I just read a tweet posted by Kelvin MacKenzie: "Astonished there is any food left in food banks with all these public sector workers allegedly breaking down the doors for free stuff."
Remember MacKenzie? Liverpool certainly hasn't forgotten him.
The one-time editor of The Sun, now a media/sports pundit and a prolific tweeter, he opines on everything.
MacKenzie seems to see himself as a champion against wokery.
To others, he appears to be an attention-seeking, ageing blatherskite.
'Woke' to MacKenzie is a form of modern day liberalism which he believes would prevent him (and others) from saying things as they are. He revels in being politically incorrect. Sometimes he is funny.
In fact, it's a mark of just how tolerant society is that it caters for outrageous remarks and provocations.
To this writer, if woke means being tolerant, liberal, non-offensive and democratic, then I am 110 per cent woke and I ain't apologising for it. That said, in a democracy free speech comes with responsibilities. It requires citizens to be both self-aware and socially-aware.
Being sensitive to and aware of social and political injustice is something to be proud of.
Some of the world's greatest political and civic leaders would be today classed as woke - John Hume, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Maya Angelou, Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama.
If Christ returned, no doubt he too would be deemed woke.
MacKenzie doesn't like woke.
Nor does he seem to like unionised public sector workers. Train drivers, teachers and paramedics - all get a lash on his Twitter account.
Tweeting about nurses he wrote: "My sense is today that nurses put their pay packets ahead of patients."
There are many faults within the NHS but the commitment of nurses is not one of them.
Braggadocios are not a new phenomenon.
Many of the most successful comedy British sitcoms of the 1970s and 1980s had low-brow, loud mouthed, boorish, know-all characters, in the mould of Alf Garnett and Albert Steptoe.
Truth be told, back then there was a Alf Garnett on a bar stool in every pub in the country. Today they are on a keyboard, still griping about the state of the nation, immigrants and trade unions. It was easy to laugh at them. Less easy to confront our own prejudices when we sometimes nodded in agreement.
The obnoxious cockney character Joanie Taylor aka Nan is an update on Garnett. Once she described being gay as a "disability". There's no doubting writers believe they are caricaturing bigotry to ridicule it but the subtleties are sometimes lost on the viewers. It's remarkable to note how many people actually believe soap characters are real. Who can forget the campaign to 'Free the Weatherfield one'?
MacKenzie has over 40,000 followers. And he is no John Pilger. (Pilger has in excess of 287k Twitter followers).
Interestingly, Pilger has a different take on the NHS. He believes too many journalists are missing the point about the NHS by concentrating and repeating sensationalist stories about its failures, whilst ignoring the real story about the concerted and sustained effort by the Tories since Thatcher to run it down.
Increasingly on my own Twitter feed I see more and more right-wing views appearing whether I follow them or not. The internet brings to us a diverse and wide range of opinions. And it does no harm to become better informed through informed comment or to call out the uninformed.
As a writer, trying to manage or wade my way through the various social media platforms is time consuming and not always fruitful. Therefore, I am always intrigued by the frequency and indeed intensity of the vitriol spewed out by some serial anti-woke, glass-jawed bloggers.
At times, it seems as though it's they who are the most easily offended by those they rail against. It comes to something when these poor validation-seeking souls receive comfort from a click rather than a conversation.
