It’s official: Nowhere in Britain is safe from the woke speech police.

First they stomped their jackboot on universities, where it’s now a risky business to express conservative opinions or even to state biological facts, including such sinful utterances as: “Men are not women.”

Then they came for the workplace.

Crack an off-color joke or voice a dissenting view and you might be made to take an “awareness-raising course” — or what the Soviets called re-education.

Now the Woke Inquisition is feverishly eyeing yet another zone of British society for one of its joyless crackdowns, this time laying down its ruthless writ in arguably the most sacred space in all of the United Kingdom. 

Where is that?

The pub.

It pains me just to write these sentences, as a British-Irish hybrid who enjoys nothing more than a cold pint and a cheeky chat inside Britain’s greatest invention — the public house.

But it’s true: Now the offense-taking freaks want to clamp down on banter in bars.

The repression comes courtesy of Keir Starmer’s Labour government, which is crazily allergic to freedom of speech, via an Employment Rights Bill currently up for a vote in Parliament. 

Most of the bill is standard workplace stuff, revising the rules on sick pay, unfair dismissal, bereavement leave and other mundane matters.

But the bill’s Clause 20 will compel businesses to protect “vulnerable” staff members from the objectionable utterances of their clientele.

It demands that employers take “all reasonable steps” to defend their staff from “non-specific” “harassment” by “third parties.”

Strip away all the legalese, and it means businesses will be liable for the hurt feelings of employees who feel “harassed” by something a customer says.

That could include everything from offhand remarks to saucy jokes and “contentious political views,” says the UK’s Free Speech Union.

The clause is labeled the “banter ban,” and no wonder: It threatens to suffocate the chatter and wisecracks that make Britain’s pubs world-famous.

If this bill becomes law in its current form, its impact will be instant, dire and Orwellian.

Imagine you’re the manager of a feisty public house where pint-quaffing patrons love to engage in free and raucous conversation.

You will be in a constant state of panic, forever fretting that a twentysomething bar staffer might overhear a blue joke or an unwoke opinion, then sue you for failing to guard them from such “harassment.”

We might be headed for truly Kafkaesque territory, with pubs forced to employ “banter bouncers” to reprimand the patter of those who’ve had a few too many.

These literal speech police might “eavesdrop on customer conversations,” the FSU warns, and “eject them if they say something ‘problematic.’”

After all, if a merry drinker says to his pal that “trans women are men” or “immigration levels are too high,” some purple-haired pint-puller who overhears them might feel offended.

Better to boot out such customers than risk being sued, many pub-owners will reason. 

And it won’t only be pubs: Will football fans have to temper their chants lest some PC steward take offense? 

Will parks put up signs saying, “No cycling, no ball games and NO BANTER” to guard staff from the apparently crushing experience of hearing an idea they disagree with?

Every morning, the NY POSTcast offers a deep dive into the headlines with the Post’s signature mix of politics, business, pop culture, true crime and everything in between. Subscribe here!

This “banter bill” would empower the easily offended, giving them jurisdiction over every arena of life, even the good ol’ boozer.

Their fragile self-esteem would take precedence over everything else, including the God-given right of every free-born Brit to get drunk and say whatever the hell he wants.

Britain would be ruled by a wimps’ veto, having to temper our tongues to avoid upsetting those woke fainthearts who think words are violence.

We are witnessing something quite terrifying — the spread of cancel culture from the campus to society as a whole.

Having trained an entire new hyper-fragile generation to value their own feelings more than other people’s freedoms, we should not be surprised that they’re now bringing this censorious narcissism into the world with them.

And while the United States has far better free-speech protections than Britain, you Americans are not immune to this creep of speech-policing.

Too many of us turned a blind eye as the young fell under the spell of that creepy cult of censorship that insists “words are wounding,” and now the British government is building a legal force field to shield these wallflowers from their fellow citizens’ chatter.

The pub is truly Britain’s hallowed ground.

It’s there that we cut loose, get tipsy and say what we cannot say in the more buttoned-up zones of society. 

For centuries Britons have been heading to their local to drink heartily and speak freely.

So it’s no exaggeration to say that Britain will no longer be Britain if we lose our pubs to wokeness.

We don’t need protection from “offensive” words — but from the rampant authoritarianism of the mad elites.

Brendan O’Neill is chief political writer for the British online magazine spiked.