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Culture wars: The British Right is picking a fight it won’t win

By:   []

Date: 2021-12

“People sometimes ask why I make such a noise about our flag, history and culture,” wrote Lee Anderson, Conservative MP for Ashfield, on Facebook this summer. “Well, it’s not just me. I’m part of the Common Sense Group at work, which has over 50 Tory MPs...”

“One of our aims is to promote our country as the best nation on earth, and fight back in the Culture War that [is] trying to erase our past by pulling down statues, renaming streets, and the desecration of war memorials.

“I happen,” he wrote, “to be very proud to be British and an English man.”

Like many of the new Conservative MPs elected in Boris Johnson’s 2019 victory, Anderson came to Parliament ready to drive a tank onto the front line of the culture war, only to find himself mired in a pandemic. Now, this generation of Tories thinks it can finally get traction for the issues that it cares about. Now that Brexit is done, they have a country to take back.

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“Never be ashamed of our flag,” he concluded his Facebook post, signing off with a string of Union Jack emojis.

The Common Sense Group, which launched in May, is just one platoon of right-wing cultural warriors tearing through the UK’s politics, attempting to fire concepts from the fringes of online quarrels into the centre of public debate: terms like ‘cancel culture’, ‘identity politics’ and ‘wokeism’.

But what on earth do these things mean? Where have they come from? And, perhaps most importantly, how should those of us who believe in a more egalitarian and democratic society respond? To understand any of that, we have to start by asking: what is a culture war?

The cultural building site

In his Radio 4 series ‘Things Fell Apart,’ broadcaster Jon Ronson defines ‘culture war’ as “almost everything that people yell at each other about on social media”. Others point specifically to fights inflamed by politicians and the media. And, of course, there’s a truth to both of these perspectives. But I see it a little differently.

‘Culture’ has two meanings – one narrow, one broad. In the narrow sense, it means roughly the same as ‘the arts’. In the broad sense, it refers to whole ways of life, like ‘Maasai culture’ or ‘French culture’.

The writer and academic Raymond Williams argued that ultimately, the two are connected – that culture in the narrow sense is always an expression of culture in the broad sense. “Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings,” he wrote. “Every human society expresses these, in institutions, in arts and learning.”
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