Welcome to the Woke Trials

Downloadable audio file

How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics

In 2013, Julie Burchill wrote a mischievous piece in the Observer in defence of her friend Suzanne Moore. Burchill hadn't anticipated the vitriolic reaction that her words would provoke. She was pursued by the outrage mob, and there were even calls in the House of Commons for her to be sacked. After that Burchill - now 'the dark star of Fleet Street' - was lucky to be to writing online blog pieces for the Spectator.

Welcome to the Woke Trials will be part-memoir and part-indictment of what happened to Burchill between then and now, as the regiments of the woke took over. It will also be a characteristically irreverent and entertaining analysis of the key elements of a continuing and disturbing phenomenon - all told with the common touch and rampant vulgarity that has made Burchill a household name.

Raised in a communist household and a lifelong Labour voter, Burchill also makes the case for a progressive future politics, a time when we see ourselves as a common humanity with similar hopes and dreams rather than a childish world of villains and victims. As she argues, the day we awake from our sleepwalking can't come too soon.