The Woke Battle of the Sexes

There was some good news coming out of Exeter University this week, where Ben (alongside Peter Bleksley) successfully debated for the motion, “This house regrets the rise of woke culture”. The final result was 84/71, but the vote divided starkly across the sexes with almost all of the women voting against. This particular ‘tendency to woke’ amongst young women is well documented and listeners interested in exploring the phenomenon further might want to look up Freya India’s sub stack, GIRLS. Last week we discussed an article by an anonymous officer serving in the Metropolitan Police. Today we turn our attention to another article written anonymously, this time from within the Home Office. According to the author, civil service political impartiality has now morphed into a culture of ‘stewardship’ with even the permanent secretary of the Home Office saying in 2021 that there was no need to ‘slavishly’ follow government policy on diversity. In our final segment, we discuss a new report from Policy Exchange which has found that one in six teachers are now self-censoring over fears of causing religious offence. This will come as no surprise to listeners familiar with FSU cases and other well publicised events such as the Batley Grammar School protests of 2021 over a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed being shown in the classroom. An underlying theme of today’s episode is the ‘tyranny of pathological kindness’ described by Peter Hughes in his recent article for Unherd.  As Dr Hughes puts it, “to break [the pathocrats’] power means isolating the minority within the minority from the decent people who have become cruel out of fear, contagion and opportunism”. He adds, “in this struggle, we’ll find unexpected allies”; very true and something that we have certainly seen and appreciated at the FSU.