Liz Truss has been accused of seeking to appeal to a “bigoted” section of the Conservative Party’s base by positioning herself as “anti-woke”.
Equality campaigners denounced the leadership frontrunner’s “culture war games” and said they feared she would continue her “divisive rhetoric” if elected to No 10.
It comes as the foreign secretary provoked anger with an “inflammatory” attack on “woke” Civil Service culture that she claimed “strays into antisemitism”.
Her remarks, which were condemned by a union as “dog-whistle politics,” were the latest skirmish in a culture war which has permeated Ms Truss’s battle with Rishi Sunak to become PM.
Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, a prominent women’s rights activist, told The Independent: “She is feeding their base of politically illiterate bigoted idolators.
“For Liz Truss to be anti-woke, is to be anti-me, as I am proudly, unapologetically woke to racial and social injustice and systemic inequality.
“The PM of this country must be the PM of the woke and the anti-woke, the PM of the poor and the rich, the PM of male, female and non-binary, but we have got the PM of one side – the anti-woke.”
Dr Mos-Shogbamimu, whose 2021 book This is Why I Resist investigated the roots of systemic racism, said it would be positive to have a female PM but that having women better represented in politics was not enough.
“What does Liz Truss represent?” the author asked. “Who does she represent? I do not see her as representing substance or equality for women from diverse backgrounds. She will continue divisive rhetoric that does not address the ongoing systemic injustice and inequality in our country.”
She added: ”She should not just be speaking to the Conservative Party but to the wider electorate. She is continuing Boris Johnson’s legacy. She is more of the same.
“She refuses to admonish Johnson publicly for the poor choices he made and for his incompetence as PM. The last 12 years under the Conservative Party have been horrendous. This is the party that gave us austerity and Brexit.”
Ms Truss, who is also women and equalities minister, has previously described herself as “Destiny’s Child feminist”.
Dr Mos-Shogbamimu said the foreign secretary did not represent her as a black woman and clearly had a “very different idea of what a feminist is and does”.
In a controversial speech in December 2020, Ms Truss announced plans to steer the UK’s equalities policy away from “fashionable” issues on race, sexuality and gender and derided “virtue signalling”, “pink bus feminism”, and so-called “camplaining”.
The MP for South West Norfolk also hit out at what she claimed was the dominance of “identity politics, loud lobby groups and the idea of lived experience” as she called for a a move away from quotas, targets, unconscious bias training and diversity statements, which she dismissed as “tools of the left”.
Mandu Reid, leader of the Women’s Equality Party, told The Independent: “Truss has shown just how much she enjoys playing culture war games, while the economic situation for women gets more serious every day.
“If she was brave enough to call a general election, she would soon find out what women think of this politics of no substance.”
Mr Sunak has also been accused of pushing culture war rhetoric in a desperate bid to revive his flagging leadership campaign. The former chancellor last month pledged to review the Equalities Act to stop the “woke nonsense” it has permitted to “permeate public life”.
Despite previously insisting he has “zero interest in fighting a so-called culture war”, the MP for Richmond in North Yorkshire promised to take on “left-wing agitators” and “end the brainwashing, the vandalism and the finger pointing”.
Rishi Sunak has attacked ‘left-wing agitators’
