Tories like me don’t seek a culture war. We just want a ‘radically moderate’ society

‘It isn’t radically moderate to boo individuals taking the knee to protest the abuse they have suffered.’ Players take the knee before the Manchester City v Brentford match, 9 February 2022. Photograph: Peter Powell/EPA

Oliver Dowden, the Conservative party chair, recently delivered an interesting speech to the Heritage Foundation thinktank in Washington. The Independent reported it with the headline “Tory chair gave ‘anti-woke’ speech at think-tank funded by tobacco and oil companies”. HuffPost gave its reporting the headline “Tory party chair Oliver Dowden likens ‘woke ideology’ to Maoism in bizarre speech”.

Some commentators tried to cast his speech as part of the so-called “culture wars”; they seemed to only care about his use of the word “woke”, ignoring lines in his speech such as “we allow ourselves to be obsessed by what divides us rather than what unites us”.