Melanie Phillips: Revolt against coerced conformity

At long last, some Conservative MPs are raising their standard for conservatism. The Times reports today that up to 40 Conservative MPs will refuse to accept the “unconscious bias training” intended to tackle racism in the Commons, accusing the parliamentary authorities of “pandering to the woke agenda”.

Such training has existed for parliamentary staff since 2016 and is now to be extended to MPs. Said one of the rebel group:

“I would really rather gouge my eyes out with a blunt stick than sit through that Marxist, snake oil crap.”

Well, quite. “Unconscious bias training” doesn’t make any difference to actual racist attitudes. As a black former member of the Commons staff told the paper recently:

“Mandatory unconscious bias training has been in place in parliament for years now and it has not made any difference to the racism experienced by black staff.”

That’s because it’s not intended to address racial prejudice. It’s intended instead to coerce conformity with approved attitudes — in this case, the anti-white racism of Black Lives Matter, which BLM uses to further its openly-stated agenda of undermining and overthrowing western society.

“Unconscious bias training” is based on the Marxist concept of “false consciousness”. Its sinister, Kafka-esque goal is to persuade people that they are really odious on account of views they don’t even know they have — and the very fact that they don’t know they have these views, or worse still deny having them, is proof of just how odious they are.

It’s an agenda straight out of the Soviet communist playbook. Nevertheless, this onslaught on freedom, rationality and western cultural identity is being ruthlessly applied in companies, public sector bodies and other institutions around Britain and the west.

And in Britain, it’s being enforced by a Conservative government.

It can’t be stated too strongly that if conservatives don’t conserve what is valuable, true and decent about our society they aren’t conservatives at all.

For decades, however, that unfortunate state of affairs has been the case on both sides of the Atlantic. In America, it gave rise to the phenomenon of RINOs — Republicans In Name Only. In Britain, they were coyly called Tory party “modernisers”. What they actually were was subversion sanitisers.

This sad confusion started when the Soviet Union imploded. With this great enemy of the west apparently defeated, Conservative politicians thought their fox had been shot. Everyone was now adopting the free market.

Viewing everything through the prism of economics, they were spitting tacks that the Labour leader Tony Blair, who had replaced the party’s red flag by a red rose, had parked his tanks on the Conservatives’ free-market lawn (along with his chum and fellow tank-parker, Bill Clinton).

These Conservatives and Republicans never recognised the culture war that was already well under way, under the same free-market loving Blair and Clinton, in destroying western education, the western traditional family and western national identity.

They never understood that, decades earlier, the left had realised Stalin didn’t really fit the bill as a trendy pin-up. Gramsci and his fellow culture-warriors would bring about the revolution without millions lying dead or rotting in the gulag, simply by playing on the ignorance and idiocy of middle-class idealists instead.

And so the left marched through the institutions of Britain and America and into the heads of tens of thousands of well-meaning university-educated folk, and persuaded them to hate their countries, hate their culture and hate their hideously white, capitalist, social and moral norm-respecting selves.

Oblivious to all of this, Conservatives decided to march behind the flag of liberty. That, they decided, defined what a conservative was.

They didn’t realise that this would line them up on the same sinking patch of ground as the hyper-individualists of the left. They didn’t realise that true liberty only exists within a structure of authority and laws, without which anarchy takes over in a Hobbesian war of the strong against the weak. They didn’t realise that the one thing a conservative has a duty to do is to conserve.

Hypnotised instead by media projection of the university-based onslaught on core western values, they told themselves that if they didn’t go along with all this cultural change they would make themselves politically extinct.

So they dug themselves deeper and deeper into the cultural hole, parroting the propaganda of universal “human rights", identity politics and environmental armageddon.

And so they were utterly incredulous, these not-conservatives, when millions of ordinary people voted for Brexit and for Trump.

And still they haven’t understood. Programmed like Pavlov’s dog to signal their virtue whenever racism is mentioned, they signed up to the the BLM analysis of cultural self-loathing without understanding they were signing up to anti-white racism.

Now some Conservative MPs have broken cover and declared instead for decency, for rationality and for conservatism. Let’s see whether this belated but vital revolt gathers critical mass, or is stamped out by the boot of coerced conformity.

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author - you can follow her work on her website HERE.