As The Sun reported yesterday:
ESTHER McVey has made a shock return to the Cabinet as Rishi Sunak's "common sense tsar" tasked with tackling the scourge of wokery, The Sun understands.
The PM appointed Ms McVey to the Cabinet Office role today in an olive branch to the Tory right.
I know that woke is a contentious word, but let me note what it means. A common English definition is:
Aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality
Another is:
Aware of social and political issues, especially racism
Those are from Cambridge and Oxford dictionaries, respectively.
So we now have a minister, who was moonlighting on GB News until the weekend, whose task it is to promote unawareness (or might we call it ignorance or political incomprehension?), indifference, racism, inequality and social division.
You literally could not make callousness on this scale up, and it is happening in our government now. No wonder we have thugs at the beck and call of minister's dog whistles.
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I like the Sindhu Vee definition she gave on a recent stand up segment. A woke person can’t tell the difference between racism and a joke about race.
Did you mean “A woke person understands that there is no difference between racism and a joke about race. “
Coldwar Steve calls her the wokefinder general.
She is also referred to as the minister for common sense.
In the view attributed to Albert Einstein – common sense is actually nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind prior to the age of eighteen. Is this the best basis for government? Surely we need our leaders to be critical thinkers who challenge prejudices and seek deeper understanding of the complex problems we face in order to find better ways forward which benefit all their citizens.
Well said
I studied humanities and I remember, during a seminar, a fellow student said “Well, it’s just common sense isn’t it?” This started a debate about what common sense actually was. It was a long time ago now, but I still wince when I hear the term used. It was once “common sense” to buy, sell, and own human beings, to ship unwanted humans to concentration camps, and so on. The term is used in place of an argument, relies on commonly held prejudices (I didn’t know Einstein spoke of it, thank you Ros)… so I suppose that makes it rather perfect for a title for a government position.
Agreed
John Kenneth Galbraith called it ‘conventional wisdom’; it was similarly defined and just as useless/dangerously wrong for real-life economics.
The big giveaway in the term ‘common sense’ is the ‘common’ bit, i.e. ‘popular’, ie. ‘populism’.
It is worth considering why Braverman was REALLY sacked. Was it because she was just too honest and forthright about things that the Tories are really doing? Or was she just far too clumsy for them? I mean, you have to not make it too obvious when you have decided to rip everything up that you’re enjoying it.
The Tories are going Right wing on us because they know there is fertile ground there and as Hannah Arendt points out:
‘The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.’
Matt Carr (substack) has written a wonderful piece that puts all the very recent events together. Each on its own looks mad – put together you see the full dystopian picture.
And he’d missed the late addition of McVey…
https://open.substack.com/pub/mattcarr/p/braverland?r=qshi&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
We’ve gone way beyond anything that Armando Ianucci could imagine
The term “Woke” originated in America where it was derived from the imperative to remain: “Awake to Racial and Social Injustice”. Therefore the Anti-Woke agenda is demonstrably in favour of perpetuating racial and social injustice; no wonder it is Tory policy!
The recent attacks have falsely weaponized the term relying on public ignorance to ramp-up bigotry in the UK; classic British divide and rule tactics. We need to make the general public aware of this toxic stated policy of the Tory Party. I bring this up in debates and meetings to help inform others. Thank you Richard; we must all promote the truth.
Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.
W. Somerset Maugham