How does woke start winning again?

The Guardian

16 hours ago

Inside a coffin-like glass box lies the figure of a man, his face streaked with scarlet paint. Above it a video plays on loop, showing the afternoon in June 2020 when an exuberant crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters yanked this statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston from its plinth near Bristol harbour and rolled it triumphantly into the water. Five years on from that cathartic execution, the graffiti-smeared statue occupies the far end of the exhibition on protest at the city's M Shed museum, in a thicket of placards left behind by the departing crowd. Their slogans – 'Silence is violence'; 'Racism is a dangerous pandemic too' – evoke the radicalism of a summer that already feels oddly consigned to history, when frustration erupted on to the streets but never quite seemed to be channelled into lasting change.
The museum leads visitors to Colston via older stories of resistance figures, once considered shockingly radical but now celebrated without question: Theresa Garnett, the suffragette who brandished a horsewhip at Winston Churchill at Bristol Temple Meads station, or the heroes of the 1963 Bristol bus boycott, who walked to work in protest against the bus company's refusal to hire black drivers (and helped pave the way for the 1965 Race Relations Act). But the legacy of protests at the modern end of the gallery, where the statue lies sandwiched between exhibits on Extinction Rebellion and Occupy, remains, for now, more contested.
Trying to clarify what the UK public understands by the perennially slippery term 'woke', in 2022 the pollsters YouGov asked respondents how well it fitted various contemporary causes. The highest match – above trans rights, no-platforming people whose opinions you dislike, stronger action on climate change and the Black Lives Matter movement itself – was with removing historical statues associated with slavery, like that of Colston. Something about this combination of direct action against a highly symbolic target, and revisiting history through a modern social justice lens, meant that 61% considered it woke.
For some, that was perhaps a compliment. But by 2022, a word briefly synonymous with enlightened liberal consciousness – borrowed from a phrase used as far back as the 1930s by black Americans, urging each other to 'stay woke'' to the threat of racial violence – was already becoming what the then Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon called 'a pejorative term of abuse'.
The narrative that woke ultimately ate itself, becoming so shrill, sanctimonious and yet simultaneously brittle that a backlash was almost inevitable, has been building ever since it became clear Donald Trump was on course to win a second presidential term. Britain, with its newly elected Labour government, initially seemed sheltered from the prevailing winds. While corporate America scrambled to ditch diversity policies following Trump's victory, only 11% of British firms surveyed by the Institute of Directors planned similar changes.
But then came April's supreme court ruling that 'woman' for the purposes of equality law meant 'biological woman', rolling back trans people's access to sex-segregated spaces. In May's local elections, Reform party candidates campaigned on promises to sack council diversity officers and block what the party's deputy leader, Richard Tice, calls 'net zero wokery'. Keir Starmer, who five years ago took the knee for Black Lives Matter and posted 'trans rights are human rights' on Facebook, now leads a government arguing that unchecked migration did 'incalculable damage' and advising trans women to use men's toilets.
In parts of the radical left, meanwhile, woke stands accused of undermining traditional class-based collective struggle with its emphasis on individual identities. The journalist Ash Sarkar, who rose to prominence as a Corbynite activist, describes in her new book Minority Rule hosting an event in 2023 with Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam, where he was asked what the left was getting wrong. When he responded that it was because 'you're all being fucking cunts', Sarkar writes, uproar ensued. One activist declared herself terrified by 'the 'white anger' in the room', while another said Hallam had 'brought violence' into the space and 'everyone had been harmed'. Sarkar was left wondering how people who couldn't cope with a sweary climate campaigner envisaged leading a revolution. In a round of subsequent book publicity interviews, she suggested that she had moved on from a youthful phase where, 'You could point at a floor lamp and be like, 'neocolonial ideology'.'
On all sides, woke has become shorthand less for a set of widely accepted liberal beliefs – few people today would put a slaver on a pedestal – than an associated style of highly online activism, seen as prone to denouncing opponents as morally evil, engaging in competitive victimhood and favouring performative protest over practical change.
After four white protesters successfully defended themselves against criminal charges over the Colston statue's downfall, arguing that Bristol's then mayor, Marvin Rees, should have done more to remove it legally, Rees – who is of Jamaican heritage – responded by asking whether four black defendants would have been similarly acquitted. If not, he argued in a statement now hung on the wall at M Shed, 'then what we saw was an exercise in middle-class white privilege, alongside a declaration of anti-racism'. While symbolic acts could be catalysts for change, he added, without concrete action 'they can be more about satisfying the immediate emotional needs of members of privileged groups than about changing the actual political and economic status of people in oppressed groups'. Though over half the Bristol residents and visitors surveyed by M Shed felt positive about Colston falling, perhaps the most tangible legacy of its downfall was longer sentences for people defacing memorials, rather than changes to the material conditions ofmaterial improvements to black Britons' lives.
Did woke really go too far, or in some ways not far enough? And are there still ways of successfully advancing progressive causes, even in a time of backlash that is frightening for many?
Luke Tryl is looking forward to a weekend tending his roof garden when I call. Now in his late 30s, he cut his teeth campaigning for equal marriage at Stonewall, before advising the Conservative equalities minister Nicky Morgan. These days, he runs the cross-party More in Common thinktank, which was founded in memory of the murdered MP Jo Cox to seek common ground in an increasingly polarised world.
'Stop acting like being willing to work with Nazis is a fucking virtue, you creep,' was one of the more printable insults the mild-mannered Tryl and his co-author, Ed Hodgson, received on the social media platform Bluesky in February, for publishing a report suggesting that progressive zeal is sometimes its own worst enemy. More in Common's polling divides the public into seven political tribes, from Established Liberals (affluent centrists) to Loyal Nationalists (typical 'red wall' voters) whose views it then tracks in depth. The subject of that particular report was the Progressive Activist group, a close match for what Conservative politician Suella Braverman once called 'Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati'. Though only around one in 10 of the population, Progressive Activists punch above their weight in national conversations by being well-educated, highly engaged – they're four times as likely as the general population to post political content on social media – and driven to change the world. Five times as likely as other groups to say 'woke' was positive for society, they are its beating heart.
'Civil society, campaigning, large parts of the civil service – they wouldn't function without Progressive Activists. These are people prepared to give up big salaries and other perks of the job [for the cause]; they really do care,' says Tryl. 'If you ask people about lots of the changes that have been driven by Progressive Activists, they're ranked high on the list of things the British people say they're proudest of: advances in women's rights and gay rights, reductions in outright racism. They make change happen.' Though they would be wise to heed any lessons from the Democrats' defeat in last year's presidential election, he says, it would be a mistake to throw the progressive baby out with the bathwater: 'There's a danger that the pendulum will swing too far the other way and get rid of a whole load of stuff that the public actually supports.'
Yet Progressive Activists' fatal flaw, the report argues, is that they're further from mainstream public opinion on cultural issues than they realise. They're the only group where a majority thinks that immigration should be as high or higher than it is now, and that protecting people from hate speech matters more than defending free speech (a key rationale behind 'no debate' – the idea that trans identities aren't up for discussion – and 'no platforming'). They're also the group most likely to think social change sometimes requires breaking the law, whereas two-thirds of Britons disapprove of protesters blocking roads or gluing themselves to things.
Tryl stresses that being outliers doesn't invariably make Progressive Activists wrong – perhaps they're just ahead of the curve, as the suffragettes once were – but it has important tactical implications. His polling shows that Progressive Activists overestimate by a factor of two to three how much others agree with their core beliefs, from abolishing the monarchy to letting children change gender. Consequently they tend to invest too little time on persuasion, focusing instead on mobilising the masses they wrongly imagine are on board. 'If you're reaching out to people, then you're watering down,' is how Tryl describes this mindset.
While successful campaigns usually build the broadest base possible, Progressive Activists also tend to be purists, rejecting supporters who don't endorse a complete worldview. (More than a quarter wouldn't campaign alongside someone who believes – as a majority of Britons do – in Israel's right to exist, for example.) Their yearning for grand systemic change means they can sound dismissive of other people's small but well-meaning efforts, and they're also unusually keen on correcting other people's 'mistakes' on diversity issues, something other groups consider likely to cause embarrassment.
Core to woke philosophy is what is sometimes called 'systemic thinking', or the idea that society consists of overlapping systems of oppression, from capitalism to patriarchy, which we are socialised not to notice and to which we must be awoken by unpacking the power dynamics hidden in everyday interactions – between men and women, say, or people of different races. Pointing out undercurrents others have missed is therefore very important to progressives – they genuinely think it's helpful, Tryl says – but not everyone shares their enthusiasm for what quickly descended, in the gladiatorial arena of late-2010s Twitter, into pile-ons and point-scoring: 'There's a group of people who come from a position of 'I have some questions about this', but everyone shouts at them, and they become radicalised the other way.'
Ironically, given its emphasis on inclusion, there was also one hidden power dynamic that 'woke' too often seemed to miss in those heady early days. Class, as defined by education level, is now a bigger dividing line than race in US politics, and a key predictor of Reform's success in Britain. Were activists who scolded critics to 'educate yourself' or 'do the reading', while speaking the language of undergraduate sociology essays, always likely to grate on the two-thirds of British adults who don't have degrees?
Three years ago, a former Labour party press officer called Chris Clarke published a report for the thinktank Progressive Britain, arguing that the way progressives talk may, in part, explain why British liberal parties kept losing elections. Populists such as Trump or the Vote Leave campaign under Dominic Cummings use simple, direct, verb-based language ('build a wall', 'take back control'), which ignores nuances and doesn't necessarily hold water as policy, but which anyone can follow. Progressive activists, however, sometimes favour more complex, 'systemic' language involving mental leaps that aren't immediately obvious. Slogans such as 'global warming is racism' – on the grounds that emissions from (mostly white) big economies disproportionately harm (mostly non-white) developing countries – may sound like pure word salad to those unfamiliar with this style of reasoning, even if they might agree with the underlying principles. British progressives, Clarke tells me, need to spend more time explaining what they actually mean in simple terms, rather than assuming everyone who balks at an unfamiliar argument is a bigot. 'My final conclusion was about the importance of joining the dots – making arguments that break it down for people, and which don't assume the worst of those who don't buy it.'
The less jargon, meanwhile, the better. Two-thirds of Britons can't even confidently define 'net zero', Tryl says. Support for the policy rises 14 points when it's explained as 'balancing emissions', which sounds more achievable to people who otherwise think they're being asked to eradicate all carbon use. The phrase 'white privilege' raises hackles in his focus groups – white people typically say they've never personally felt privileged – but also, more surprisingly, divides non-white voters too. In a 2021 survey by the racial equality thinktank British Future, 70% of ethnic minority respondents agreed that 'it's easier to get ahead if you are white' but only 59% agreed 'there is white privilege in Britain'. Even some big institutions are deterred from talking about racism by confusion over unfamiliar terminology, British Future's director, Sunder Katwala, told me: 'Language anxiety is a tax on having conversations that are overdue.' But it's also, perhaps, a potential tax on supporters' patience.
Chris Clarke worked for Labour in South Thanet during Farage's 2015 attempt to win the seat and still winces at the memory of calling it a 'poor area' needing investment in front of a voter, before worrying that 'poor' was offensive and stumbling through various euphemisms – deprived, less affluent – while the man stared incredulously. By striving to say the right thing, he had simply sounded weird. Clarke remembered that conversation, years later, when listening to Starmer struggle to explain why men can have cervixes.
Wrapped up warmly against the winter chill, a gaggle of students holding cardboard signs chants: '1-2-3-4, kick the bigots out the door.' Outside, the pink-haired young organiser of the protest declares that no university should be platforming 'views that will make it that trans people end up being killed'.
It could be any one of multiple British campus protests, but this is neither the University of Sussex – recently fined £585,000 by university regulators for failing to protect the free speech of gender-critical academic Kathleen Stock – nor the University of Edinburgh, where pro-trans activists blocked the screening of a documentary they deemed transphobic. The January 2023 footage is from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and I watched it after listening to the target of the protest explain why, if anything, it only entrenched his views.
Robert Wintemute is professor of human rights law at King's College London, a gay man who worked for decades on anti-discrimination test cases and helped draft the so-called 'Yogyakarta Principles', a founding statement of the campaign for self-identification, or the right for trans people to gain legal recognition in their preferred sexual orientation or gender identity without requiring a doctor's diagnosis of gender dysphoria. In a 2005 book, he argued that LGB people had 'a moral duty to speak out' for the T. His new book, Transgender Rights vs Women's Rights: From Conflicts to Co-Existence, explains why he changed his mind.
Wintemute was teaching a summer school in 2018 when a student asked why, in law, a married person who transitions must seek their spouse's consent to remain in what would become a same-sex marriage. When Wintemute said the rationale was protecting the spouse's rights, he was challenged by a trans student who, he says, walked out when the professor said that trans rights don't trump all others in law. This student, he writes, 'did not seem to have considered that non-transgender people have human rights'.
Wintemute wondered if he had dismissed some women's concerns about self-ID too quickly. But when he began voicing doubts publicly, a Brussels-based gay rights group for whom he had long done legal work responded by cutting professional ties. 'I said, 'But I don't work on these rights for you, can't we agree to disagree?' But no. It was all or nothing,' Wintemute recalls. For a lawyer used to testing arguments, the 'no debate' approach seemed suspicious. 'You think the other side's arguments must be weak if they're not willing to present them.'
Ostracised by old allies, Wintemute started speaking at events organised by the LGB Alliance, a group formed to oppose Stonewall's 2015 adoption of trans alongside lesbian, gay and bisexual rights. (Though some trans activists consider the Alliance as a hate group, a legal bid by the trans group Mermaids to block its registration as a charity failed in 2023.) It was a lecture Wintemute planned to give in Montreal, on this concept of 'divorcing the LGB from the T', that sparked first an open letter accusing the university of 'actively contributing to the genocide of trans people' by hosting him, and then a full-fledged protest. On the day, Wintemute remembers arriving to a chorus of: 'Fuck your system, fuck your hate! Trans rights are not up for debate!' The lecture was abandoned after protesters broke into the room and threw flour.
But if the aim was to shut him up, he says, it backfired: TV interviews he gave about the fracas reached more people via YouTube than the lecture would have, and six days later, publishers accepted his book proposal. He wasn't silenced, but amplified, and if anything encouraged to double down. These days, he argues that perhaps there shouldn't even be a right to legally change sex on birth certificates and passports. Perhaps you consider this view extreme enough to justify his attempted cancellation, but it is one shared by a startling 50% of the British public, according to the authoritative British Social Attitudes survey.
What makes Wintemute's journey from sympathy with self-ID to hostility towards it worth studying is that it mirrors a strikingly rapid broader shift in public opinion. In 2016, the year a cross-party Commons committee first backed self-ID, the survey found 58% of Britons supported the right to change legal sex and only 17% admitted feeling prejudice against trans people. Within a year, the then prime minister, Theresa May, promised to consult on reforming gender recognition.
But by 2022, the British Social Attitudes survey found public backing for the legal right to change sex had almost halved and admissions of anti-trans prejudice almost doubled, at a time when public opinion became more liberal on other social issues. Though some will blame the press or politicians for stoking a backlash – and More in Common's report explicitly acknowledges that media outlets can 'play a role in fomenting different viewpoints' over culture war issues – Stonewall has historically won gay rights victories in the teeth of a more overtly homophobic tabloid press.
In retrospect, Stonewall seemingly fell into the trap – identified by More in Common – of overestimating how mainstream its views were, while gender-critical feminist organisations such as Woman's Place UK focused on persuading the wavering via open public meetings. Jubilant at what seemed an easy victory on self-ID, Stonewall had adopted a 'trans women are women, get over it' stance, declaring that, while willing to engage in debates that furthered understanding, 'we do not and will not' acknowledge any conflict between trans rights and women's sex-based rights. (Some activists insisted it was transphobic even to say conflict existed, for example over access to domestic violence refuges, though the Equalities Act 2010 explicitly anticipates such conflicts.)
But refusing to answer difficult questions did not make them go away. Instead they were ultimately settled in the courts, where gender-critical feminists won a string of victories culminating at the supreme court earlier this year. A campaign for self-ID initially enjoying cross-party support had somehow ended not just in defeat but in reverse, with trans people losing hard-won access (at least on the Equality and Human Rights Commission's interpretation of the ruling) to everything from grassroots sport to public toilets.
The man tasked with picking up the pieces is Stonewall's new CEO Simon Blake. A 51-year-old veteran of the early 2000s battle to repeal Section 28 (which once banned teachers from 'promoting' the idea that homosexuality is acceptable), Blake is signalling a return to the more persuasive, gradualist campaigning style of those years. 'What I have been really interested in is how much we used to know that you had to win hearts and minds, that you had to have the conversations, that you had to go into places where people didn't like you, and it was one step at a time,' he says over Zoom. 'When I was at the National Union of Students [as chief executive], one of the things which was very different for me generationally was the 'I'm not going to educate you, Google it' thing. And you don't win hearts and minds by saying 'Google it'.' Campaigns need, he argues, to regain a human touch.
'The other bit for me which is different – and that doesn't mean it's wrong – is that sense of you're either 100% or you're 100% against.' Most people are more complicated than that, Blake says: 'We might absolutely support everybody's rights and freedoms, but we might have some questions that we don't understand, and some of the things that people don't understand are where the heat has come in.' That said, he is clear that 'conversation has to be respectful': the sheer hostility trans people often encountered when they did engage was the reason so many retreated into 'no debate'.
Frustrating as some may find it, Blake also notes that Stonewall victories were often won incrementally and that cultural change can lag behind the legislative kind. The gay age of consent, for example, fell from 21 to 18 in 1994, before dropping to 16 in England, Scotland and Wales in 2000. 'Despite the progress we've made over the last 20 years, we mustn't kid ourselves that we're further along than we are,' says Blake.
