Graduate students at an Oxford college were criticised for removing a portrait of the Queen. The National Trust, the sedate custodian of stately homes, was accused of being too “woke” for backing historical research into its properties’ links to the slave trade. Researchers at King’s College London warned that, with such identity politics, “the UK could be at the early stages of a trend seen in the US in the 1980s and 1990s”.
This culture war seemed inexorable. Divisive messaging had won the 2019 general election: Boris Johnson promised to break the grip of the metropolitan elite. The internet itself seemed to reward a lack of nuance and compromise. If you wanted a vision of the future, you could imagine a hyperbolic tweet forever stamping on a human eyeball. To its proponents — like the rump of Tory MPs who called themselves the Common Sense Group — the culture war was more important than the tax burden or the state of public services. Because the culture war supposedly defined who we were as a society.
Something has now changed. British social media is no longer so full of simplistic stances on identity. Johnson’s attempts to recapture the zeitgeist of identity politics — by bringing back imperial measures and sending away asylum-seekers — could not save his premiership. Two upstart TV channels that launched to counter woke views, GB News and Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV, have both floundered. An ad campaign for TalkTV’s star presenter Piers Morgan ran: “Love him or hate him, you won’t want to miss him.” Morgan is a talented presenter, but so far most Brits are happy to miss him and his efforts to “cancel ‘cancel culture’”.
Perhaps the culture war couldn’t match up to actual war in Ukraine. Perhaps identity politics felt contrived compared with the cost of living squeeze. Who cares if they are paying in pounds and ounces if the prices are so high? Economic identities have come to the fore again. (“Class war”, ran a front-page headline in the Sun newspaper in June, about rail strikes.)
At the same time, perhaps the ending of coronavirus lockdowns eased the level of anxiety that had spilled out on social media. It’s possible that we will never be as online as we were in the summer after George Floyd was murdered. Perhaps we have become tired of shouting at one another? Perhaps what we really want is to come together in mushy appreciation of the Queen’s platinum jubilee, Paddington Bear, and Paul McCartney at Glastonbury?
Whatever the reason, a truce in the culture wars would be significant. It would show that British politics is not as like US politics as many observers assume. While our long-lost cousins dig trenches over abortion and guns, Britons may have bridges. Even as rallying cries such as Black Lives Matter cross the Atlantic, their precise manifestation does not. A culture war is not necessarily our destiny.
The term “culture war” became popular 30 years ago. In August 1992, the US presidential contender Pat Buchanan told the Republican convention that the country was in the midst of a “cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the cold war itself, for this war is for the soul of America”. Buchanan was against abortion, against gay marriage, against women serving in combat roles, against the “raw sewage of pornography that so terribly pollutes our popular culture”. He lost the Republican nomination, but his message captured part of the American right.
A similar dynamic long seemed impossible in Britain. “In England, all the boasting and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff, is done by small minorities,” wrote Orwell. Britain was less religious than the US. It didn’t have a polarising two-party system. Then came the referendums on Scottish independence and Brexit. Much of the public had to pick a side — pro or anti-union, Leave or Remain. These identities threatened to be the foundation for broader polarisation. Someone’s views on, say, racial and gender identity could be “stacked” on top of their referendum stance.
This was certainly how it felt on the night of the referendum, when I was in a party of Leave supporters, including a therapist called Sarah, who gloated at the people she perceived as the elites: “Mark Carney. Goldman Sachs. Alan Yentob. Let them bleed!” Populism washed up on both sides of the Atlantic. Maybe our society would be increasingly divided into two camps, as the US is.
But two things changed. First, Brexit identities began to weaken. By the time Britain left the EU in 2020, Britons were bored of hearing about Brexit. They were also much less concerned about the key issue in the referendum: immigration. Immigration is no longer cited in the top 10 issues that concern Britons; Brexit is ninth, behind the NHS, climate change and a lack of faith in politicians. Brexit identities were reinvigorated in 2019 by frustration at the political gridlock over the country’s EU exit. But this quickly dissipated, replaced by a more conventional anger at Boris Johnson’s dishonesty.
Second, on other issues, Britons’ identities were not “stacked” on top of their referendum stance. Britons did not split starkly along partisan lines in their attitudes to Covid-19 vaccines. There is a fair amount of consensus on the need for climate action, on same-sex marriage, on abortion. In this, Britain differs not just from the US, but from many European countries. “We’re so far away from where America is,” says Luke Tryl, UK director of the think-tank More in Common, which seeks to find common ground between people. “In America, if you tell me what someone thinks about immigration, I can tell you what they think about climate change. In the UK, people are much more likely to approach things issue by issue.”
A plurality of British people, including a plurality of those classified by More in Common as “backbone conservatives”, agree that a trans man is a man and a trans woman is a woman. Nearly 60 per cent of Britons say the British Museum’s Parthenon Marbles belong in Greece, not Britain. Even among Leave voters, the split is 52-26. In a free vote last month, the House of Commons approved, by a margin of 215 to 70, new rules under which the Northern Ireland health department will have to fund abortion services. This is not fertile ground for a culture war.
