How does WOKE start winning again?

British progressives have faced major setbacks in recent years. Was a backlash inevitable-and are new tactics needed?

- Gaby Hinsliff

THE FIGURE OF A MAN, his face streaked with scarlet T paint, lies inside a coffin-like glass box. Above it a video plays on loop, showing the afternoon June 2020 when an exuberant crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters yanked this statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston from its plinth near Bristol harbour and rolled it triumphantly into the water. Five years on from that cathartic execution, the graffiti-smeared statue occupies the far end of the exhibition on protest at the city's M Shed museum, among a thicket of placards left behind by the departing crovi Their slogans - "Silence is violence"; "Racism is a dangerous pandemic too"- evoke the radicalig of a summer that already feels oddly consigned to history, when frustration erupted on to the streets but never quite seemed to be channelled into lasting change. The museum leads visitors to Colston via older stories of resistance figures, once considered shockingly radical but now celebrated without question: Theresa Garnett, the suffragette who brandished a horsewhip at Winston Churchill at Bristol Temple Meads station, or the heroes of the 1963 Bristol bus boycott, who protested against the bus company's refusal to hire black drivers (and helped pa the way for the 1965 Race Relations Act). But the legacy of protests at the modern end of the gallery remains more contested.

Trying to clarify what the UK public understands by the perennial slippery term "woke", in 2022 the pollsters YouGov asked people how well it fitted various contemporary causes. The highest matchabove trans rights, no-platforming people whose opinions you disli stronger action on climate change, and the Black Lives Matter movement itself - was with removing historical statues associated with slavery. Something about this combination of direct action against a highly symbolic target, and revisiting history through a modern social justice lens, meant that 61% considered it woke.