A Hansard data investigation · after Tagesspiegel’s “Der Genderwahn der AfD”

Who actually says “woke”
in Parliament?

Forty years of the official record show the same ritual under three names — the loony left, political correctness, woke. The politicians who complain loudest about Britain’s woke obsession turn out to be doing most of the talking. We counted all of it.

Source: Hansard, spoken contributions 1980–2026 · 3,834 verified mentions · methodology below
The four findings
  1. Since 2015, Conservatives account for 38.5% of all culture-war vocabulary spoken in Parliament — the largest share of any party, at the highest per-seat rate of any major party.
  2. Where the direction of use is textually explicit, Labour’s mentions are 82% rebuttal — scare quotes and attacks on the “war on woke” — while Conservative mentions lean toward genuine deployment. Usage begets counter-usage.
  3. The most prolific user in either House is not a party politician at all: Baroness Fox of Buckley — 119 mentions, nearly four times anyone else.
  4. None of this is new. “Political correctness” ran the same way in every decade since the 1990s (Conservatives out-said Labour 575–205 in the 2000s), and the 1980s had the “loony left”. Same ritual, new vocabulary, three generations running.

Three generations, one ritual

Verified mentions per year in spoken contributions, by vocabulary generation. Hover for values.

Who says it — and how much

Culture-war vocabulary since 2015: total mentions (bar), share of all party-attributed mentions, and mentions per 100 seat-years (the fair fight across bench sizes).

The Marc Jongen of Westminster

Tagesspiegel found the AfD’s gender obsession was driven by individual super-users. Britain has one too: Baroness Fox of Buckley — Claire Fox, the former Brexit Party MEP, now a non-affiliated peer — uses the culture-war vocabulary nearly four times more than anyone else in either House. Her one-woman output makes the tiny non-affiliated bench the highest per-seat user in Parliament (22.2 per 100 seat-years, three times the Conservative rate).

119mentions since 2015
next highest: 32

Saying it v. throwing it back

Mentions whose direction is textually explicit (marker phrases like “woke brigade” v. “so-called” / scare quotes / “war on woke” attacks) — 37% of modern mentions carry such markers; the rest are plain discussion and shown in neither column. Rule precision is imperfect at the margins; see methodology.

Rebuts / mocks the term ←
→ Deploys it as their own

In their own words