You might have expected Rishi Sunak’s “health week”, which has just ended, to at least be free of the perennial “wedge issue” – those culture war topics, from small boats to net zero, which have dominated government messaging of late.
But you’d be wrong. Amid the unflattering focus on waiting lists – on which a record 7.6 million people in England were languishing in June – a new culprit for the NHS crisis emerged from government quarters. A source close to the health secretary, Steve Barclay, told journalists that, instead of being “relentlessly focused on caring for all patients and cutting waiting lists”, NHS trusts and other health bodies had been “wasting time and money on woke virtue signalling”.
Yes, woke health managers are to blame for the health crisis. Barclay had previously written to health quangos, urging them to ditch a “diversity champions” scheme. Now this has been linked to waiting lists. A new wedge issue is born.
Amid all the urgent material problems facing the country, why this relentless, almost pathological, search for wedge issues and cultural division points? One must assume the Tory party believes this is helping them. But examine the strategy, and there is little to suggest that this is true.
The first thing to say about a government of a modern western nation setting out to “change its culture” is that this simply cannot be done. We are just too individualistic: our people will not be dictated to in that way. If a western politician were to demand, say, that everyone become “more family minded” or “less woke”, voters might agree – or not – with the principle. But nothing else would happen. In vain have governments urged couples to marry and have more children in the face of plummeting birthrates. They have been ignored.
Culture wars in the west are above all futile; our leaders are just not powerful enough. And therein lies the irony of a party professing to champion small government while fantasising that it has the power to reach into networks of friends, neighbours and colleagues and change their cultural beliefs – making them less elitist, or green, or snobby, or progressive. If the British government could really “reduce snobbery” towards apprenticeships or maths degrees, or conjure up family values merely by saying that it champions them, or demand that students keep portraits of the Queen on the walls of their middle common rooms, they would be ruling a very different sort of country – one that was far less free.
It shows that the only way culture wars actually do win support in the west is by working on the opposite principle – that people naturally resist the idea of being told what to do. Warriors always have to frame their issue as a sort of rebellion against an authoritarian power. Thus, we have the ridiculous spectacle of the most powerful people in the country styling themselves as a sort of rebel coalition – the last outpost of opposition to an often unspecified shadowy elite. This might include anyone from “woke” civil servants (employed to do their bidding) to university departments to the residents of various metropolitan boroughs.
A focus on changing culture cannot, then, in a practical sense, ever really work. But can it win you an election? Again, no. Probably not. Much has been made of the wedge issue as electoral strategy, but less of its disadvantages. The problem with dividing the electorate is that you inevitably alienate some of your own potential voters. Some fall the wrong side of the wedge. Parties that win elections are typically able to reach across vast numbers of individuals who may agree on a few issues but disagree on many more. They must unite young and old, rural and urban, liberal and less liberal.
The conservative values that unite the largest numbers of people tend to concern economics. Wanting lower taxes, for example, is a principle that cuts across large and diverse groups. But the problem with culture is that it is specific: to geography and generation, to class and to economic status. It traces a line around your target group and excludes everyone else. And the harder you go on cultural issues, the more specific it gets and the more people you exclude.
Wise parties leave voters with cultural wiggle room – they profess, for example, to be both “tough on crime” and “tough on the causes of crime”. Precision alienates. Enemies are useful things; they help unite your supporters. But if your foes become too shadowy and non-specific, they might end up absorbing potential friends. Indeed, some Tory definitions of “woke” have included a good chunk of their own MPs.
There is some evidence to suggest the endless culture wars are responsible for turning young voters to the left in western countries. The journalist John Burn-Murdoch has pointed out that the housing crisis doesn’t fully account for the leftwing swing among younger generations: millennial homeowners are just as likely to vote against the Tory party. A recent report by thinktank Onward found groups of “shy capitalists” among young leftwingers – plenty agree with boomers on low taxes and think of big business as an opportunity rather than an opponent. But they have no time for Tory social values.
In fact, some of the government’s wedge issues seem designed to remove most of their own voters. Recent polling tells us that net zero is particularly popular with Conservative voters: about 73% back the 2050 deadline. Meanwhile, mere cultural signalling on small boats, in lieu of sensible immigration policy, is diminishing trust among even those who agree with the government.
And there’s a further problem with culture wars. “The big binary in politics is On Your Side v Out of Touch”, says John McTernan, former political secretary to Tony Blair. “So a culture war issue or a wedge issue needs to paint the other guys as Out of Touch.”
But here’s the irony. As the government brushes over mortgage rises and NHS waiting times to focus on the scourge of metropolitan elite dinner party talking points, it’s not Labour that looks out of touch.
• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
