On Wokery and Net Zero
Unexpectedly the other day, following an emergency operation, I found myself immobilised, catheterised, sleepless and uncomfortable with the small hours to get through on a surgical ward. In desperation I asked a nurse if there was lying around something – anything! – which I might read, and after some searching she returned with a copy of the Scottish Sunday Express (for 22nd June 2025, the academic in me is moved to note). This was reading matter which ordinarily I should have rejected out of hand, but my state was dire and my need pressing – so I spent a bleary hour or two looking through the paper. The reflections thus occasioned have seemed in retrospect worth recording.
For those unfamiliar with it, the Scottish Sunday Express appears to cater to a readership composed of what the Prime Minister likes to call “hardworking people” – practical, commonsense, lower-middle class and resolutely lower-middlebrow, firmly attached to traditional British values albeit with a Scots accent. (A gushing double-page spread in my borrowed edition featured King Charles at some race meeting, immaculate in light-grey suit, lemon-yellow waistcoat and topper – the tone entirely deferential if not adulatory.) The general ambience was that of a paper intended for people with the expectations and thought-patterns but perhaps without the cheap fashion aspirations of those who might otherwise take in the Daily Mail.
The first thing among the offerings to this clientele which really caught my eye (after His Majesty) was an indignant pouncing on wokery, evident in several articles. A prominent piece, for instance, recorded with barely-restrained scorn the number of ‘diversity networks’ now apparently being promoted within the Armed Forces – support groups for vegan soldiers, homosexual or lesbian recruits and the like. There are apparently over a hundred of these networks now active, the cost to the defence budget of facilitating which was claimed to be such as would have purchased I forget how many assault rifles, or (this figure for some reason stuck) ten thousand 24-hour Army ration packs. The picture emphatically conveyed was of tiresome, silly and frivolous requirements, defying the ordinary realities of military need but imposed by air-headed progressivist ideologues, of whom there now appeared to be some on the loose even in the Services.
But what then began to penetrate my haze of discomfort with the first sluggish reawakening of an intellectual interest, was noting that net zero targets, also mentioned in several other articles on different topics including land usage and fiscal issues, were being written of in exactly the same dismissive and more than slightly impatient tone as these diversity antics.
Now I have myself been critical in print of sustainability target regimes. As far back as The Sustainability Mirage (Earthscan, 2008) I was pointing out the inherent tendency of such goals to recede, mirage-like, as they are approached. In an alternative metaphor, I called them floating benchmarks: intended indicators of safe levels of this and that which flex and shift position to accommodate increasing difficulties experienced in trying to work to them. This characteristic, of positively inviting manipulation in bad faith, is a function of their being inevitably expressed in squishy numbers – quantified parameters constructed by negotiable science-for-policy which can be treated as firm when democratic politicians want to claim credit for serious intent, and as revisable guesstimates when they would otherwise start to constrain things too severely under economic and social pressures. But for all that, net zero targets do mark a recognition that climate and associated ecological dangers are real – something against which present policy and expenditure should attempt to make at least some provision, in essentially the same way as it provides against, for example, new security threats from Russia. Yet here were these targets being written about as if they had no more epistemological status than that of hoops to be jumped through in the pursuit of contentious political correctness. What, I found myself wondering, could possibly have prompted this identification?
There is some faint colouring for it in the fact that both sets of requirements are what we might call theory-driven, overriding what appear to be realities directly observed. The common sense experience of this paper’s readership, bolstered by a disposition to endorse traditional roles and relationships, will tend to register the distinctions going with, say, gender identity as naturally-derived and fundamental, and as underpinning (for instance) essentially masculine military virtues which any overemphasis on ‘diversity’ could only undermine. It is then a theoretical claim that all this represents instead a nexus of potentially oppressive social constructions, and a yet further application of (ethical) principle to hold that the autonomous individual, even in the Forces, should not only be free to choose his or her course through these supposed contingencies, but should be actively supported in doing so. Similarly, the dangers of climate destabilisation lie at several interpretive removes from ordinary lived experience; even floods and heatwaves suffered directly are only weather, so that the links between present emissions-heavy lifestyles and medium-term climate catastrophe lie through, firstly, a huge corpus of expert-assembled evidence statistically organised, and then secondly the deployment of bio-geophysical laws to derive corroborated scientific predictions. By the same token, in both cases, the results of these quintessentially intellectual operations are seen as the promotion of uncomfortable changes by educated elites who are (by implication) out of touch with ordinary, down-to-earth people.
