Can the ‘anti-racist metaverse’ rid Wales of unwoke thoughts?

The Welsh government has just burned through around £1.2million to create what it calls the ‘world’s first anti-racist virtual world’. The aim is to teach Welsh teenagers about their alleged ‘white privilege’ and ‘unconscious bias’, through the medium of the ‘metaverse’. In this digital space, which has been rolled out across the nation’s further-education colleges, kids can relive the experience of the Bengal famine, explore an interactive gypsy campsite and receive interactive lessons in ‘black feminism’.

This woke metaverse project might sound otherworldly, but it is essentially an extension of the sadly all too real Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan, which commits Wales to becoming the first ‘anti-racist’ nation on Earth by 2030. Translated into English, this means that every aspect of Welsh public life is to be subsumed to the ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ agenda. Even as the rest of the West turns its back on woke, the Labour-run Welsh government has embraced it with gusto.

The Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan was born amid the hysteria of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Since then, the Welsh government has launched a guide to historical sites and landmarks which uses a colour-coded system to warn potential visitors of any possible connection to racism. Pubs, such as the Buccaneer Inn in Tenby, and even whole villages, including Nelson in Caerphilly, have been blacklisted as ‘racist’, thanks to fairly tenuous links to the slave trade. Parks have been declared problematic, because activities like ‘dog-walking’ are disproportionately enjoyed by white people. Even the beloved Welsh cake has been targeted for a woke makeover – a £10,000 research project aims to ‘decolonise’ the sugary treat. And now the Welsh government has created a digital safe space that it hopes will challenge the bigotry and oppression that it imagines is surging through the nation.

The anti-racist metaverse invites students aged 16 to 18 to wander through a solemn virtual ‘atrium’, which is adorned with portraits of civil-rights figures. From the atrium hub, users can navigate between themed zones and conference-style stands. One of these stands looks at sociology ‘through an anti-racist lens’, allowing users to explore ‘whiteness’ and how it impacts ‘social, learning and employment environments’. Another tells users that ‘men have an inherent psychological need to subjugate women’.

One room students can enter features a historical timeline, mostly focussing on the sins of the British Empire, with a predictable slant. It says of the 1770 Bengal famine: ‘Although partly down to weather conditions and droughts… most historians agree that the vast loss of life was directly down to the policies of the British.’ This may well be the case, but the metaverse editorialises further, directly comparing the loss of life in Bengal with the Nazi Holocaust.

Perhaps the most surreal set piece of all is a simulated Traveller campsite. As you enter the camp, you’re surrounded by notice boards, each featuring either a genuine racial atrocity committed against Romani people, such the Nazi concentration camps, or an alleged example of anti-gypsy bigotry. An election leaflet by the Conservative Party, calling for more public consultation on a potential Traveller site, is displayed as a supposed example of ‘dog-whistle’ racism.

And what really takes the Welsh cake is a digital billboard taking aim at comedian Jimmy Carr. It shows a 2022 leaflet demanding that Carr be banned from performing in Wales, following an offensive joke he made on one of his Netflix specials. Thankfully, this display was removed after the Welsh government was approached for comment by the Telegraph. But it is nevertheless telling: Welsh government apparatchiks really do view an edgy routine by a popular comedian as a matter as serious as slavery and the Holocaust. After all, the clear implication is that Wales cannot achieve ‘anti-racist’ status if comedians are still at liberty to crack a risqué joke.

This digital metaverse is not ‘anti-racism’ as any normal person would understand it – it is state-sponsored lunacy. A government that equates comedy to genocide, and cakes to colonial oppression, has long vacated the real world.

Stephen Sidney is a spiked intern.