I’ve previously described my scepticism towards businesses weighing in on the culture wars, or even politics in general. As I put it, the mechanism for choosing ice cream should be distinct from voting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One way of putting this policy into practice is to ignore any political messaging a company puts out. Whether Ben & Jerry’s is woke, based or indifferent you buy that ice cream.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Another strategy is to boycott any overtly political companies regardless of stance, but in practice this is likely to be a lopsided strategy. Consumer-facing brands seem almost only to see value in being woke, with the British pub chain Wetherspoon’s a rare rightwing exception in its political activism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (A separate exception I can think of is the Spectator, which recently threatened to blacklist a company over some woke threats around advertising. But that’s a political magazine, which justifies special treatment, and newspapers should resist such pressure from companies buying ads.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Consistency aside, unless one monitors such things I suspect the tendency will be to pick and choose depending on your own politics. I confess I was only mildly perturbed by Spoons pro-Brexit campaigning, which included beer mats and literature, if my beer-addled memory serves. Woke campaigning annoys me more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n