Mark Dolan: You will never be woke enough, never sufficiently ideologically pure for the hard left

Imagine living in a world where the BBC just concentrated on making great programmes. No such luck. The Beeb bureaucrats are at it again. The Mail Online are reporting that a BBC training workshop tells managers to keep up their blood sugar levels – because tiredness could lead them to drop their guard and racially profile job candidates.

The in-house programme to tackle 'unconscious bias' – a discredited technique – also tells senior staff not to organise team drinks unless they know everyone can attend because someone may feel 'left out’. And it says employees must accept they are all capable of 'micro-incivilities' which have a 'huge impact' on colleagues' wellbeing.

Credit to the Mail who had to battle hard to unearth this madness – a freedom of information request was declined twice by the Beeb. So much for accountability.

The corporation is continuing to run the programme despite the Government Equalities Office finding 'no evidence' that unconscious bias training improved workplace equality. The Civil Service dropped such sessions last year after citing work by psychologist Patrick Forscher showing they didn't work.

All managers must sit the course and the BBC has said it aims for 95 per cent of staff to participate. It states: 'When you're recruiting, ensure your blood sugar levels don't become low. Low energy, tiredness and low blood sugar increase our reliance on assumptions and bias.’

This would all be funny if it wasn't for the fact that you're paying for this nonsense. But they're not the only public institution that have been hijacked by the woke Taliban. The University of Aston are encouraging students to stop using the words manmade, mastercopy and civilisation because it believes they have sexist or prejudicial connotations.

Offending words include immigrants, third world, tribe, civilised and, in some contexts, native, all because of their historic overtones. Language deemed to be sexist includes one-man show, old masters, forefathers, seminal and masterful.

How can a university, theoretically a haven of words and ideas, perform a totalitarian land grab of our language. Being told which words to say and not say is an abusive dynamic which is playing out across our society. Policing language like this is dystopian and makes George Orwell’s 1984 look like a light-hearted comedy.

No institution, particularly an academic one, which should be out there fostering a battle of ideas on behalf of their students, has the right to do this.

George Orwell pointed out that words shape thoughts and that's what universities like this want to do – shape your thoughts. To control how and what you think, so that you can have a set of appropriate views, which change every day by the way.

As the vegan bake-off star was cancelled by fellow vegans for horse riding reminds us, you will never be woke enough, never sufficiently ideologically pure for these people. This is an attack from the hard left to homogenise public discourse so it aligns with the prescribed woke narrative.

The brilliant comedian and presenter Alexander Armstrong has spoken out on this too. The TV host fears cancel culture and the ‘terror of offence’ threaten all aspects of life, from books, to being able to laugh together. He added ‘Our institutions are spineless – they’ll never put up a fight’. How right he is. So I have a simple plea. Can we just think what we want to think and say what we want to say, something outside of Mao’s China we have always been able to do.

No words should be off-limits in a language as rich as ours. So I say to these intellectual bullies, who are hellbent on rolling out a hellish and prescriptive groupthink, we want our institutions back want our language back we want our thoughts back and we want our country back. Much obliged.