But it is very clear that even these superficial methodological correspondences cannot begin to justify the equating of requirements backed, ultimately, by physical realities – the melting glaciers, rising sea levels, extinguished species and so on – with contentious and contested views about our interpersonal responsibilities. So what can be going on behind that equation, such that the Scottish Sunday Express can assume that its readership will simply take it for granted?
What we are seeing here, I think, is part of the business of benchmark-flotation in actual process. As even the half-hearted pursuit of net zero targets begins to impact the finances of this demographic, through for instance the effects of renewables levies on energy prices, resentment grows which is then exploited by populist outfits like Reform UK (and the one previously known as the Conservative Party) who are looking for grievances on which to ride to power – exploitation which translates through the ballot box directly into political pressure on government to flex, fudge or tacitly abandon the targets. But populist manipulation of such resentment is here being very helpfully lubricated by the way in which the theoretical character of climate and ecological danger just outlined, combined with its short-term non-pressing nature, lends itself so readily to association, under the “one-eyed-purists-getting-worked-up-over-unrealities” trope, with broad popular dismissiveness towards wokery. Of course, editorial fostering of that association is far from innocent – the Express stable, once brought to us by the sprightly maverick Lord Beaverbrook, is now apparently owned by a huge anonymous conglomerate called Reach plc, which will certainly depend financially on the continuing fossil fuel economy. But once the link has been made it feeds into populist clamour in a powerful dynamic of mutual reinforcement.
Crucially, however, serious greens cannot just shrug their shoulders in Guardian-reading disdain at these manifestations, nor register them merely as anthropological curiosities. For if there is ever to be a ‘climate majority’ in favour of adequately transformative policy measures, the millions whose opinions are given them by this and similar organs (their reach and impact hugely extended by the new phenomenon of online chatter) will surely have to constitute a very significant part of it. Even if, as I have argued elsewhere, time is now too short for us to await the democratic consolidation of such a climate majority, so that the intelligent and informed who do recognise the urgency of transformation must organise themselves for a vanguard seizure of power, they will still have to pitch for at least acquiescence among broad swathes of the tabloid-minded, in order to force through changes dramatic enough to make any hopeful difference. How could they begin to do so in face of a mindset attuned to seeing such changes on anything remotely like the analogy with wokery?
An obvious and important step in this direction would be rather urgently to abandon that wilful self-stranding on the wilder shores of wokery which has latterly distracted the greens’ principal political vehicle. The Green Party grievously imperilled its claim to be taken seriously when in the run-up to COP26, at that point (2021) shaping to be an important climate juncture, it preoccupied itself with a leadership election turning largely on attitudes to transexuals – and judging from press reports about the internal persecution of ‘gender-critical’ voices, things have not markedly improved since. The decisive adoption of a working motto along the lines of “Before all else, the habitable planet”, together with the cold-storage of culture-war commitments sine die, would seem long overdue if campaigning greens want a better chance than they currently enjoy of getting a hearing from those for whom much ‘diversity’ concern is at best faintly comic, and at worst borderline unbalanced.
But is that going to be enough? Or does the green case need to go further, and actually align itself positively with deep ‘commonsense’ strengths to be identified in the cohorts who find wokery ridiculous? And if so, how might it do that? I conclude with some very exploratory speculations prompted by these questions.
At the core of what I have been calling wokery, and which might also (depending on how one feels about it) go under the names either of political correctness or of respect for diversity and inclusiveness, seems to be a cast of mind instinctively suspicious of tradition. Established patterns inherited from the past, whether of gender role, family relationship or social hierarchy, are standardly subject to progressivist challenge as liable to oppress the autonomous rights-bearing ego, which claims complete freedom to choose how it shall constitute its identity, and demands that whatever its choices, they be acknowledged as legitimate. Any green politics seeking to appeal to a constituency like that of the Express readership which instinctively doubts the human validity of the postures and attitudes to which this mindset conduces, should perhaps, therefore, try to find a different understanding of the place of tradition in our lives.
A relevant philosophical consideration might be that the woke position on this can seem, when pressed, deeply incoherent. Identity, one might think, cannot finally be freely chosen in any casting-off of all traditional shackles, because one needs to have started from acceptance of some given identity in order to be able to choose at all. Free choice is a matter of inventing oneself creatively forward on the clue of one’s being to date, and that process must always begin somewhere, and with something, unchosen: human beings can only emerge as self-responsible persons from their embedding in a genetic and cultural history which transcends and locates them – origins from which they can travel considerable distances, but never entirely escape. By the same token, I cannot really be oppressed by my inherited identity, any more than I can be hampered by my normal physical embodiment – apart from those forms of necessary situatedness, there is nothing there substantial enough to be oppressed or hampered. The autonomous ego claiming respect for its absolute right of self-determining choice among its contingencies can seem in this light no more than a progressivist myth. I (for instance) am not just contingently a while English male. Not only can I never detach myself altogether from that root identity, but I have also to accept it as coming with values and assumptions of which I can rationally question particular aspects and implications, but never the whole package all at once – for that package comprises what Burke celebrated as the ‘prejudices’, the inherited standpoint which is the basis of all my agency and without which I have no locus to question or judge anything.
