I’d never heard of Laurence Fox until he started lecturing us about racism

I had never heard of Laurence Fox until I saw him on Question Time telling a BAME person that the criticism of Meghan wasn’t racist. When Fox finished speaking, the show’s presenter, Fiona Bruce, stepped in to remind us that the home secretary, Priti Patel, had also said the criticism wasn’t racist. Whatever the BBC is, some of its current affairs coverage is now so unwoke, it is in a coma.

There are people in my life forever telling me I am not woke enough – people who I gave birth to – and the new vocabulary of triggering, microaggression and privilege-checking is a bore for sure. But, as the writer Roxane Gay has said, no one is asking people to apologise for their privilege. They are just asking them, in Gay’s words, to “acknowledge how these factors helped you move through life”. It’s manners, basically, isn’t it?

The lazy stereotype of the snowflake who can’t read a Thomas Hardy novel without counselling is just that. As is the stereotype of the great unwoke, unwashed, racist, sexist idiot. This is a trap, people are complicated and the real world is not Twitter.

But it was on Twitter that I posted a video of Fox, saying I had never heard of him, and was told that I must be aware of this minor thespian. But I have never seen the Morse spin-off in which he “starred”. (It’s called Lewis, apparently.) So sue me. On YouTube, he can be found talking about woke culture as an “intolerant” religion where people who don’t subscribe to it are “heretics” or the enemy. He thinks it’s gone too far. He says this stuff to Peter Whittle, who was the deputy leader of Ukip. So here we have Beavis and Butt-Head without the charm, repeating the familiar white-guy refrain about identity politics. It’s all a nightmare.

There is apparently money to be made by posh guys ventriloquising the so-called common man – whether they’re slagging off vegans, Muslim women or climate protesters. In the future, everyone will bait liberals for 15 minutes. Fox is now in with the Spiked crew of provocateurs. Alt-left? Alt-right? Alt-dreary. There is a long line of these types, some cleverer than others: Rod Liddle, Richard Littlejohn and Jeremy Clarkson, with Toby Young, James Delingpole and Martin Daubney on the subs’ bench. They present as dissenting voices, speaking truth to the elite. In reality, they just preach to people their age. To call this circle jerk of intolerance a culture war is to ennoble it. Not everyone can reach the ugly heights of Jordan Peterson.

What people are saying when they say racism doesn’t exist is that it doesn’t exist for them. Their own identities are weirdly defined by a form of victimhood they profess to hate. So envious are they of oppressed people that they try to claim that they are too, in the name of free speech.

There is now a backlash against women, against gay people, against black people, against the tiniest bit more diversity – and it is a concerted effort. Steve Bannon knows it, and the men who now run Breitbart know it. It moves in high places. We have government by Old Etonians and yet there remains a confusion about who runs the country, who is in the cultural establishment and who counts as a liberal.

I don’t want to give much time to Fox, but I will get personal as he has made a podcast with Delingpole, who once had to apologise for using repugnant, sexually violent language against me. Why did he do it? Because I had criticised Michael Gove’s education polices, and at that point one Dominic Cummings was Gove’s special adviser, so they all leapt to Young’s defence when he attacked me, too.

These people are the establishment. White privilege and casual sexism is the sea they tend to swim in. Attention-seeking haters such as Katie Hopkins and strangely bitter successes such as Piers Morgan help spawn these posh understudies.

Their side has won, so why are they such losers? Why are their egos so fragile? And why are they so easily rattled if they are only saying what ordinary people think, as they like to suggest?

For that is the shtick, when really what they are doing is insidious. They exist to make those in power appear reasonable as they tear up the social contact.

Fox is but a desperate fool who doesn’t even see his part in the bigger game he plays. Let us not speak of him again. He is not worth even the notoriety.

• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist