Culture Wars & Woke

The next time a culture warrior hanging flags all over the place tells you it's patriotic pride and how Britain stopped the slave trade, tell them: that’s a bit woke, isn’t it? Because at the time, abolition wasn’t a flag-waving moment of national pride. It was denounced as dangerous radicalism. Abolitionists were mocked as fanatics, accused of wrecking trade and threatening the empire. And when it finally happened, the enslaved weren’t compensated - the slave-owners were, with a payout so vast it took taxpayers until the 21st century to finish paying it off.

That was woke. Just as it was woke to say children shouldn’t be sent up chimneys or into factories for twelve hours a day. Woke to demand clean water in cities drowning in sewage. Woke to push for schools, housing reform and basic sanitation. Every one of those campaigns was derided at the time as meddling, utopian nonsense. Today we call them civilisation.

Look at the record. In 1760, before the Industrial Revolution, about a third of England’s population relied on parish relief. By the 1830s, in some counties it was closer to half. In London during the Hungry Forties, one in five people lived in destitution, while children as young as nine worked twelve-hour days in factories. And in Ireland, a million starved during the famine while food was still exported because the market price was better. That was the free market in its purest form – profit first, people second.

Change didn’t come through benevolence. It came through what we’d now call woke laws - the Factory Acts, the Public Health Acts, the Education Act, the Housing Acts. Every one of them fought for by campaigners and resisted by capital until the pressure became irresistible. And the truth is, capitalists conceded because they had to. Without reform, they knew they’d have revolution on their hands.

And not every boss dug in their heels. The Quaker firms - Cadbury, Rowntree, Lever, Clarks - built model villages, schools and green spaces, treated their workers like human beings, and their companies still exist in the 21st century. The mill owners who squeezed every penny and shrugged at the slums are forgotten. Decency turned out not only to be moral, but sustainable.

And here’s the rub: what was once dismissed as woke is now our moral baseline. Abolition, sanitation, education, pensions, weekends off - none of them gifts from capitalists, none of them welcomed by conservatives of their day. They were forced through by reformers willing to be mocked for demanding fairness.

So when today’s right sneers at the word woke, remember what they’re really sneering at: the very foundations of modern society. Without the woke of the past, there’d be no freedom to boast about - and there certainly wouldn’t be any pensions. The truth is simple: the woke are always on the side of history.