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There is a gathering, and very significant, storm growing on social media to rename the town of Woking, and to change its name back to its Anglo-Saxon form of Wohingas. Superficially, this battle has erupted because the towns name has the term Woke in it. More significantly, however, the row points to greater themes at play within Western society, the media and the culture wars. April is the cruellest month and on such a significant day as today, it would be foolish indeed to ignore the threat faced by Woking.

When you look up the cultural contribution of Woking, it packs a surprisingly large punch for a town which is a byword for the London commuter belt. For example, H.G. Wells set Horsell Common in Woking for the Martians first landing in War of the Worlds. Now cultural fact is stranger than science fiction. Arthur Conan Doyle lands Sherlock Holmes in the town for an investigation in one of his short stories. More recently Woking was compared to Standing in the kitchen wondering what you came in here for by Douglas Adams in The Deeper Meaning of Liff. In February 1982 The Jam reached number 1 in the charts by writing A Town Called Malice about Woking. A town called malice aforethought, indeed.

So perhaps Woking is overdue a bit of the limelight. Now, though, it is caught in the glare of cultural conflagration.

Dig a bit deeper into the political make-up of Woking and the place turns out to be fertile ground for a culture war. The town has a Liberal Democrat Mayor, but a Conservative MP. The Torys have 20 seats in the council while the Liberals have 18. In the last General Election, the long-standing Conservative MP was returned to Westminster, but lost 5.2 percent of his vote while the Liberal Democrat candidate increased vote by a staggering 13.2 percent.

The Tories need culture wars in places like Woking to hold onto power in the Southeast, while pork-barrelling money into the Red Wall. These sorts of conflicts dont do the Lib Dems any harm either; getting them much-needed attention and manufactured relevance for the community they should be serving.

To really understand how Woking could be caught up in a wave of Anglo-Saxon reactionary rage, look no further than the Brexit referendum of 2016. Traditionally the town was the very definition of true blue, but voted overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union (51.2 percent). Up until the Brexit referendum this was a town which oozed middle class stability, but is now ripping itself apart over what it should call itself.

The Brexit debate polarised everything it touched. To understand this, we must get to grips with the figure of Nigel Farage, who looms so large in the leafy suburbs such as Woking. His personality, more than anyone else in modern political culture, polarised every tacit of British life. Brexit was his Pandoras Box, which lit the tinder chest of culture wars, creating an earthquake to shake the very foundations of what it is to live in a town like Woking. From this spouted the fountainhead of polarisation to create the divided society we live in today. For Brexit, read controversy over trans, BLM, lockdown, anti-vaxers, the BBC, climate change or indeed the woking classes.

Society is now so divided that we cant even agree on names of the places we live in. The Woking controversy is evidence of a collective collapse in Western culture. No wonder Putin is so emboldened. Just imagine what his trolls and bots could do with this war of the worlds: Woking versus Wohingas.

All of this is deeply problematic and goes to the root of who we are and where we want to go. Unless we can rely on what our communities call themselves, how can we avoid a return to Anglo-Saxon attitudes? Not much can be expected from our political overlords. Boris the Deceiver Johnson and Sir Keir Captain Hindsight Starmer are hardly the people to take us forward, but make us look back into an abyss of culture wars constructed for their own ends. With such medieval jesters and knights of the realm in charge, what hope for Woking? As Shakespeare has his fool, Feste, tell Malvolio in Twelfth Night: Then you are mad indeed, if you are no better in your wits than a fool.

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The culture war fight to rename Woking - TheArticle