If Martin Luther King Jr was right that the arc of the moral universe ultimately bends towards justice, then that arc is often interrupted by backlashes and setbacks. When asked for examples of progressive movements that have successfully overcome such challenges, Luke Tryl cites climate campaigners. 'Even when things are going the right way, they're always conscious of losing it – they're always looking and thinking, 'OK, that went wrong. Learn and reflect.'' Coincidentally or not, net zero is the 'woke' cause to which Starmer has so far stuck most closely while under fire.
Joss Garman was 16 when he was first arrested, trying to break into a US airbase. The outgoing director of the European Climate Foundation is still probably best known as the founder of the eco-protest group Plane Stupid, the Just Stop Oil of its day, which organised sit-ins on airport runways to protest expansion and disrupted aviation industry conferences by setting off rape alarms. But two decades on, Garman thinks the need for protests to shock the public into action on climate is waning.
'I do feel there's still a role for activists to take an issue that's not on the agenda and put it up there, but I just don't think that's where we are with climate now,' he says. 'The issue is whether there's any trust in government or business to deliver solutions that are going to work.' He points out that the red wall voters over whom Downing Street frets are as worried about the planet as anyone else, but potentially more sceptical about politics. 'The big proclamations about how this is going to deliver millions of jobs – they've heard it all before. People need to actually see and feel the changes.' If explaining how renewables could cut low-earning families' energy bills seems humdrum compared to stopping traffic, his hunch is it's more important.
Protests can, of course, serve many legitimate purposes beyond changing minds: they can be about inspiring solidarity between activists, expressing high emotion, building resistance (or even starting a revolution). But is the charge levelled against woke – that some of its protests turned potential supporters against them – fair? In an intriguing experiment for the not-for-profit public research initiative Persuasion UK, director Steve Akehurst showed respondents videos of five different climate-related incidents: Just Stop Oil activists spraying paint over the News International building and throwing soup at a Vincent van Gogh painting; Insulate Britain's road-blocking protest; and Extinction Rebellion's oil refinery blockade, as well as its more carnivalesque 2019 protest involving parking a big pink boat at Oxford Circus. Akehurst then asked respondents about their views on the climate crisis and compared their answers to those of a control group who were not shown the videos.
After watching the soup-throwing and road-blocking videos, viewers became actively more hostile to the protesters' cause than non-viewers, suggesting these actions may have triggered a backlash. But, intriguingly, viewers of the paint-spraying at News International and the pink boat at Oxford Circus were nudged towards the cause. Akehurst's conclusion was that protests need an easily understood 'villain', not a painting whose connection with fossil fuels is far from obvious, and to avoid inconveniencing ordinary people just trying to get to work.
Garman argues that climate campaigners have made progress in part by building coalitions broad enough to survive changes in the political weather, a lesson learned after David Cameron's sudden 2013 decision to 'cut the green crap' amid Tory fears that his environmental policies were unpopular. 'Quite a lot of the climate community has gone out of their way to try to work with Conservatives, work with farmers, work with trade unions,' says Garman.
That doesn't, he argues, necessarily always mean selling out. When Labour lost the 2023 Uxbridge byelection, prompting furious debate over whether London Mayor Sadiq Khan's expansion of his Ulez clean-air charging zone to the borough had backfired, Garman warned on his Substack newsletter that climate campaigners 'need to make sure we don't do stupid shit' at a time when many households are on painfully tight budgets. Yet a year later, Khan was triumphantly re-elected, while Tory attempts to build on the idea of a 'woke' war on motorists failed to save them at the general election.
The moral is that environmentalists can take risks where they're sure support runs deep enough, Garman argues: 'The extent to which there's investment in and focus on building public support, that's the thing that enables us to make so much progress.' His new project is a climate thinktank designed to respond to an era of populist politics, tight budgets and renewed emphasis on energy security.
It reflects growing interest within the climate movement in focusing on what Roger Harding, co-director of the small eco-charity Round Our Way, calls 'working-class, red wall voters who are not about to become vegan anytime soon' but still worry about the planet. It's an audience he knows well, having grown up in a lone-parent family with little time to spare for high politics. Round Our Way aims to focus on practical climate impacts people notice in their own back yards, from persistent flooding of local football pitches to rising food costs, aiming to build support from the grassroots up.
Both these efforts, and Simon Blake's at Stonewall, are first responses to questions about the future of progressive movements for which nobody yet has all the answers. But they are attempts to heed the warning lights flashing on the dashboard; to adapt, and survive.
'It's not, 'How far can we turn the clock back?' We do want to acknowledge some good things happened,' as British Future's Sunder Katwala puts it. 'I think there's still a broad consensus for doing diversity and equality well. But it's a chance to sort the wheat from the chaff.' To be woke was, after all, originally to be vigilant: ever watchful to existential threat, no matter what shape it takes.
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