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”.
If the purpose of this kind of quick-fire attack is recruitment, then the slower, more covert attacks are for annexation. An example of the latter also came about recently, in the form of new guidance by the Department for Education on political impartiality in England’s classrooms. The document singled out topics such as empire, racism and the climate crisis as “political issues” that should be treated with care, moving the parameters of what teachers and students perceive as “neutral” and what is “ideological” another inch to the right. This side of the culture wars takes its time to cover ground by influencing education and culture.
Those advancing this line of attack in government often act behind closed doors, so that by the time their goals are made public it’s too late to challenge them. Last month, the government announced that BBC funding from the licence fee would be frozen for the next two years, raised concerns about the BBC’s “impartiality and groupthink”, and suggested that its public funding model could face abolishment (although it later softened its stance). So opaque was the process that Richard Sharp, the chair of the BBC, said the broadcaster was blindsided by the decision being announced not to those concerned at the BBC itself, but via briefings to the Sunday papers. He told BBC Radio 4 that he “hadn’t anticipated learning what I learned over the weekend” as discussions had been ongoing with the government and were, as far as he knew, inconclusive. But discussions had been concluded elsewhere. At the end of 2020, a 10-person panel was appointed to help decide the BBC’s future and funding model. It was not set up under Cabinet Office guidelines, met only in secret, and freedom of information requests for a record of the proceedings were refused.
Loud and quiet goes the pattern of culture war advance, like the children’s song: “loud and quiet, fast and slow.” Of recent wins, the expropriation and ubiquitisation of the word “woke” has been the quickest. Most people don’t actually know what “woke” means. But, to quote Will Ferrell in Blades of Glory explaining the nonsensical lyrics to a song: “Nobody knows what it means but it’s provocative. It gets the people going.” All that matters is that people pick up on its implications and intimations.
Different permutations of “wokeness” have always been useful, leveraged by the right to portray any social change as a matter of exuberant and unhinged vandalism to the status quo. This is not a new tactic (little in the culture wars is): wokeness is the new “loony left” or “PC gone mad”, a swapping of terms to portray the left as an absurdity and threat which has been around since at least the 1950s.
What is frustrating is that for a tactic that has been used for so long, progressive politicians still do not seem to have understood that the only way to beat the charge is to own it. To say when confronted with an issue presented as a matter of wokeness: “What do you mean by woke?” To expose and mock the term for its threadbareness, or to question its very pejorative use. I’ll take anything really at this point, as long as it is delivered with authenticity and swagger. Imagine hearing a politician say something like: “If by ‘woke’ you mean ending racism and inequality, reforming our curriculums so that they are factual and representative both of historical truth and how Britain is changing, and striving for a world where your chances in life are determined as little as possible by your birth, then sign me up.” I would think I was hallucinating.
The signal the left sends by letting the term be claimed by the right is so powerful that Labour politicians are now in the bizarre position of denying the existence of the culture wars but being simultaneously afraid of being called woke. In an interview with the Telegraph earlier this year, Labour’s shadow culture secretary, Lucy Powell, showed how cornered and defeated progressives can be by letting the term “woke” go uncontested, while being entirely pinned down by its assaults. She said there is a lot of “false division” created by the right on matters such as statues that she would not indulge as culture secretary. She then fell right into the biggest false division of all. “I wouldn’t say I’m woke. I’m not woke, but I’m not anti-woke either,” she said, like Schrödinger’s cat. “I’m just kind of fairly ordinary. I will absolutely sort of cry my eyes out at Strictly Come Dancing where a deaf woman wins it and a same-sex couple are the runners-up. I think that was a fantastic kind of illustration of where woke and anti-woke meet.”
Don’t laugh – “woke and anti-woke” is actually a good summary of Labour’s response when it comes to the culture wars. It’s risk avoidance. What it really means is that the party is taking the moral high ground on the basis that it cares only about tangible issues that impact people’s lives in a strict economic sense, but is otherwise, to put it bluntly, frit. To engage in clear, studied defendable positions on hot button issues such as racism and colonialism that influence school policy, the media, and cultural institutions risks them being smoked out in the open about things that, through Labour’s appeasement in the culture wars, may well be poll kryptonite and tabloid ammunition.
What helps this state of acquiescence is that there are lulls, missteps and retreats in the culture wars, inviting speculation that it’s all a distraction or “running out of steam”, an artefact of an ebullient post-Brexit Conservative party. And yes, sometimes it is a distraction, sometimes these issues do go away for a while. But the potential for new momentum is always there, ready to be accelerated further by a media that loves a good war, whatever the speed. Just look at the vigour with which newspapers ran front pages on the education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi’s, latest guidelines and Dowden’s Washington speech, amping them up to claim that Black Lives Matter’s “biased” views are to be avoided (the Times), that students are being “indoctrinated” (the Daily Mail), and that Dowden’s words must be translated into “action” (the Telegraph). You don’t have to have a sophisticated grasp of what “woke” means to absorb the message being sent here: if you don’t vote for the Conservative party again and again, bad things are going to happen.
With a zombie prime minister and a Brexit wrung of populist opportunities, culture wars campaigning will likely intensify in the lead-up to the local elections in May – and the next general election. There will be a lot of “Mr Dowden goes to Washington” silliness about woke maths, but there will also be a lot of gravely serious, opinion-forming, institution-changing propaganda and policy that we on the left cannot simply pretend we are rising above. In fact we are just hiding, hoping and praying that these moves won’t be crucial to refreshing the chances of a desperate government out of ideas. That sounds pretty risky to me.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
