Revealed: How a once-thriving Northern town was ruined by wokeness

THE South Yorkshire town of Cleckburton used to be a thriving industrial hub. Today its shops are boarded up and there are no jobs, hopes or prospects for its inhabitants.

The reason? The onslaught of wokeness, a process which began in the late 1970s and has since laid waste to the town.

Longtime resident Roy Hobbs said: “Back in the day this was a lovely place. People looked out for each other, chatted over their back fences and were casually racist about anyone not born within a ten-mile radius of the market square.

“And now it’s dead. My dad told me that it was the result of de-industrialisation and a lack of investment in the North by successive governments but it turns out he was wrong because the Daily Mail says it’s all down to wokeness.

“It was after the cancellation of The Black And White Minstrel Show in 1978 that the rot set in. Within a couple of years factories began to close. Then you got alternative comedians like Ben Elton and that confusing pop singer Boy George and the pit closures happened.

“Thatcher did her best trying to stop the gays, but she was outnumbered. Jimmy Somerville, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, The Pet Shop Boys. She didn’t stand a chance.”

For a while, Cleckburton stabilised. But then came 2015, Jeremy Corbyn and millennials. The scourge Cleckburton had been flighting all those years was identified as ‘wokeness’.

“Things had been ok. We’d had a welcome return to sexism in the shape of lad culture and you could still shout racial slurs at a match without being banned from the ground.

“Then this new wave of wokeness arrived. Statues thrown in rivers. Women doing the football commentary. Adverts with black people in them for no reason.

“And now it’s pronouns. They’ve caused absolute devastation across South Yorkshire, have pronouns. How much do they think we can take?

“According to the Mail, our only hope is that a Conservative government – who have historically always given a shit about towns like ours – will level us up.

“And, given they’ve been in power since 2010, I’ve no doubt that help is just around the corner.”

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Five reality TV shows you've imagined yourself on

THINK you’d be a breakout reality TV star like Rylan? Here are five shows you’re deluded enough to imagine yourself on:

Bake Off 

As a child you used to occasionally make very basic flapjack and now you reckon it would be a short leap to constructing profiterole pyramids and triple-layer mille-feuille in the Bake Off tent. The sad truth is it’s easy to muddle up a natural ability to bake the kind of Showstopper cakes that Pru and Paul love with a natural ability to eat limitless amounts of them.

I’m A Celebrity

You like to imagine yourself looking stoic and cool as you chow down on goat arseholes and tarantula legs. But given that you scream yourself silly if you see a tiny spider on your bedroom ceiling, it seems unlikely you’d be much use in the jungle. A more realistic vision is you bitching and moaning even more than Gillian McKeith.

Britain’s Got Talent

As soon as the theme tune kicks off, you’re wracking your brain for the amazing talent you could bring to the show. You’re not sure ‘flawless aim when pissing’ or ‘ability to sleep through any number of alarms’ would make good telly, but you can’t help but picture the one-sided smile creeping onto Simon’s lips as he declares that you are the future of British [insert-whatever-the-f**k-here].

Love Island 

It’s hard not to imagine yourself kicking back by a pool with a hand-picked selection of Britain’s hottest people. It’s just that, in your head, you believe you’d look like them, forgetting that they’d be the worst people to stand alongside in swimwear. And none of them would fancy you. Those night-time cameras would catch you doing nothing under the covers but crying about how fat and lonely you feel.

Gogglebox 

Whenever you watch TV, you test out a few witticisms in your head, imagining the UK public charmed by your pithy remarks about the cleavages in Bridgerton. In reality, you’d be captured gawping at the telly like an idiot, the perfect silence from your sofa broken only by the sound of you and your partner loudly chewing your way through a whole pack of Oreos.