Joe Lycett and the trouble with wokescreening

The word ‘wokescreen’ is (like its naughty older sibling, the carelessly carbon-producing smokescreen), an alibi which hides the truth about a nefarious action. But what marks it out from old-fashioned hypocrisy is that – rather than being a mere rogue – the wokescreener poses as a social justice hero, looking down from a great height at the great unwoked. From the Sussexes’ private planes to Justin Trudeau’s blackface antics, the wokescreen is a fine example of modern Magical Thinking – if you identify as good, you can then be bad to your sanctimonious little heart’s content.

A prime example is the comedian Joe Lycett who – having condemned David Beckham for pocketing £150 million to be the ‘face’ of homophobic hellhole Qatar – was recently revealed to have performed not only in Qatar, but to have done a string of stand-ups in such bastions of equality as Dubai and Abu Dhabi. His defenders have tried to explain that, as he wasn’t taking money from the Qatari ‘government’ but from private club owners, it doesn’t count. The point is that Lycett was entering a country where women are treated like possessions and migrant workers are treated like dirt, and agreeing to behave according to its laws. Unlike Beckham – who’s only a ‘gay icon’ – Lycett is gay himself, which is surely more of a betrayal. He even wrote cheerily about his mini-tour of repressive fiefdoms in his book – though he may (understandably) have calculated that not many people would read it.

The wokescreen is all over showbiz. Kate Winslet talking earnestly about equal opportunities in acting, while promoting I Am Ruth, a drama co-starring her daughter, Mia Threapleton. Emma Thompson taking a flight of more than 5,400 miles between Los Angeles and London, thus stomping out a one-and-a-half-tonne carbon footprint, in order to show solidarity with Extinction Rebellion. (Let’s not forget the rank-and-file XR lot, whose Instagram accounts would make Phileas Fogg envious.) Jo Brand wishing she could throw battery acid in Nigel Farage’s face while talking about how essential kindness is. Frankie Boyle, jester of rape, forever being given ever more well-rewarded things to do by the BBC. And Auntie is the wokescreen supreme, from behind which children can be molested and women assaulted by DJs from Jimmy Savile to Tim Westwood while it spouts its mealy mouthed vows to enlighten the nation.

Politics is where the wokescreen reigns supreme

Sport is full of it too. Think of Lewis Hamilton, the tree-hugging vegan who avoided paying £3.3 million in VAT while purchasing his private jet and dodged paying millions of pounds worth of tax using an Isle of Man scheme. If Beckham had not blotted his rainbow-covered copy-book enough by shilling for Qatar, he might want to ask for his other crime of duplicity – flying 6,380 miles from the World Cup to Boston to present an award for sustainability – to be taken into consideration. How relieved he must be for the existence of Gary Neville, the fearless multi-millionaire socialist giant-killer who scolded the Tories for paying public workers a pittance while paying his own workers the minimum wage (£18,500 a year – the average nurse earns £34,000) at a hotel where high-rollers can quaff £5,900 bottles of wine. Qatar was the wokescreen Altamont, from the players who planned to flaunt their support for the LGBT community by wearing ‘One Love’ rainbow armbands – but swiftly removed them when threatened with a yellow card – to the BBC, who sent 272 staff along to what the scientist Mike Berners-Lee called ‘the highest carbon event of any kind – apart from a war – that humans have ever staged’.

Neville is not the only SJW who seeks to distract from his own greed by pointing the finger at those evil capitalists over there. Lily Allen (who attended Millfield, Bedales and Hill House – King Charles III’s junior school) broke off from flogging pricey sex toys to swerve accusations of privilege by pointing out that ‘the nepo babies y’all should be worrying about are the ones working for legal firms, the ones working for banks, and the ones working in politics, if we’re talking about real world consequences and robbing people of opportunity’. Or Jeremy Corbyn-loving Steve Coogan (who’s worth around £10 million) who furloughed the gardener and housekeeper at his £4 million country house shortly after playing a wicked billionaire fashion mogul in a film called – yes! – Greed.

But of course the wokecreen can be found in businesses too; where you find respect for pronouns there’s often little respect for customers. One such case is Marks & Spencer, which allows trans women into women’s changing rooms but, astonishingly, refused a disabled lesbian customer access to women’s toilets – and accused her of being a man. Then there’s Jamie Oliver’s empire of evil (net worth £240 million) wherein the self-righteous chef revealed his true colours by sacking staff without redundancy pay, leaving the government’s Insolvency Service to make payments to up around a thousand ex-employees before taking the fat-tongued fool to an employment tribunal where they successfully shook some loose change from his long pockets.

But of course politics is where the wokescreen reigns supreme. Brexit brought it out in force, with humanitarians such as Ian McEwan imagining the deaths – ‘1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves’ – of those who had committed the heinous crime of thinking differently from him. After the third example of Trudeau wearing ‘blackface’ came to light, he did the decent thing and admitted that he’d actually lost count of the number of times he’d done it – and he’s still the Canadian Prime Minister. Until Trump, Democrats were always worst sex-pests than Republicans, culminating in Harvey Weinstein famously identifying as a feminist.

‘Red’ Ken Livingstone, who took a keen interest in the green stuff, once hilariously attacked Labour MP Dan Jarvis for accepting a £16,800 political donation from a hedge fund manager after he himself had been paid £8,000 by a hedge fund to ‘entertain’ clients. Asked whether he was guilty of double standards, the former London mayor quipped ‘not double standards, different standards’ – not smokescreen, but Wokescreen. And of course there’s LGBT ally Jeremy Corbyn, who put away a pocket-friendly £20,000 appearing on Iranian state TV. The late Jo Cox’s husband Brendan admitted to being a sex pest, quitting two charities he set up in her name and weeping as he apologised for the ‘hurt and offence’ he had caused women – while his wife was still alive – including forcing a woman who worked for him at Save The Children against a wall outside a bar, holding her by the throat and telling her: ‘I want to f*** you.’

Currently, wokescreens are being employed to great effect by the monstrous regiment of modern misogynists, whether useful idiots like the Transmaids – who insist that feminism must centre men’s feelings over women’s safety – or Stonewall  pretending to care about lesbians while telling them that swerving Thems in thongs is ‘sexual racism’. And of course the men in frocks themselves, pleading #BeKind while wearing ‘TERF-KILLER’ T-shirts and fondling knives. ‘Believe women’ as the liberals like to say – except when women say they don’t want men in their spaces.

‘Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue’ said that old smoothie François Duc de La Rochefoucauld: these days, it’s the tribute that virtue-signalling pays to virtue. Yet more proof that the new pretend-enlightenment is, at heart, reactionary rather than revolutionary; simply another way for the ruling classes to corral and control the masses from behind their magical ‘don’t do as I do, do as I say’ screens of woke.