Woke brigade ‘could tear the UK apart despite being just a noisy minority’
WOKE culture warriors are a noisy minority but they risk tearing the UK apart, researchers say.
Throwing around baseless allegations of racism and white privilege will lead to deep US-style social divisions, they warn.
And social media platforms need to be held to account better for fuelling divisive movements, the Kings College London team insisted.
The experts found that cancel culture had exploded in the last year — with 55 per cent of people having first encountered it in the past 12 months.
Liberal or left-leaning sides of the culture war were less likely to engage in debate than those on the traditional or right-leaning side, they found.
More than half of Brits believe that people are too easily offended, they discovered.
Meanwhile, 26 per cent see woke as a compliment, 24 per cent reckon it’s an insult and the rest don’t know what it means.
Prof Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute at KCL, said: “The large majority of people are generally much less fired up about cultural issues than the rhetoric suggests.”
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The report says there are “clear echoes of the US experience” emerging in the UK.
America has been riven by civil unrest sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement over the past 18 months.
Sunder Katwala, of think-tank British Future, said: “We must not see America as a model that we want to import. America is a warning about what not to do.”
The proportion of respondents who had first encountered the term 'culture wars' in the last 12 months, according to the survey being reported, was 55%, not 82% as first reported. This has been amended.