UK Conservative Party’s co-chairman has called on fellow Brits to have the “courage” to oppose cancel culture
Speaking on Monday to the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing US think tank, Oliver Dowden complained that a “painful woke psychodrama” was unfolding across Western nations, threatening their values and sapping “societies of their own self-confidence”.
“The US and the UK may certainly be very different societies. But we are joined by the same fundamental values. Neither of us can afford the luxury of indulging in this painful woke psychodrama,” Dowden told his audience.
The senior UK politician stated that we should not be “obsessing over pronouns or indeed seeking to decolonise mathematics.”
Dowden, who is the Conservative Party Co-Chairman and former Culture Secretary, accused “social-justice warriors” of engaging in a “form of Maoism” that seeks to “expunge large parts of our past,” without explaining “the context” behind it.’
Warning about the ‘woke’ ideology, Dowden claimed it’s now “everywhere,” from universities and schools to government bodies and corporations, and called it a “dangerous form of decadence.” “When our attention should be focused on external foes, we seem to have entered this period of extreme introspection and self-criticism,” Dowden lamented.
The speech to the Heritage Foundation marks his latest attack on ‘cancel culture,’ having decried the phenomenon and “woke aggression” at last year’s Conservative Party conference, calling it the “bullying and haranguing of individuals” because of their beliefs.
Urging change during his address on Monday, Dowden expressed concern that the West has become “obsessed by what divides us rather than what unites us.” Issuing a call to the UK, US and other Western nations, the he urged individuals to not abandon their values “for the sake of appeasing this new groupthink.”
