Woke Code – how Johnson virtue-signals to the Greens
IN my TCW article published last Monday, I argued that the ‘Conservative’ Party’s so-called ‘War on Woke’ was more cosmetic than substantive. Since then, the announcements which have made about what still seem, essentially, to be palliatives mostly peripheral to the core issue, do little to dispel the impression of a desire to give mainly the mere appearance of a ‘fightback’ against the Woke agenda.
Largely because of space and time constraints, the article also dealt more or less solely with the UK domestic, socio-cultural elements of the Woke Agenda, and the Tories’ belated and somewhat limp reaction to it. But the broader, more comprehensive Woke agenda, I suggest, isn’t purely domestic and socio-cultural. It’s also internationalist and economic, where it’s anti-capitalist and collectivist rather than free-market and individualist, and advocates globalist-supranationalist oligarchical solutions to the problems it alleges exist, rather than nation-state, democratic ones.
In contrast to its unconvincing protestations of anti-Wokeness, Boris Johnson’s government appears to be going out of its way to virtue-signal its enthusiastic alignment with two of the most widespread and potentially calamitous Woke shibboleths of our time – Green-Left ‘climate-change’ and its new first cousin, the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset programme to exploit the Covid-19 pandemic so as to bring about the comprehensive re-vamping of all aspects of our societies and economies under a globalist, supranationalist, technocratic totalitarianism.
This is well illustrated by three pairs of linked tweets by Johnson and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, starting with the ritual obsession, which all senior British politicians have, of being seen to be among the first to have telephone conversations with their counterparts in a new US administration.
There’s little intrinsically wrong in this tedious, puerile, willy-waving aspect of the diplomatic dance. Notable on this occasion, however, is how Johnson and Raab each take the opportunity to shoehorn into it painfully contrived references, linking pandemic recovery with the advancement of the Green eco-agenda – including the almost obligatory buzzword-phrases ‘green and sustainable recovery’ (Johnson), and both ‘tackling climate change‘ and the now almost universal ‘build back better‘ (Raab).
Next, their unnecessarily effusive, even cloying, welcomes for Biden’s rush to sign the USA up to the twin Green mantras of the costly but ineffective Paris Climate Agreement and the impractical and ruinously expensive drive to achieve the chimera of ‘carbon’ neutrality by 2050.
For a government supposedly committed to a ‘levelling-up’ agenda allegedly intended to benefit people in the relatively economically disadvantaged Midlands and North, burdening them with much higher heating and power bills to pay for unreliable and subsidy-dependent Green energy seems a strange way of going about it.
Here, once again, are the buzzwords beloved of the Great Reset’s adherents. ‘Net Zero by 2050’ and ‘work together for our planet’ from Johnson; ‘Paris Agreement‘ and ‘tackle climate change‘ (again) from Raab.
Lastly, their congratulatory tweets on New Zealand’s National Day to its Prime Minister, that darling of the globalist ‘progressive’ ‘Liberal’-Left, Jacinda Ardern.
This isn’t a controversial message in itself – New Zealand is, after all, a member of both the Commonwealth and the Anglosphere’s Five Eyes security alliance – but once more, we see the chance taken to insert some key WEF/Davos Great Reset platitudes. From Johnson, we get ‘make the world a greener . . . place‘; from Raab (yet again) ‘to combat climate change‘; and, intriguingly, from both, the ubiquitous and sinister ‘build back better‘.
And that’s only three. Going by his Twitter timeline, Johnson especially seems unable these days to tweet at all without sliding in a reference to one or more of these now über-modish clichés.
It’s not as if the use of this particular phraseology is unique to either politics or Britain, either. The same mantras, above all the same’ build back better‘ platitudes, keep coming from as far afield and diverse sources as Trudeau in Canada, Macron and Merkel at a virtual leaders’ summit, Biden in the USA, corporate CEOs meeting at environmental foundation gatherings, even Kensington Palace. Coincidence? I think not.
One wonders to what extent all this has now morphed from being empty virtue-signalling into a subtle code: a method for business, transnational bureaucracy and above all political leaders to signal to each other and to the elite of the supranationalist crony-corporatist globalist oligarchy that, despite being obliged for domestic political reasons to offer reassuring but obfuscatory bromides to their electorates, they are in fact entirely on board with the Great Reset and Green agendas, and can be trusted to further them in their own countries.
Only just over a year ago, Johnson banned his ministers from attending the annual Davos schmooze-fest of the great and the (not so) good of the globalist oligarchy. Now he appears to be taking not merely instructions but dictation from them.
A week ago, I insinuated that Johnson’s ‘Conservatives’ were only pretending to fight the Woke agenda at the domestic, socio-cultural level. The way in which their proposed post-Covid greater state-interventionism and Green eco-socialism manifest the accelerating conflation of the Green ‘climate-change’ agenda with the Covid-19 recovery agenda under the overarching aegis of the WEF/Davos Great Reset suggests that, when it comes to the Woke agenda at the internationalist, economic level, they aren’t even pretending to.
Editor’s note: The full long-read, which combines both this article and its predecessor of last Monday, can be viewed here.
*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from The Conservative Woman can be found here ***
