Owen Polley: Let us hope that common sense makes a come back in 2023

There are plenty of them to get started on.

In Northern Ireland, the same hardcore separatists who always blighted our political scene have acquired a group of less committed hangers-on, desperate to prove how open-minded and relevant they are.

Their campaign to destroy this part of the UK and have us annexed by the Republic has gained no public traction at all. Surely it’s time for broadcasters and journalists to ignore these people, or treat their threadbare arguments with the contempt they deserve?

It’s also past the point that the poisonous fashion for ‘woke’ ideology was buried for good.

We particularly don’t need these divisive doctrines in Northern Ireland, where we are still trying to live with the traditional faultlines in our society. Yet, these new ideas have, in a relatively short period of time, become so pervasive, that they have become established almost by stealth.

Just before Christmas, I visited my local branch of Waterstone’s bookshop, for example, intending to buy a history book for my thirteen-year-old nephew.

I hoped to find one of the ‘Adventures in Time’ series, aimed at younger readers, by the popular historian Dominic Sandbrook, who is known for writing about Britain in the twentieth century and for the ‘Rest is History’ podcast.

In the non-fiction section for teenagers, I struggled without success to find normal, dispassionate history, written without an agenda. Rather than a book about Britain’s past, like the second world war, or even something on classical history, like Sandbrook’s Alexander the Great, there was volume after volume about black history, slavery, colonialism, supposedly ‘inspirational’ figures like Greta Thunberg and stacks of material about gender and sexuality.

Alongside these were various works about the Easter Rising and other southern Irish books heavily slanted toward nationalism.

Some of these topics are perfectly valid, but when they overwhelm history about the second world war, or the kings and queens of the United Kingdom, or even stalwarts of school textbooks like Vikings, Romans or Byzantines, then they take on a sinister, propagandistic edge.

These were the shelves, as well, in a mainly pro-Union, relatively socially conservative town. What on earth is it like elsewhere?

The problem is that the selection in Waterstone’s reflects a hostile approach to our past that has taken root in universities and throughout influential institutions, like museums and broadcasters. Just last week, a leading group of academics accused the BBC of “rewriting British history to promote a woke agenda.”

They cited multiple instances of “bias” and “tendentious” views presented as fact. The author and broadcaster, Lord Roberts, accused the corporation of pursuing a “fatwa” against Winston Churchill, for example. The programme The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan contrived to present a segment on the slave trade in Freetown in Sierra Leone without mentioning that the British set that city up as a home for freed slaves.

An episode of Digging for Britain described the government’s policy during the Irish potato famine as ‘extermination’, ignoring the UK’s relief efforts and repeating without criticism one of nationalism’s most shameless shibboleths.

In many of the nation’s universities, the idea has become established that history is about putting western civilisation, and Britain in particular, on trial. And it has become increasingly difficult for academics to counter this viewpoint, without compromising their careers.

There are, though, signs that people are fighting back against this orthodoxy. Last week, the Daily Mail reported that Durham University’s largest benefactor, Mark Hillery, was cutting off his donations until “they get their free speech house properly in order.”

The hedge fund owner has redirected some of his money to the Free Speech Union (FSU), an organisation founded by the journalist Toby Young, that has fought indefatigably against so-called ‘cancel culture’. This is the tendency for universities and other institutions to sack, discipline or otherwise silence teachers and speakers whose views do not conform with new, ‘progressive’ doctrines.

Young claims that “Since I set up the FSU two and a half years ago, we’ve received more cries for help from students and academics at Durham than from any other British university”.

If these institutions are cut off from a lucrative source of gifts, because their ideological conformism has become so extreme, however, then it may start to focus their minds on broadening the views that are permissible on campus.

One of the most destructive and disruptive ‘woke’ ideas is the notion that people can choose or change their gender identity at will, without any medical input, and expect their claims to be accepted by everyone else in society.

The Scottish government is legislating in line with this thinking, and the authorities at Westminster have threatened to intervene, on the legitimate grounds that the bill could create safety issues for women.

Nicola Sturgeon is a wildly irresponsible separatist, who will use any and every issue to create grievances against the national government. It is not surprising that she is taking an extreme position on gender, to burnish her ‘progressive’ credentials and pick a fight.

This struggle, though, is now likely to come to Northern Ireland, as we have our own cohort of politicians that takes up every trendy but fatuous new cause.

Hopefully, 2023 is the year that common sense makes a comeback and the new form of identity politics can be pushed back before it takes a genuine hold on these shores.