Culture warriors sallied forth, only to be defeated by their own ineptitude
In January, when England’s third national lockdown was just beginning and most of us were blissfully ignorant of the middle letters of the Greek alphabet, I used these pages to make a prediction. Not about the pandemic but about another equally tedious and longrunning nightmare that most people hoped would be over by now: the culture wars.
I predicted that during 2021 what are called “contested histories” – those relating to empire, slavery and race – would be increasingly “weaponised for political gain” and that the historians who study them, along with the minority communities for whom contested histories are family histories, would be among the “new enemies” paraded before the culture war gallows.
It really wasn’t much of a prediction. Rather than unerringly foreseeing future events, I merely assumed that stuff that was already happening was going to keep happening and then get a bit worse. Not exactly a Nostradamus level prescience and, as it turned out, behind my attempt at prediction was a presumption that turned out to be wholly wide of the mark.
What I utterly failed to foresee in January was that the Johnson government, along with the other branches of the UK’s vast ecosystem of performative outrage, would prosecute the war they themselves had fomented so incompetently. While millions were taken in by their false-flag arguments and confected divisions, over the course of 2021 much of their culture war schtick just didn’t land and at times it blew up in their faces.
The most audacious culture war play of 2021 was the publication in March of the Sewell report, a cynical attempt to dismiss the importance and even the existence of structural racism and pit poor black people against poor white people in a zero-sum game for resources and legitimacy. Characterised by the government’s supporters as a piece of work that would reframe the national conversation around race, this masterclass in gaslighting began to disintegrate within hours of publication.
What the Sewell report came up against were the very people from whom it had drawn its evidence, the experts across many fields who rapidly dissected the report line by line, showing how their work had been misinterpreted or misrepresented. Both the report’s findings and the methodology were trashed. Rolled out as culture war super-weapon, the Sewell report has only rarely been mentioned by government since.
The other culture war lowlights of 2021 crashed and burned because time and again the government and its fellow travellers chose the wrong targets. It takes a special level of hubris for politicians, members of what is repeatedly voted the least trusted profession, to pick a fight with the England football team, superstars with millions of fans and Twitter followers, led by a manager who, according to one survey, has a popularity rating higher not just than both party leaders but even Winston Churchill.
This summer, while most people in England were watching the Euros with hearts in mouths and fingers crossed, the government’s culture warriors were watching in sweaty-palmed horror, as the team whose anti-racist stance they had derided at the start of the tournament kept winning and growing in esteem. This led to the ludicrous pantomime of politicians dispatching their aides to the shops to buy replica England jerseys for last-minute photo-ops in which they expressed their support for players whom weeks earlier they had accused of “gesture politics”.
Yet for real ineptitude we have to turn to Nigel Farage and his attempt to take on the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, one of the most beloved and respected organisations in the country. What Farage accused the RNLI of doing was saving lives at sea, so not exactly a case of mission creep. However, as the lives in question were those of desperate migrants, Farage set out to mobilise the thankfully small demographic who can be roused to frenzied anger at the thought of migrants not being left to drown in the English Channel. His attacks inspired a wave of abuse directed at RNLI staff, which has not subsided. But such ugly sentiments led to a huge upsurge of support for the RNLI and a 3,000% increase in donations.
Even the supposed culture war victories of 2021 existed only in a strange, rightwing metaverse. The Common Sense Group of Conservative MPs, with the help of its allies in the press, has successfully convinced millions that the National Trust has been taken over by woke radicals and had been punished by its membership who had abandoned it in droves. Yet none of that was true. The illusion that such events had taken place was generated by some of the most dishonest reporting of recent years. Yet the only tangible long-term effect of the attacks on the trust has been the formation of a campaign group dedicated to saving it from non-existent threats. Its website largely consists of links to the same inaccurate articles that led to its formation, in an endless loop of falsehood and fury.
The ineptitude of the culture wars reflects the fact that there is no deeper philosophy behind them. They are not fought in order to achieve some sort of cultural victory, or to defend, but merely to win elections. Target selection has been clumsy because the groups targeted are merely those against whom it was believed anger might be manufactured and then manipulated. With no objective or outcome in mind, the culture wars are a foreverwar, a conflict that can end only if the electoral coalitions they were invented to forge can no longer be assembled.
Launched out of cynicism and executed incompetently, the culture wars are nonetheless corrosive and dangerous. The person who best captured that reality in 2021 was the Conservative peer Baroness Warsi who, in a tweet directed at the home secretary, Priti Patel, wrote: “It’s time to stop the culture wars that are feeding division. Dog whistles win votes but destroy nations.”
It takes a special level of hubris for politicians to pick a fight with the England football team