology is becoming ubiquitous, imposed on the populace from the cradle to the grave. There are ever-fewer spheres of life free from its reach.

Woke is not dead. Far from it. It has become normalised by stealth, and is now becoming a totalitarian doctrine from which there might soon be no escape.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.