This is Spectator Radio, the Spectator's curated podcast collection.

Hello and welcome back to The Spectators podcast. I'm Laura Prendergast. This week we look at the

rise of woke corporations and how concepts like microaggressions, allyship and toxic masculinity are now starting to enter the

workplace. We also hear about Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He's fallen from grace, but does he

have anyone to blame but himself? Plus, we hear about Shanghai's marriage markets, and there's even

an apology from Rod Littleiddle at the end.

So, how woke is your office?

In this week's issue, Toby Young looks at how social justice mantras have entered into working life.

He joins me now, along with Barclay Wilde, the Director of Diversity Trust,

a company which offers services for unconscious bias training, diversity program advice, and training against discrimination of all minorities. So Toby, in your piece you talk about

this idea of the Woke Corporation. Can you start by explaining what exactly you mean by that?

Yes. So what I'm talking about is the spread of culture that developed in mainly American universities.

What we think of as the social justice left concerned about white privilege, about

heteronormitivity, all that's contributed to the kind of McCarthyite Maoist atmosphere at American universities

has now spread far and wide into the corporate world. It's already, it had already spread,

I think, into the public sector, but the relatively new development is it spread into the corporate

sector. And it's really quite extraordinary and almost comic that large global

multi-billion pound consultancies like Accenture now have these kind of diversity and

inclusion officers and new recruits go through this induction process in which they're

encouraged to wear rainbow-colored landyards with the word ally written on

them to show that they are allies of various oppressed victim groups, LGDPQ plus, whatever,

and so forth. And it's just so odd, on the one hand, kind of absurd and funny, that these multi-billionaire

...