Tories unveil anti-woke manifesto

The Queen’s Speech yesterday may have seen the government’s fairly dry vision for modern Britain but a group of Conservative backbench MPs and peers have now banded together to propose their own alternative. Cracking down on immigration, breaking up the BBC and taking aim at woke policing are all proposed in a new book by the Common Sense Group of around 50 Tory parliamentarians. Titled Conservative Thinking For a Post-Liberal Age, it takes aim at the Equality Act, Supreme Court, British broadcasters and Extinction Rebellion, proposing a much tougher line on the forces of ‘wokeism’ and its practitioners.

The group’s chairman Sir John Hayes declares that ‘the battle for Britain has begun, and guided by the common sense of the people, we must triumph for the common good’. For fellow member Gareth Bacon ‘Britain is under attack’ from a ‘woke ideology’ with ‘no democratic mandate’ but instead an ‘intense hostility to western civilisation’. Policies to tackle this include ‘definitive amendments to the 2010 Equality Act,’ tax incentives to encourage marriage, curbs on direct action protests and a requirement for state-funded institutions to ‘promote British values, traditions and history.’