Opinion
2nd February 2023
A better way!
Once I shared the drive from Birmingham to Bristol with a client. He drove us from our hotel near the airport round the M42 to the Hopwood Services, and I took over from there. As I had not driven into the site I had paid little attention to how we got there, and so when I drove out I simply followed the sign onto the Motorway and carried on. It was probably over half an hour later I saw a turning for Stratford on Avon. I had not realised this was signed from the M5 but one learns something every day. A little later I saw a sign for another Midlands destination and began to sense something was wrong. We were not, it seemed, on the M5 at all. We were on the M40. Hopwood is one of those services which is not on the motorway itself, but accessed from the roundabout at a junction. That means it has only one site, whichever way one is going, and the first exit for the M42 is for the Eastbound carriageway, which eventually becomes the M40 and heads off to London.
Having come so far South, albeit South East rather than South South West, there was no point travelling back to Birmingham. The obvious thing to do was to leave at the next junction and head South West until we hit either the M5 or the M4 and thence head for Bristol.
The point was, we weren’t where we were supposed to be, so we had to set off again from where we were. We could not start from where we’d like to be. We were where we were.
When I read articles from my fellow anti-Wokeists I am increasingly struck by their desire to be in a different world, a world where the thing they dislike just wasn’t there. They rail and rant against the abuses and the dangers. They try to ridicule the absurd. They express fear of a society out of control, detached from reason, dismissive of the obvious, rejecting evidence, and dangerous to children, to democracy, to anyone who doesn’t fit the Pseudo-Liberal labels or worship the Pseudo-Liberal gods. I understand their fear, but am tired of reading the same old complaints again and again. Yes, I acknowledge the problem, but simply repeating it over and over again will not solve anything, just as repeating Pseudo-Liberal claims without producing a shred of evidence does not make them true. Repetition is not an argument. Nor is it a solution. We are where we are. We won’t get anywhere else just by grumbling about it. We’ll have to move to do that, and we cannot move from anywhere other than where we currently are.
Equality Diversity and Inclusion are not going to go away as public policy, but the officers employed to oversee that field do need to learn there is something better than the Wokeist approach, something fairer they would promote if they knew how. What we need is more people to join in working out what that is and how to teach it, how to put it before the world so others will see it, and how to explain its practical implementation in the workplace, in politics, or the media; in short, how to replace virtue signalling with genuinely virtuous behaviour.
I have tried approaching some of the writers of these critical articles and asking them to join me in building a solution, but they just say they are too busy. They seem not to be too busy to write another thousand words bemoaning the problem, just too busy to participate in a constructive solution. Come on! We can do this if we just change our use of time from complaining about the status quo to building and promoting a new better approach. We already have the bones of that. It just needs a little flesh and the energy to put it out for discussion. On 22nd July last year I announced a change in emphasis in this column. I am still working on the change but I need others to join in. We cannot rely on cursing the darkness. Let’s try lighting a candle!