Lisa Nandy, Labour’s new Culture Secretary, has just made a terribly exciting announcement. In her first speech in the role, she said our society suffers from too much “division” – so she’s made it her “mission” to end it. “The era of culture wars,” she promised, “is over.”
A noble aim. There is, however, one small problem. Which is that she’s absolutely guaranteed to fail. Because, in reality, the culture wars are only just beginning. And it’s all the Left’s fault.
Left-wingers like Ms Nandy love to blame the Tories for “stoking culture wars.” But this is the most brazen distortion of the truth. Think of all the culture wars that have been inflicted upon us in recent years. The rows over gender identity, Black Lives Matter, boycotting Israel, “decolonising” universities… Every single one of those conflicts was started by Left-wingers seeking to impose their radical beliefs on the rest of us. So the Left accusing the Right of stoking culture wars is like Putin blaming Nato for his invasion of Ukraine.
And it’s not as if Labour politicians have tried to rise above these conflicts. Time and again, they’ve eagerly embraced them. Take, for example, our new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer – who, at the height of the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, proudly released a photo of himself and Angela Rayner, his deputy, taking the knee.
For another example: take Ms Nandy herself. When campaigning to be Labour leader in 2020, she was asked whether male criminals who identify as women should be placed in female prisons. She replied: “I think trans women are women and trans men are men. So I think they should be accommodated in the prison of their choosing.”
Three years after Ms Nandy made these delightfully compassionate remarks, Isla Bryson, who was a man when found guilty of raping two women, was sent to a Scottish female prison. The resulting uproar – which helped bring down Nicola Sturgeon as Scotland’s First Minister – suggested that, funnily enough, locking rapists in a building full of women can actually be quite “divisive.” Yet it was Left-wingers who’d argued for it.
To pretend that Labour will end the culture wars, therefore, is risible. Labour will only make the culture wars worse. In fact, they’ve already started. In the role of minister for women and equalities, Sir Keir has just appointed Anneliese Dodds – who, when asked in 2022 to define the word “woman,” insisted that it “depends what the context is”. So if Sir Keir, as he recently claimed, wants to “bring people together” on this issue, why did he choose someone who has so obviously picked a side? He will have known that JK Rowling and other women would deplore Ms Dodds’s appointment – as they duly did. Yet he still went blithely ahead.
Then we come to the small matter of Labour’s proposed “Race Equality Act.” According to the BBC, it will “extend full equal pay rights to ethnic minority workers.” But ethnic minority workers already have equal pay rights. Under existing law, you can’t pay someone less because of their race. So what will this mysterious Act really do? Forgive my pessimism if I suggest that it sounds like a recipe for yet more furious social division.
At any rate, one thing is clear. The Left are certainly not sick of culture wars. If they were, they would stop starting them. So when they say they want to “end” culture wars, what they really mean is that they’re sick of people daring to question their plans. They want to impose radical ideological change on our culture without even the faintest murmur of dissent.
In short: they don’t want peace. They want silence.
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