Wokeness was originally associated with black Americans fighting racism, which is why it was so prevalent in the civil rights era. Pedants might point out that Joe Davis won the world title 15 times in a row between 1927 and 1946, but the World’s Professional Snooker Championship, as it was known from 1935, was a rinky-dink affair by modern standards, involving as few as two players battling it out while taking a break from the supposedly more serious game of billiards. He made the fastest maximum break ever (five minutes and eight seconds, a record that will almost certainly never be beaten).

woke’ was hijacked to silence people of colour How the word ‘woke’ was hijacked to silence people of colour

It wasn't really until the late 2000s, early 2010s, when it gained more of this kind of political context. From schools that teach children to question their gender identity, to universities that provide students with ‘content warnings’ for classic works of literature; from local councils that remove statues of historical figures, to multinational corporations that sell virtue alongside their products; woke thinking has seeped into every aspect of our lives. It is also a reminder that what critics of woke need is, firstly, courage to speak out in the certain knowledge that they are not lone voices and that woke is not popular. She has appeared on BBC 1’s Sunday Morning Live and Daily Politics and has reviewed the newspapers for Sky News. In Scotland, the failure of pessimistic post-Brexit economic projections to materialise probably means that the nationalists will not win any time soon.Therefore, Williams is quite correct that challenging woke remains essential, even if “victory in the long term is far from assured. The presenter is so fond of using the word ‘woke’, he even argued with radio host James O’Brian about its true meaning. Joanna has written numerous academic journal articles and book chapters as well as being a frequent contributor to national and international debates on education, feminism and gender politics.

the word ‘woke’ was weaponised by the right How the word ‘woke’ was weaponised by the right

It’s the empire so modernising that during the course of British rule, India’s share of the world economy fell from 23% to less than 4%. but I found it just a little bit to "wordy" which meant for me I could not read more than a few pages at a time. To gauge how much has changed in a very short space of time, we need only look to last month’s Women’s World Cup final. Dr Joanna Williams is a columnist for spiked as well as a regular contributor to The Spectator, The Telegraph and The Times.

The other day, in a bar in London frequented by students of the infamously ‘woke’ Goldsmiths University, I met a young white cis-male who said that the English were to blame for his inherited trauma because of their historic oppression of the Irish. All too often, the sense of virtue that comes from claiming to act on behalf of the disadvantaged and oppressed legitimises a refusal to countenance dissent – and a ruthlessness at dealing with those seemingly in opposition to the woke mission. We asked linguistics professor Jonathan Charteris-Black, from UWE Bristol, to explain the phenomenon that has caused such a fundamental shift to the meaning the impact of using this word. Although Khan claims he is in the US to ‘bang the drum for London’, Trump-bashing has been a recurring theme of his tour.

Jokes are not violence – this is violence - spiked

It’s almost impossible to pick just one article from Brendan O’Neill’s prolific output this year, but while we’re on the subject of the gender madness, here’s a left-field favourite of mine: his hilarious takedown of Grace Lavery’s book, Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis. Today, many commentators are eliding this promiscuous public persona with the more serious allegations of criminality made against him. So it’s also hardly surprising that claims of persistent racism by anti-racism activists do not fit with our experience of living in what is now, by far, one of the world’s most integrated multicultural and multi-ethnic societies.

She’s slaughtered so many sacred cows in her spiked columns this year, but this piece, on the rise of the Worried Well, is a personal favourite of mine. Naturally, he’s also big on Twitter – the platform on which he used to regularly spar with former US president Donald Trump. Take a step back from the Russell Brand scandal and you see that a clear cultural shift has taken place – not towards treating victims with respect, as is so often claimed, but towards treating all women as victims. His standard response to a tournament victory is to say that he played terribly and can’t believe he won.