Can we stop the march of the 'woke brigade' as they destroy statues, call for streets to be re-named and re-write history? / Dave Thomas

Once upon a time if you were offended, you just shrugged your shoulders, muttered so what, and got on with your life.

But, unfortunately there exists what has come to be known as the 'Woke Brigade', a set of activists who find offence and can cancel out the opinions of others that don’t match their own. Of course, they believe in free speech, but only as long as it's theirs.

A university common room was offended by the portrait of the Queen on the wall; they said it was an emblem of colonialism. The portrait was removed, the Queen ‘cancelled.’ The good that she does, counts for nothing. If someone is targeted (Colston or Rhodes) none of the good that they have ever done can be acknowledged.

The new TV channel, GB News, has enraged the woke and 'cancel' brigade because it is allegedly too Great British. In the old days you’d just switch it off if you were offended, now, you try to destroy it.

GB News speaks for the silent majority that just gets on with things. It is very anti-woke. The 'wokists'

don’t like that.

Comedy shows that we once found hilarious (and many of us still do) are taken off air because they are deemed offensive; Fawlty Towers was one of them a while ago.

An actor will say the ‘wrong’ thing and immediately some woke group will be offended and announce, 'you can’t say that.'

Taken to the extreme that actor will then find his engagements drying up.

The worst woke group is Stop Funding Hate, a left-wing social media campaign which aims to stop companies from advertising in, and thus providing funds for, certain British newspapers that it argues use 'fear and division to sell more papers.'

GB News set out to be an antidote to all this but what happened? The woke political activists swung into action, deemed it hate-filled, and set about campaigning for its advertisers to withdraw their support. Several of them, with a swift knee-jerk reaction, did just that. IKEA and Octopus were two.

Public backlash had them back-pedalling.

“Virtue signalling twerps,” Piers Morgan called them. And rightly so.

The mistake that the big companies made in withdrawing their support for GB news was in assuming that the woke faction are the majority. But far from it. They are not ‘the many people’ and the infuriating tragedy is the effect they have on our daily lives with their own extremism and prejudices. They are not the majority but just the noisiest.

They would have us renaming streets, destroying statues, re-writing history. Shades of George Orwell and ‘1984’ alas.

If you question ‘taking the knee’ you are deemed racist. How long will it be before the new Manchester chief of police is ‘cancelled’ by the wokes because he dared to say that he wanted his officers catching burglars rather than ’taking the knee?'

If my opinions offend you; you can tell the Burnley Express you will stop buying it. That’s how it works. Or just shrug, say 'so what, he’s a twerp,' and get on with your life.

Like we used to do.