The National Health Service (NHS) has been forced to double back and remove from public view its draft “glossary of woke”, which had generated a torrent of backlash for ostensibly pushing "divisive" concepts on staff.
The NHS had earlier opted to define a list of “woke” terms for anyone in British healthcare struggling to comprehend them, entitled “Glossary A-Z” and covering a range of themes under the slogan of “equality, diversity and inclusion”.
The page was, accordingly, published on its website, and featured terms such as “Black Lives Matter Movement”, “Islamaphobia' (misspelt), and “misogynoir' (a recent term to embrace misogyny specifically aimed at black women).
Under “T”, the glossary included “taking the knee”, “tokenism”, “transgender”, “transgender man”, “transgender woman”, and “transphobia”.
Other entries were “white saviourism”, “white centering”, “white fragility”, and “white privilege”.
The entry for “white fragility” described the term as “a state in which even a minimum of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves by white people”. After it was published, the resource found itself on the receiving end of scorching criticism.
Tory MP Neil O’Brien went on Twitter to slam some of the concepts in the “alphabet of woke” as “highly divisive”, which “shouldn’t be officially pushed”.
“There’s a whole bunch of concepts in there: white fragility, or white supremacy – all these kind of different things that are extremely divisive concepts that should not be being pushed by HR managers in the NHS as a sort of gospel,” he was cited by The Daily Telegraph as saying.
Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, was also left reeling by the “chilling” glossary.
“It’s a truly extraordinary document. And chilling in what it reveals about the mindset within an important part of the NHS,” said Pollard.
Pollard added:
“Clearly the NHS are embarrassed that an internal document has been published by mistake. It's the mindset it reveals - it’s a glossary that accepts all the critical race theory and ideas - which are deeply controversial, ideological and divisive - as fact… It poses the question: what kind of other documents are circulating in the NHS that we don't get to see and which accepts all these arguments as a given?”
Netizens were also prompted to hit Twitter to denounce what they perceived as a “casual imposition of ideology”.
Instead of taking the page down, the NHS’s digital team opted to password protect it.
“This draft document is not NHS guidance, was not intended for publication and has been removed,” the NHS stated in response.
The news comes as a recent study concluded that Britons were divided on whether ‘woke’ was a compliment or not, and were believed to be unaware of an “ongoing culture war”. UK public are as likely to think being ‘woke’ is a compliment (26 per cent) as they are to think it’s an insult (24 per cent), researchers found.
The Policy Institute at King’s College London and Ipsos MORI surveyed almost 3,000 adults to find a majority have hardly heard of the phrases “cancel culture” or “identity politics”, despite their appearance in the headlines in recent years.