Seeking to catch up with his rival for the Conservative Party leadership, it is Rishi Sunak who has launched the fiercest attacks against “woke nonsense” and “left-wing agitators,” but it is Liz Truss who can boast that she has already done something to that purpose.
Sunak now claims that “woke nonsense” has “permeated public life” and he promises to “end the brainwashing, the vandalism and the finger pointing” and “protect British freedoms” if he becomes the next U.K. prime minister. He also intends to amend the Equality Act to preserve gendered words such as “woman” or “mother” and clarify that gender self-identification has no legal effect.
“The worst offender in this regard is the Equality Act 2010, conceived in the dog days of the last Labour government,” he said, adding: “It has been a Trojan horse that has allowed every kind of woke nonsense to permeate public life.”
Boris Johnson’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer also assured that he would oppose the presence of men calling themselves “trans women” in women’s sports competitions, and that he would preserve women-only services. He also wants his future government, if he is appointed leader of the Conservative Party, to issue stricter guidelines on sex education in schools to protect children “from inappropriate materials.”
Sunak pledged to protect freedom of speech in the public administration by reforming the Public Sector Equality Duty to ensure that the public sector is “open and welcoming” to people regardless of their political views and their religious and philosophical beliefs.
This would ensure organizations “are open and welcoming” to people with differing political opinions and religious and philosophical world views, “putting a stop to practices such as no-platforming,” his campaign said.
Sunak has also said that he intends to “safeguard our shared cultural, historical and philosophical heritage.”
As for Liz Truss, the current foreign secretary who is the favorite in the polls, having a 30-point lead over Rishi Sunak among members of the Conservative Party, she has promised to “tackle left-wing groupthink in government” and to abolish diversity and inclusion jobs that “distract from delivering on the British people’s priorities.”
Last May, an investigation by the Telegraph revealed how woke and gender ideology infested central government at all levels in the United Kingdom.
The civil service documents seen by The Telegraph refer to there being over 100 different genders, and while the “binary” description of a person as a “man” or a “woman” is being increasingly proscribed in Whitehall, the British civil service has become open to people self-identifying themselves as, among other things, transgender, transsexual, non-binary, gender fluid, genderqueer, gender variant, cross-dresser, genderless, third gender, bigender, intersex, omnigender, pangender, two spirit, gender outlaw, demigender, gendervoid, graygender, androgynous, agender, and gender non-conforming individuals, to name but a few seen by The Telegraph in Whitehall documents.
“According to one appraisal document, seen by The Telegraph, an official was told they were expected to spend 20 percent of their ‘corporate objective’ time working within ‘corporate identity networks.’ According to a source, a corporate objective is defined as a ‘work objective that contributes to building an inclusive civil service’,” The Telegraph wrote. “The official was told to spend 5 percent of their corporate objective time participating in a ‘non-binary’ network which included attending a ‘gender non-conforming book club’ and celebrating ‘Non-Binary Awareness Week’.” The said official told The Telegraph: “I was hired to do trade policy and yet the taxpayer pays me to waste 20 percent of my corporate work time on this crap.”
“One senior civil servant from the Department for International Trade, who declined to be named, claimed they were only promoted after they began wearing a ‘non-binary’ lanyard, which is black, purple, white and yellow,” The Telegraph further wrote.
Last week, The Telegraph said it had access to leaked documents that showed the then International Trade Secretary Liz Truss had urged Dominic Cummings, the chief adviser to Boris Johnson at the time, to scrap the diversity and inclusion roles in the civil service and to tackle the issue of the civil service’s “liberal groupthink.”
In December 2020, it was revealed that “unconscious bias” training would be scrapped for all civil servants. In the past five years, nearly 170,000 staff across the civil service had taken part in these types of sessions meant to alert them to their hidden prejudices. Some Tory MPs had expressed anger at those training courses introduced under David Cameron’s Tory government, which they said was driven by a “woke agenda.”
