There are two lines of attack in the current culture wars. The first is slow, steady and discreet, marching by stealth through Britain’s institutions. The second is a brazen, loud artillery attack armed with cliches and buzzwords that are fired out across the media.
The recent speech from the Conservative party chair, Oliver Dowden, to the Heritage Foundation in Washington is an example of the latter. It was a word salad into which he lazily and dispassionately (repeating this stuff really must get very boring) tossed a target list of vague and intangible concepts such as “cancel culture”, “woke psychodrama”, “obsessing over pronouns” and attempts to “decolonise mathematics”.