Be all that as it may, however, of more immediately political pertinence is that we might come in parallel vein to recognise inherited tradition as the essential basis of green agency – as the only real basis, that is, for the kind of concern for the future on which sustainability policies must depend for their effectiveness.
The crunch problem with sustainability has always been brutally simple: it demands that people make what they must perceive as significant sacrifices now in exchange for benefits which will only accrue to others in the medium- to longer-term future. That explains in large measure why the need for it has been so widely accepted in principle, but the delivery when push comes to shove has been so generally nugatory. For no such demand will have any realistic chance of gaining purchase as against the pressures of immediate exigency, unless it appeals to a deep attachment to something which of its very nature calls for the securing of its indefinite continuance. Rupert Read, in several powerful pieces of writing, has argued for the ordinary responsibilities of parenthood as constituting such a form of attachment. But not everyone is a parent, and for those who are, the idea that their obligations of care iterate with sufficient force down the advancing generations is both empirically and logically shaky. (See my review here). It may however be that a more straightforward move of essentially the same kind would be to invoke something in which almost everyone shares – their national and cultural heritage.
Such a heritage can have a wide variety of inflections. For the readership of my Scottish Sunday Express, it would probably be a matter of traditional British values (clannishness, local piety, instinctive respect for hierarchy, tolerance within broad limits, pugnacity when pushed…other lists could be made), upholding a network of established and longstanding national institutions in which an unabashed pride is still taken. The point would then be to get this very numerous cohort to see that it is these things which are now under threat from climate and ecological destabilisation. The pitch might be that what Churchill insisted was at stake in 1940 – “our own British way of life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire” – is at stake still in this new and differently dangerous context. The Empire of course is long gone, but despite various racial admixtures and cultural shifts since then, a distinctive way of life and institutional framework very much remain – still possessed of a vitality and force which decades of left-wing mockery have not managed to vitiate. And this represents a general inheritance out of the deep past, the ongoing protection of which into the deep future might well command support where appeals to the interests of an abstract and globalised humanity simply fail to weigh against presently perceived needs – especially where these are driven, as I have contended previously (see, for instance) by a widespread and quasi-pathological addiction to material consumption.
In short, national sentiment, the desire to preserve an integrated and cohesive realm with which people identify, might be appealed to in defence not just of the national community’s geographical borders, but also of its ever-advancing border with the future. Sustainability concerns will take real hold of the demographic whose ideas I encountered in that borrowed paper, we might say – only slightly caricaturing the approach – when they are seen as part of ensuring that “There’ll always be an England” (or a Scotland).
Of course, the major challenge of commodity-addiction would remain: even concerns so configured will still meet resistance when their implications for significantly reduced material consumption, motorised mobility, leisure flying and so on are made clear. But insofar as addiction to these things attempts to fill a characteristic modern void of anomie and meaninglessness, there is at least some prospect that reawakening a sense of national belonging, of collective identity with a real transpersonal depth in time, might contribute towards freeing ordinary people from its grip.
The really difficult issue here, in fact, is whether political greens could sufficiently distance themselves from wokery to adopt that kind of “nationalist” pitch and tactic. Environmental and climate campaigners tend to come overwhelmingly from the progressivist left, and the default sustainability appeal with which they are comfortable is to the claims of an abstract and theorised future humanity, reorganised under the aegis of a similarly abstract conception of global justice. The former Green MP Caroline Lucas has at least attempted to think positively about tradition in her recent book Another England, but she is really asking a different question – how do we reclaim ‘Englishness’ from a revitalised political Right? – and her answers still appeal to the characteristic Islington-green-leftism which she so long and ably represented in Parliament. We have perhaps tried this line for long enough now to begin to recognise that it won’t wash – certainly with those whose views are reflected in that paper, for whom it serves instead (as I was so struck by discovering) to bring concern for the future actively into disrepute. But if greens can’t or won’t speak a language which that substantial constituency might actually hear, it is perhaps their own commitment to building a climate majority by democratic means which they ought to examine.