UK has become slave to woke nonsense – here’s what new minister for common sense Esther McVey must do to stop the rot

IT is a measure of how utterly doolally this Government and country has become that it feels the need to appoint a Minister for Common Sense.

Common sense used to be just that — basic sound judgment that required little thought or explanation.

You know, like not smoking at a petrol station . . . or describing someone with a penis as male.

But no, common sense has all but evaporated in public life — slowly expunged by successive administrations acceding to the screeching demands of idle snowflakes and woke pressure groups and their obstinate new rules.

So I guess we should be thankful that Rishi Sunak has installed former GMTV presenter Esther McVey to this once unnecessary role.

The MP for Tatton in Cheshire, officially a minister without portfolio, has been briefed with “leading the charge on the government’s anti-woke agenda”.

What “anti-woke agenda?”, I hear you cry.

Well, quite.

So far that agenda — led by the now defenestrated Suella Braverman — has been one of all mouth and no trousers.

No wonder our once proud state institutions have been reduced to hotbeds of pointless political correctness and outright laziness.

So, Esther, let’s have a look at just some of what your bulging in-tray has in store…

QUANGOS

COMMON sense is often an alien concept to many of Britain’s quangos, which love nothing more than frittering away our cash on dubious projects — usually in far-flung places.

Look at the British Council’s bonkers decision to lump £10,700 into a Serbian drag festival called Dragoslavia — despite not a single one of our acts appearing.

Quite how a group of grown men in wigs and miniskirts cavorting around in a disco in Belgrade was furthering Britain’s cultural clout around the world is anyone’s guess.

But all was not lost – the British Council did manage to get its logo to appear at the bash.

A crucial bit of brand awareness, I’m sure we can all agree.

Or take the UKRI, the government body responsible for funding research and innovation.

It managed to squander £27million in just two years on such necessary tasks as “decolonising” collections of music and sculptures — and examining the relationship between plants and British imperialism.

In layman’s terms this is known as fixing a problem that did not exist in the first place.

Is it common sense to blow taxpayers’ money on issues almost none of us give a stuff about, Esther?

HOSPITALS

OUR health service has become the land that common sense forgot.

Here diversity dogma and a new ludicrous LGBT lexicon reign supreme.

As a woman (sorry if that’s presumptuous, Esther) you might like to reintroduce that concept to the NHS, which seems hell bent on erasing.

In NHS Trusts across the land women are slowly being phased out and replaced with “pregnant people” who “chest-feed” “human milk”.

Women no longer have periods — it is only “people who bleed” who have them.

And “mothers”? Wash your mouth out you TERF, they shall be known as “birthing people”, conducting “vaginal births” from what some PC zealots would like to refer to as “bonus holes”.

All this so as not to offend non-binary and transgender communities (currently 0.5 per cent of the population, according to the latest census).

Meanwhile, NHS England officials are creating more “diversity and inclusion” roles to enforce all this wokery, with three new departments on the horizon employing 244 people.

At least 177 of these apparently vital staff will trouser £50,000 a year.

Will all this shorten the nearly EIGHT MILLION-strong waiting list, Esther?

SCHOOLS

THE prevalence of lefties in our schools is nothing new — just count all those beards and drab knitwear choices.

But as the Left’s causes mushroom — with many more imagined injustices imported from the US by the week — so too do potential issues with what our kids are taught.

Pupils, including some as young as five, are now learning Critical Race Theory concepts such as “white privilege”, “systemic racism” and “unconscious bias”.

Nearly 60 per cent of students aged 18 to 20 said they had encountered these contentious concepts in school, according to a YouGov poll last year from Policy Exchange.

Of course, it is helpful to recognise that the world is made up of people who are different and that some have more power and agency than others.

But is it common sense, Esther, for white, working-class kids to be asked to “check their privilege”?

Exactly what privilege is that?

The gender debate is another battleground that has been imported into schools, with kids in some secondary schools taught that there are 100 genders, like the classics “demi-man” and “genderf***”.

Lessons in anal sex and masturbation taught before children reach puberty.

Is that also common sense?

CIVIL SERVICE

THERE is nothing the Blob likes more than a bit of box-ticking — that’s when they’re actually doing any work.

Here, diversity and equality strategies flourish as if no manager in this hyper-sensitive age is capable of stopping discrimination on their own.

Are we to assume that with out the 30 staff the Department of Work And Pensions (your old patch, Esther) working on diversity and inclusion last year discrimination would have run riot?

Or likewise in the Home Office, where 23 people were given the same brief?

One report last year put the cost to the taxpayer of the 255 staff working on equality matters at a whopping £11.5 million.

Yes, stamping out discrimination is important but can fewer people being funded by the public purse manage that?

I think we know the answer. But do you Esther?

And for those civil servants not toiling away at the coal face of injustice in the workplace, productivity still remains low, down 5.7 per cent.

Whitehall buildings routinely stand up to two- thirds empty thanks to so-called work from home TWaTs — who visit the office only on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Surely that’s not common sense, minister?

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Colin Robertson

November 14, 2023 8:00 pm