Little word games of the Left

Every morning, Sky News invites two journalists to review the papers.

In the past, one or two token conservatives used to appear on the roster of potential candidates, but Sky has abandoned that silly subterfuge. All its reviewers now have impeccable woke credentials, accompanied by evident learning difficulties.

Today’s duo were a man and a woman, both ex-editors of something or other. The man filled the requisite racial quota, while the woman had so much makeup on her face and peroxide in her hair that she looked like a walking environmental hazard.

Among other things, they were asked to comment on the cover story in The Express about the woke judges who had scuppered the government’s plan to deport illegal aliens. That request was greeted with the smug know-all smiles that are essential ingredients in the Left semiotic repertoire.

The word ‘woke’, agreed the reviewers, is grossly overused. And it doesn’t mean anything anyway. That reminded me of my advertising colleague who didn’t know the difference between ‘appraise’ and ‘apprise’, and hence insisted that the latter word didn’t exist.

That was the first word game the reviewers chose, and I’m happy to join in belatedly.

Since they do have learning difficulties, I’ll try to elucidate that sticky semantic point. The adjective ‘woke’ describes inordinate attachment to every subversive fad that can be used as a weapon against what Tony Blair called ‘the forces of conservatism’ and what is in fact common sense, education and moral integrity.

These fads include climate, LGBTQA with any number of pluses you fancy, gender fluidity, race, immigration or anything else going at the time – provided it chips away at every worthy tradition of our civilisation. There, I hope I’ve made this clear.

At issue this morning was illegal immigration, which the reviewers welcomed, and the government’s efforts to curb it, which they deplored. This vindicated Thomas Sowell’s quip that immigration laws are the only ones discussed in terms of how to help the people who break them.

Actually, the article under scrutiny made a good point: the woke judges of the Supreme Court (itself a woke, Blairite institution) used the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to block any deportation plans. Hence, if we wish to regain control of our borders – which is an essential requirement for any serious country – we must leave ECHR.

Peroxide Babe would have none of that. She fired another semiotic arrow from the quiver of the Left by issuing a dismissive chortle. Leave ECHR? Let’s be serious now. Human rights are for everybody, aren’t they?

Indeed they are. But do let’s recognise that there was another word game being played there. Normally I signal my reluctance to take part by suggesting that my interlocutor arrange in the right sequence two words, one of which is ‘off’.

However, I’m willing to make an exception here and join the game for the benefit of Peroxide Babe, her partner and other slow learners. So yes, human rights – or civil liberties, to use the term I prefer – are for everybody. And yes, they are good things to have, provided they are genuine rights and not fig leaves covering up woke appetites.

However – read my lips – saying in that context that human rights are for everybody is a horrendous non sequitur. It springs from either the speaker’s rampant idiocy or, worse, her virulent ideology.

The implicit suggestion is that human rights can only exist under the aegis of ECHR. Therefore, any country that isn’t a member or, worse still, isn’t a member any longer, has no regard for human rights and will trample them into the dirt sooner or later.

Now ECHR was drafted in 1950, in the immediate aftermath of a period when observance of human rights hadn’t been a top priority on the Continent. Hitler, with his Gestapo, SS and the Einsatzgruppen, reminded Europeans that basic rights, including the one to life, were hardly inalienable.

Post-war bureaucrats, mostly French and German, with the odd Italian taking care of diversity, responded by contriving a way of preserving Hitler’s idea of a united Europe, while eliminating its ugly excesses, such as death camps, mass executions and general contempt for human rights.

Hence the gradual but seemingly inexorable push, still on-going, for a single European state. Hence also ECHR, acting as a quasi-constitutional reassurance of the Eurocrats’ good nature. However, though I regard the EU as a wicked contrivance, I do recognise that such a Johnny-come-lately had to state its commitment to essential liberties to allay some ugly suspicions.

The EU (and its precursors) also needed ECHR as another strand in the rope tying a federal Europe together. Homogenised laws are as important as homogenised economies to create an illusion of unity.

All that is fine and well. Yet England institutionalised – and constitutionalised – essential liberties some 500 years before, say, the French did. And the English didn’t have to kill millions of people to produce such a document.

Fair enough, when Britain was a member of the EU she had to be part of a unified system of pan-European laws. Yet the British people voted, correctly and overwhelmingly, to leave the EU. (No prizes for guessing which way Peroxide Babe voted in that referendum.) That decision was taken partly because they sensed no need for a set of laws that either duplicated the ancient national ones or, more sinister, made them inoperable.

Equating ECHR with human rights is, in other words, cheating in a verbal game, like dealing oneself four aces from the bottom of the pack. A similar trick is to equate the EU with Europe, as in “if you dislike the European Union, you hate Europe”.

Peroxide Babe is dumb enough to cheat at such games and inept enough to get caught. But as long as she is on the right side, the woke one, she’ll remain a welcome guest on national TV channels. We need people like that, to remind us all of how many slow learners are in need of special education.