It was near the end of a fringe event entitled Are We Losing the War on Woke? when Tory MP Miriam Cates suggested drastic cuts to higher education. Why? In part to save money. But also, she said, to stop young people being “indoctrinated” with liberal ideas.
One overlooked feature of the just-ended Conservative conference was a battle waged away from the cabinet splits and the main conference hall – a concerted, if so far largely below the surface, effort to get the party fully engaged in a US-style culture war.
Taking in issues including free speech, transgender rights, structural racism and a pervading sense that the UK is dominated by a leftwing establishment, despite 12 unbroken years of Tory rule, observers say it is in part linked to Liz Truss’s embrace of free market libertarianism.
“Truss herself doesn’t seem especially interested in culture wars, but she is so heavily influenced by thinktanks who believe in their version of 1980s Reaganite economics, so it’s no surprise that brings along some of the US culture war stuff too,” one Tory party constituency chair said.
“You could see that at the conference. You get the people based in London, or who work for MPs, and are generally quite liberal, but there’s a big split with members who want to talk endlessly about single-sex bathrooms and critical race theory.”
The scale of these ideas in the party should not be overstated. The conference fringe schedule in Birmingham featured 45 events about levelling up in various forms, against little more than half a dozen connected to free speech or the woke threat.
It was, however, notable how enthusiastic many Tory members seemed for such ideas, and the rapturous response at other events for the two key culture warriors in Truss’s cabinet, Suella Braverman, the home secretary, and Kemi Badenoch, the international trade secretary.
Party insiders say a lot of this enthusiasm, particularly for free speech issues, comes from younger members who have been fired up by GB News, the 16-month-old domestic semi-equivalent of Fox News, and by online content.
Some of the ideas expressed did feel notably US-style in their intensity. The fringe event attended by Cates also featured Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, who described woke ideas as “a battle for the foundations of our civilisation”.
Kaufmann also recommended that Tory ministers follow the lead of Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor recently in the news for flying asylum seekers from his state to Martha’s Vineyard, the Massachusetts island that is a popular holiday destination for the wealthy.
Another fringe event, sponsored by the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Taxpayers’ Alliance, Truss’s favourite thinktanks, featured Kaufmann again, and also Winston Marshall, the musician who quit the chart-topping band Mumford & Sons after expressing support for the US rightwing controversialist Andy Ngo, and whose financier father has invested heavily in GB News.
One MP said their impression from the conference was that the proportion of Tory members invested in culture wars, which they put at “about a third, but a very active, loud third”, seemed newly energised.
“I don’t think they’ve changed their views that much. They just seem more bothered by things,” the MP said.
Nick Lowles, the chief executive of the campaign group Hope Not Hate, which has previously carried out polling of Tory members’ views, said the right of the party could be broadly divided into Truss-ite economic libertarians, the traditional anti-immigration right, and culture warriors, albeit with crossover.
“The culture warriors might have lost out with Truss becoming prime minister, but their ideas resonated a lot,” he said. “The idea that the party is in such a steep decline, even just for now, means ideas are vying for position. It’s like a battle for the soul of the Conservative party.
“It’s got the worst elements of Labour either in the 1980s or more recently, where people become so consumed by their infighting and purity of position that all they do is alienate themselves from lots of voters.”
