The Valdo Calocane case confirms it: wokeness kills

There’s one surefire way to know if your belief system is a bad one: it endangers life. If your ideology imperils other people, on the foul grounds that your virtue counts for more than their safety, then it is a morally unfit one. We can now say this, beyond a shadow of a doubt, about wokeness. It prizes its own preening credo more highly than it does the life and limb of everyday citizens. Just consider the grim case of Valdo Calocane.

The media call him ‘the Nottingham killer’. On 13 June 2023 he committed a crime so dreadful that Nottingham still reels from it. In the feverish grip of psychosis, he knifed to death the 19-year-old students, Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, and 65-year-old school janitor Ian Coates. He severely injured three others, too. He was later found guilty of manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility and sentenced to indefinite confinement in a high-security hospital.

If you thought this case couldn’t get any worse, brace yourself. Yesterday we discovered a new and terrible truth: Calocane was once freed by mental-health workers because they feared being thought of as racist if they detained him. Convinced there were ‘too many young black men in custody’, they let him out, whereupon he committed more offences, eventually including the savage destruction of three precious lives. Clearly the inner virtue of these overlords of public health is more sacred than the welfare of the masses.

The details are chilling. They came out on the first day of a public inquiry exploring the ‘events, acts and omissions’ that led to Calocane being on the streets, free to kill. The inquiry was told that, in 2020, Calocane experienced the first pangs of psychosis. He became violent. Then a student at Nottingham University, he was found ‘repeatedly kicking and punching’ a fellow student’s dorm door. He was hauled off for an assessment and found to be psychotic.

Yet he was set free. One of the doctors was ‘leaning towards’ sectioning him. But a team of mental-health professionals had other ideas. In the words of the Guardian, they ‘considered research evidence that examined the over-representation of young black men in detention’, and they decided it would be better to treat Calocane in the community. The Mail nails it: they ‘feared [that] detaining him would be racist’, so they let loose on to the streets of Nottingham this dangerous, psychotic individual.

Now we know: the dispiriting woke creed of race obsession carries more moral weight than the security of ordinary people. Sacralising the performative virtue of ‘anti-racist’ officials is more important in 21st-century Britain than ensuring the safety of working men and women. To release into the community a known sufferer from violent psychosis, out of a terror of being thought of as racist, is to elevate the ideological needs of ruling-class narcissists over the most fundamental liberty of the people – the freedom to be safe.

Predictably, Mr Calocane swiftly committed more crimes. He booted in a neighbour’s door, which made her so frightened she leapt from a first-floor window and damaged her spine. He was briefly sectioned after that, then let out again. He committed more offences, and then in 2023 he carried out his apocalyptic slaughter of innocents in Nottingham. Last year a review by the Care Quality Commission found that a ‘series of errors and misjudgements’ by health officials led to the catastrophic mishandling of Calocane and ‘the risk he presented to the public’. Now we discover that the baleful creed of wokeness played a role in this reckless endangerment of the people of Nottingham in the service of the ideology of the elites.

There is no question: wokeness poses a dire threat to public safety. Officialdom’s debilitating dread of being thought of as ‘racist’ is particularly poisonous. The safety of Britons is frequently sacrificed at the altar of this elite terror of being tarred as unwoke. Consider the rape-gang scandal, when cops, councillors and politicians looked the other way as thousands of working-class girls were raped by gangs disproportionately made up of Muslim men. The reason for their deadly nonchalance in the face of such working-class suffering? They feared being thought of as ‘Islamophobic’ if they investigated the gangs too vigorously.

Or consider the 2017 Manchester Arena atrocity. The inquiry into that act of Islamist barbarism heard that a security guard had failed to approach the young man who was mumbling to himself and carrying an outsized backpack – the killer, Salman Abedi – because he feared being viewed as racist. The guard said he had a ‘bad feeling’ about this young man who was ‘fidgety and sweating’. But he held back because he was ‘scared of being… branded a racist’. He feared he would ‘have got into trouble’ if he was wrong about this nervous-looking non-white man. What a perfect and terrifying snapshot of how morally incapacitating the neo-Stalinist culture of race grievance can be, where a man dreads acting against a suspected suicide bomber in case HR should haul him for a reprimand and some racial re-education.

The gender wing of wokeness is lethal, too. Consider the placing of rapists in women’s jails, some of whom went on to sexually assault inmates. The dignity of womankind burnt as an offering to the sexist post-truth mantra of ‘Transwomen are women’. Meanwhile, in the US the woke insanity of ‘Defund the Police’, popularised by Black Lives Matter, led to a spike in crimes and even homicides in areas where cops were stood down. Michael Shellenberger, in his book San Fransicko, calls it ‘pathological altruism’, where ‘woke’ cities adopt policies that lead to more anti-social behaviour, more crime and more sorrow for working people.

We need answers on Nottingham. Death came to that city in 2023 – was it aided by the ideologues who stink up the corridors of power in modern Britain? Any ideology that prioritises virtuous posturing over public dignity must be urgently dismantled.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book, Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism and Technocracy, is out now. Find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.