Woke warriors must leave Winston Churchill alone, says ANN WIDDECOMBE | Ann Widdecombe | Columnists | Comment | Express.co.uk

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Ann Widdecombe

Ann Widdecombe is a renowned author and British politician, serving as a Conservative Party MP from 1987 to 2010. She is also known for her appearances on reality TV shows like Strictly Come Dancing.

Woke warriors must leave Winston Churchill alone, says ANN WIDDECOMBE

BARELY a day goes by without some woke nonsense making headlines and recently it was the decision of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust to rename itself the Churchill Fellowship and remove photographs of the great man from its website.

Apparently the nitwits who ran the Trust were embarrassed by his “racism”. There is simply no grasp of history in the continual efforts to censor its players according to the standards of today. History is not just a procession of monarchs and events, but crucially of the evolution of society, of changing ethics and the growth of empathy. At the rate we are going we will be condemning our ancestors for killing woolly mammoths.

winston churchill

Winston Churchill's reputation is under fire over his link to slavery (Image: Getty)

The people of the past did not just lack our tumble dryers and space rockets: they lacked our insight.

A warning to the woke: today’s credo is tomorrow’s heresy and future generations will look back on them and some of the things they take for granted with horror.

Those of us who sang along to the Black and White Minstrels had no idea that, 50 years on, such innocent enjoyment would be regarded as a moral abomination. We grew up not only taking the cane for granted in schools but actually enjoying comedies such as Billy Bunter and Jimmy Edwards’ Whack-O! where it was a central theme.

When I graduated it was lawful for employers to advertise jobs with two rates of pay for men and women. The idea of a woman turning up in her car to take a man out for the evening was met with incredulous laughter.

Each generation struggles with the ideas of its parents and grandparents but now we have something entirely different: the condemnation of not just the ideas but of the people themselves.

At that rate every portrait of every Briton in history should be burnt because they all believed in something we don’t: torture, slavery (should we abolish classical culture?), compulsory religion.

The woke should wake up.

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A policeman who learned of an Asian man who had lived till 105 quipped “maybe I should start eating curry”.

This led to an accusation of racism and disciplinary action with the case due to be heard by South Yorkshire police this week.

curry

A policeman was accused of racism for saying he should eat curry to live longer (Image: Getty)

It is mind-boggling that such an idiotic allegation should be taken so seriously and police time and money deployed on it.

Racism implies hatred, contempt or ridicule, not light-hearted and friendly comment.

Indeed for that matter, we are always being urged to consider Japanese or Mediterranean diets because of the lower incidence of heart disease in those countries.

Perhaps the doctors who tell us this should be had up for racism by South Yorkshire police.

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By the time you read this the reshuffle may well have shuffled.

If Boris wants to stay in power as long as Margaret Thatcher then he had better put ability before all else including gender, ethnicity and sexuality. It’s competence, not quotas, which will determine the next election.

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According to Ken Olisa, the first black Lord-Lieutenant for London, the Queen supports Black Lives Matter.

queen

The Queen allegedly supports Black Lives Matter (Image: Getty)

I somehow doubt very much if Her Maj wants to defund the police or follows any of the other barmy beliefs of this movement but think she merely believe in racial equality, which is different.

The palace is wisely not commenting and Olisa should have known better.

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Boris promises that the extra sums raised by the increase in National Insurance will go first to the NHS to help clear the backlog caused by the pandemic and then will be used to ease the crisis in social care. Anybody who believes that is living in cloud cuckoo land.

To take anything away from the NHS will always cause resistance and temporary measures rarely prove temporary.

The Government is facing uproar because it intends to end the £20 uplift to Universal Credit which it introduced to deal with the impact
of Covid and which was always designed to be transitory. For that matter, income tax itself was originally a “temporary” measure. The only measure which will sort out the NHS is root and branch reform.

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