Speaking in the Commons on the afternoon of 18 October, the Home Secretary Suella Braverman denounced the opposition to her proposed Public Order Bill as “the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati”. The next day, she posted her resignation letter on Twitter. It had been a busy 24 hours in the war on woke, which featured the following skirmishes.
In the Commons, Braverman had given way to only two MPs, both members of the Common Sense Group – a collective of around 70 Conservatives on the right of the party that had formed two years earlier. Marco Longhi, MP for Dudley North, asked when the police would start locking protesters up. (A month later, Longhi would become president of the activist organisation Turning Point UK, whose aim is to fight “woke ideologies” in universities.) Gareth Bacon, MP for Orpington and the author of an essay for the Common Sense Group’s 2021 manifesto titled “What Is Wokeism and How Can It Be Defeated?”, suggested police officers should spend “less time policing pronouns on Twitter”. Braverman, a regular speaker at Common Sense Group events, welcomed their questions: “My honourable friend raises an issue close to my heart.”
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