Liz Truss was also involved in the scrapping of those “unconscious bias” training sessions and she had instructed her departments to review their partnerships with Stonewall, the largest LGBT organization in the U.K. which has gained much influence over the years and has been accused of “trans extremism.”
According to this state-sponsored far-left organization, “Research suggests that children as young as 2 recognize their trans identity,” as they wrote last month, reacting to an article in Metro from a mother complaining that her 4-year-old child’s nursery was not respecting the child’s “gender nonconforming” identity. “Yet, many nurseries and schools teach a binary understanding of pre-assigned gender,” the Stonewall activists complained, stating that “LGBTQ-inclusive and affirming education is crucial for the well-being of all young people!”
According to The Telegraph, white civil servants in the U.K. also undergo other forms of training that teach them “that Britain is a ‘racist’ country and that white officials should never contradict people from ethnic minorities.”
For years in the U.K., the so-called “Conservative” Party has been one of the most liberal-progressive center-right parties in Europe. For example, it was this very “Conservative” Party that brought in “gay marriage” in 2013 and, under the Equality Act 2010, gave Catholic adoption centers the choice of either giving up their business or giving up their faith. Under Cameron, it became impossible to entrust children for adoption only to married couples with a mother and a father, and all the Catholic adoption centers that still existed ten years ago have now closed.
It is also under conservative governments that woke and LGBT totalitarianism has developed in Britain over the past decade. One example of how bad things have become for individual freedoms was the way Polish journalist, Rafał Ziemkiewicz, was arrested on arrival at Heathrow airport and then turned away for his political views during a private trip to the land of the Bill of Rights.
The fight against the far-left’s neo-Marxist “woke” and LGBT ideologies which have become dominant and increasingly oppressive in the Conservative Party-governed U.K. is apparently one of the key issues that is being raised in the current party leadership contest.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Catholic, pro-life conservative minister for government efficiency, who backs Liz Truss’s plan for a Whitehall shake-up, has said that diversity roles in the civil service were “created by the woke for the woke.”
Attorney General Suella Braverman, who was probably the most conservative leadership contender but was eliminated in the second round of voting by Tory MPs, and also supports Liz Truss, boasted of having scrapped “downright dangerous” diversity training schemes in her own department.
In some of the training sessions scrapped by the attorney general after she took office in February 2020, civil servants were urged to become “allies” of LGBT people and said to “recognize your privilege and transfer the benefits of it to others who lack it.” In another session, they were told it was “not up to you as a white person” to tell black people whether or not a phrase was offensive, and that you should “educate yourself as to why the phrase is offensive and stop using it.”
Before she was voted out of the leadership contest by Tory MPs, Suella Braverman pledged to stand up to this type of “woke rubbish” if she became prime minister.
Until now, both Sunak and Truss have been seen more as liberals than conservatives, and one may doubt whether the future Tory prime minister will really stand up to woke and LGBT ideologies and initiate a return to conservative values that have long been abandoned by their party. Liz Truss is a former Remainer that has now embraced Brexit while advocating for more immigration, and Rishi Sunak now promises tax cuts after having raised taxes as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Still, the sheer fact that pledges to defend freedoms against woke and LGBT ideologies are being used to appeal to conservative voters is something new in the U.K. and it resembles what has been happening in the U.S. in recent years.
By contrast, in continental Europe, the European Commission and the European Parliament have been trying to impose the very same woke and LGBT ideologies, including, through the WHO standards for sexual education in Europe they promote as their own standards, the crap about 2-year-olds having to look for their gender identity, on more conservative societies of central Europe, taking advantage of the EU’s financial leverage. It should also be stressed that this issue is being raised in a Tory leadership contest at a time when the British police have been instructed to stop “wasting their time” opening hate crime cases each time some activists feel they have been “offended” by other people on social networks, and just after the NHS has announced the closure of its infamous Gender Identity Development Service run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust.
