Which Tory leadership candidate will take on the woke MADNESS?

James Esses on the Conservative Party leadership campaign

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The Conservative Party is in the midst of one the most important leadership elections in its history. Having just been comprehensively demolished at the general election, and now facing a serious, long-term challenge from Nigel Farage and an increasingly professional-looking Reform, the Conservative Party’s future hangs in the balance.

As I write this, for example, there are only 4-points separating the Tories and Reform in the polls. So, if the party gets this decision right, then it has a chance of getting off life support, taking the fight to Reform, and returning to being a successful political force. But if it gets this wrong then it really could be lights out for one of the oldest and most successful political parties in the entire history of democracy.

The leadership contest, announced by Rishi Sunak back in July, is due to finish on November 2, after the final two candidates have been put to a vote among Conservative Party members. Already, two candidates, Priti Patel and Mel Stride, have been eliminated.

Which leaves Robert Jenrick, James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat, and Kemi Badenoch, all of whom —as you read this— are busy wooing party members and activists at their party’s conference.

But while their views about immigration have been dominating the news —with Robert Jenrick widely seen as the toughest on this issue—in this piece I want to look at where the candidates stand on another issue that is crucial to the future of the Conservative Party and indeed all centre-right parties around the globe.

Woke ideology.

As Matt Goodwin has argued for years, while senior Tories deride the issue of ‘woke’ as a pointless ‘culture war’, the reality is that few things are more important to conservatives than defending the rights of women, the rights of children, and the preservation of our history, culture, and ways of life from this divisive, insidious and unBritish worldview.

By advocating things like gender identity theory, which argues that people’s self-identified ‘gender identity’ supersedes biological sex, and critical race theory, which contends that all Western nations are institutionally racist, woke ideology threatens free speech, free expression, objective reality, the values of the Enlightenment, and the cohesion and even survival of Western societies.

Which is why it is strongly opposed by the Reform party, which in its last election manifesto outlined a zero-tolerance approach to woke ideology. And which is why it is absolutely crucial that the Conservative Party formulate a serious response. So, where do the leadership candidates stand on this issue?

In my view—and I should stress this is my view—most of the remaining leadership candidates are deeply confused and inconsistent. While several of the candidates have come out with big statements, talking about the need to protect British culture, history, and heritage from this ideology, when you look a little closer there is little substance. In fact, when it comes to taking on this ideology only one of the candidates talks the talk and walks the walk …