The Conservatives and the “War on Woke”

Policy tools were deployed by the Conservatives to enact an ‘anti-woke’ agenda. The chapter identifies key interventions in this area, drawn from the policy tool categories introduced in Chap. 1 , including new regulations for free speech in universities and ‘gender critical’ regulatory and bureaucratic interventions. Additionally, it explores the response to the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK, which saw the commissioning of a controversial report into ‘racial disparities’, which seemed to downplay the scale of the issue and praise existing approaches. The chapter argues that there has been significant engagement in ‘forging’, the component of the illiberal playbook which emphasises traditionalism and morality in politics, but which operates comfortably within the legitimate parameters of a government’s activities -even where they may prove controversial. These activities represent a British variant of forging, which incorporates ‘liberal illiberalism’.