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Culture wars: It’s the Right that is trying to cancel free speech

By:   []

Date: 2021-12

One recent example provides an important insight into how this power operates in practice.

On 9 July 2019, the socialist writer Dawn Foster used her Guardian column to denounce the then Labour deputy leader Tom Watson, a flagbearer for centrism in the party, which was then at the height of Corbynism.

Foster, rare as a working-class woman who had fought her way into the commentariat, who had earned her column through brilliant reporting on the Grenfell Tower disaster, and who had worked in various roles behind the scenes at the paper for years, was sacked from The Guardian. Attacking this icon of Labour centrism crossed a line within the paper, and she would never write for it again. She was ‘cancelled’.

Earlier this year, she died suddenly, in her early 30s. Giles Coren, whose dad was the humorist and editor Alan Coren, whose sister is the writer and media presenter Victoria Coren Mitchell, and who himself works as a restaurant critic for The Times, tweeted:

“When someone dies who has trolled you on Twitter, saying vile and hurtful things about you and your family, is it okay to be like, ‘I'm sorry for the people who loved you, and any human death diminishes me, but can you f*** off on to hell now where you belong’?”

The comment cut particularly deep if you know that Dawn was vocally Catholic.

His grudge came, it seems, because she had tweeted, two and a half years earlier: “Giles Coren is a prime example of how the ‘if I’ve heard of yer da, I don’t need to hear from you’ rule holds for almost every man bar Jesus.”

But while she had been effectively sacked from The Guardian for her decidedly above-the-belt criticisms of Tom Watson, Coren still produces three columns a week for The Times and is still hosting BBC shows, his career unhindered by his comments. He remains decidedly uncancelled.

This example is pretty illustrative. A fairly narrow group of powerful people – disproportionately upper-class white men – are accustomed to shaping the conversation in this country about almost every aspect of our society, from politics to food to the arts: what is and isn’t news, what is and isn’t controversial, what is and isn’t important.

Occasionally, people from outside that world are allowed into it, briefly. But their positions are almost always vulnerable. Too often, they have to deal with this precarity by treading carefully, being sure not to offend the wrong person, by learning to say the right thing.

And if they don’t then, like Dawn, they can expect their careers to suffer. But she wasn’t sacked because of some foaming mob hurling rocks at her online. She was pushed out quietly, having upset someone with power.

The net effect of this constant side-lining of working-class, women’s, left-wing and Black people’s voices is stark.

A study in 2019 found that 43% of the UK’s leading newspaper columnists and editors went to private schools compared with around 6% of the overall population, and that leading journalists are maler, much whiter and much less likely to be Muslim than the working country as a whole.

Just as the authorities of early modern Venice would have done, these people tend to loathe social media. They loathe the fact that the latest victims of their moral panics can speak back, that Black people can explain to them when they’re being racist, that trans people can point out when they are transphobic, that working-class people are finding a voice in place of the squashed trade unions of old.

People who have had little chance to generate public opinion in the past, whose voices have never counted for as much or been heard as loudly as those who own the means of production of the national debate, finally have some tools to respond to those who have for centuries told them what to think. And the people who are accustomed to doing the telling hate it more than anything. Standing high on their still vast stages, they pronounce that they are being cancelled, because someone had the audacity to heckle.

In reality, the growth of social media means that more people in the world have access to platforms through which they can express themselves to bigger audiences than at any other time in human history.

Of course, that speech, too, is regulated. Facebook – by far the biggest publisher ever – has its own ideological stances and sets boundaries to what sorts of speech are allowed on its platform: something which becomes particularly clear when you compare what Israelis are allowed to post with what Palestinians are blocked from saying. There are, rightly, major concerns about how it uses that power, and the fact that what’s become our public forum is controlled by a monopolistic corporation.

But the solution isn’t to let fascists and conspiracy theorists pour bile and lies into people’s timelines. It’s to develop mechanisms of democratic accountability and control, whether through regulation or, ultimately, public ownership.

But it’s also important not to overstate the problem. The most powerful malign actors in public debate aren’t shady Facebook pages. They are media empires owned by oligarchs like Rupert Murdoch, America’s shock-jock radio stations and politicians spreading bigotry and lies.

And happily, online culture has started to influence the world offline, and empower people to speak back. The vast and glorious liberation movements of recent years – #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, the trans rights movement – have encouraged people to speak out when they feel that the language or actions of those around them are inappropriate. Rather than biting their tongues, the marginalised have used social media to organise protests against powerful people with whom they disagree, and to object when powerful people say things they find objectionable. This isn’t an inhibition of speech, it’s a release.

Not that the government sees it that way: the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, passing through Parliament now, will criminalise a swathe of traditional protest techniques often used by climate change and anti-racist activists. But none of the Right’s cultural warriors, despite all their worries about ‘cancel culture’, seems to have expressed the slightest concern about it.

The real cancel culture

“I’m fiercely protective of the fact that we can provide instruments,” explained the lead horn player of the Shirebrook brass band, speaking to me in the autumn of 2017. The group, based out of the miners’ welfare building at the top of the town, supplies each player with their trombone, euphonium, drum, tuba or horn. It’s not cheap. With 25 players in a traditional band, just one set can cost £100,000.

The same principle doesn’t apply in local schools anymore, she explained.

“As funding has been cut, kids weren’t allowed an instrument if they couldn’t afford to pay for one,” she said. “It’s killing our future band players.”

Shirebrook, a former mining town in the East Midlands, is in the Bolsover constituency. For four decades, it was represented by one Labour MP, Dennis Skinner. But in 2019, it went Tory.

Perhaps a sense of being a heartland of a vanishing culture contributed to that result. Where once the mines, the military and the church provided spaces for shape, purpose and meaning to emerge from the communities scattered across the top of England’s coal seams, now all three are crumbling to dust. These communities, which literally powered England, were once centres of working-class arts, learning and resistance: now, culture is something beamed in on a screen.

Many brass bands, no longer sponsored by the long-shuttered pits and after a decade of austerity, have disappeared. Local regiments, which recruited a kind of community and masculinity, have been downsized as the UK takes semi-retirement from the world police and automation replaces squaddies with drones.

So, don’t get me wrong. When I say that there is no such thing as cancel culture, I don’t mean that no culture is being cancelled. Neoliberal globalisation kills working-class cultures everywhere.

Across the world, at least four languages have become extinct since the start of the COVID pandemic, taking with them every poem, song and saying they taught their speakers. Every year, the version of English spoken in any given town or city in England conforms more to a south-eastern norm.

Working-class people are desperately under-represented in almost all of the arts. Acting is increasingly dominated by public-school alumni. Increased focus on reading, writing and maths has pushed music out of schools, meaning it’s increasingly the preserve of children whose parents can afford evening classes.

If capitalism is endlessly trying to drive people to consume more while paying them lower wages, then modern life means forever being told that affordable foods are inferior, practical clothes aren’t stylish, and that everyone should aspire to an imagined lifestyle invented by the media-industrial complex, which is almost always based in some invented metropolitan core, far away from your peripheral suburb, town or city.

The message is clear.

‘You’re a loser. Your whole way of life is for losers. Sell us enough of your time and buy enough of our products and one day, you might be a winner, like us.’

This is the real cancel culture. It’s one of the primary motors of consumer capitalism. And it’s felt viscerally by billions of people. But it’s not what Britain Uncancelled meant, is it?
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