A few weeks ago, I watched a focus group run by More in Common with voters in the southern Conservative seat of Guildford. Some of the group had voted Conservative in 2019, but they were unenthused by cultural touchpoints. When one voter heard that, under the Tories’ plan to fly asylum-seekers to Rwanda, even successful applicants would not be allowed back into the UK, he exclaimed: “You’re kidding me? That’s disgusting.” When asked if Britain should pause its climate change efforts following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, these members of the public said no. “[Building renewables] just makes sense. I’ve got grandchildren,” said Maria. “Now’s the ideal opportunity to go for renewables,” said a pensioner called Robert. These people were in favour of onshore wind turbines (but not, of course, more houses).
None of the focus group had heard of a recent culture kerfuffle: a GCSE English literature syllabus that cut poems by Philip Larkin and Wilfred Owen to make room for authors from more diverse backgrounds. The then education secretary Nadhim Zahawi had lambasted the move as “cultural vandalism”. When it was mentioned, the members of the focus group were circumspect. They broadly accepted the need for changing syllabuses but linked it to broader unease about older people feeling that they are saying “incorrect” things. “It gets a bit excessive when you can’t breathe. People do get a bit oversensitive about it,” said Martin, a retiree. This is the attitude that Piers Morgan wants to tap into, but it is worn lightly.
Robert Ford, a politics professor at the University of Manchester, says: “We’re modestly divided by [cultural issues] but there’s a big market in the media for the idea that we’re deeply divided by these things . . . This Nadine Dorries idea that you can say Black Lives Matter is really about Brexit, or whatever — it just doesn’t work.”
How do cultural arguments end? In Britain, some identity battles have given way to consensus. In the 1980s, intolerance of gay relationships grew amid the Aids crisis and the hardline stance of Margaret Thatcher’s government. Today, same-sex rights are accepted on all sides of politics. The proportion of people saying that homosexual sex is not wrong has increased from 45 per cent to 67 per cent since 2010, according to the British Social Attitudes survey. It has taken years of campaigning and cultural visibility, including gay relationships on TV soaps.
On trans rights, the public are less resistant than headlines suggest. Their reservations, according to More in Common’s research, are about the inclusion of trans women in female sport and the ability of children to make irreversible medical decisions. Many trans activists view such restrictions on trans people as unacceptable.
But this debate will struggle to become a culture war, because the public does not feel viscerally enough. Similarly, making trans people, who constitute perhaps 1 per cent of the population, the centre of a cultural backlash has questionable political logic. In Australia’s recent election, then prime minister Scott Morrison majored on trans scepticism; he lost.
Culture wars often die down once the novelty wears off. The England men’s and women’s football teams take the knee before matches; it is settled policy. Many heritage sites now recognise the slave trade; there is no going back. One conservative writer noted that a tour of Oxford’s contested historic sites was underwhelming because “the various protesters got most of what they want”. In Bristol, the statue of slave trader Edward Colston — which was felled in 2020 — has not been put back up. Four-fifths of Bristolians who responded to an official consultation said it should be put in a local museum. For all the division, there is “considerable shared thinking and feeling in the city”, said Tim Cole, chair of the city’s History Commission.
The culture war happened inside companies too in 2020-21. Since then, corporate diversity and inclusion policies have provided an outlet for some frustrations, argues David D’Souza, membership director at the CIPD, the UK personnel body. In business as in politics, there are also now priorities other than identity issues: “The number-one conversation is unlikely to be in some of these areas. People are solving for other things.”
There is also a legal backstop. This month an employment tribunal ruled that a think-tank had discriminated against a researcher called Maya Forstater when it decided not to renew her contract because of her views on trans rights. Forstater’s view that biological sex is fixed, which she made clear unabusively including on her personal Twitter account, was protected by the Equality Act. This means that there is only so far companies can go in taking sides on trans rights.
Some organisations are trying to make clear that not everything can be fought over. Netflix faced protests from employees (mainly in the US) about its decision to broadcast routines from comedians Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais, which critics said were transphobic. It refused to censor the stand-ups; it even sacked one of the protest’s organisers for allegedly leaking internal data. On the flipside, British bank Halifax started allowing its staff to include their preferred pronouns on their name badges. When online critics attacked the policy, it replied that they could close their accounts. Few apparently bothered to do so.
The culture war is still promoted by parts of the media and activists online. It could spread. Younger generations do feel differently to their elders. The internet does sometimes make us all shriller. Even settled issues can become unsettled, as both Brexit and the overturning of Roe vs Wade show. “You can be ambushed any time,” says one person at an organisation that has been caught up in the culture wars. In the ongoing Tory leadership campaign, some contenders have tilted at wokeness. But polling suggests even Tory members have other, mainly economic concerns; their favoured candidate at the moment is Penny Mordaunt, who as a minister backed trans rights. There is probably a niche market for anti-wokeness, just as there is a niche market for GB News and TalkTV, each of which currently reaches about 1mn viewers a week, one-sixth as many as the BBC’s news channel. Yet the idea that identity politics are at the centre of the national conversation looks wrong-headed.
A few weeks ago, I sat down to watch Gervais’s Netflix show. Parts I found funny. Parts I found offensive. A year or two ago, I might have gone on Twitter and defended him or pilloried him. This time I decided I couldn’t be bothered to do either. I switched off the TV and stopped thinking about it altogether. We don’t have to sign up for a culture war. We can simply refuse to enlist.
Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer
Data visualisation by Chris Campbell
