Culture War in Britain: Part 1
Leftist origins and the death of the liberal left.
This week, I’m publishing a three part series on the recent culture wars in the UK. Today’s post covers their proximate causes and the effect they have had on free speech.
The Culture Wars, ignited by the left
Not everyone thinks that the Culture Wars are real. Here in Britain many on the left think—or purport to think—that they’re a fantasy of the right-wing imagination, conjured up and put about in order to distract from the failures of Conservative rule. A prominent proponent of this view is Sathnam Sanghera, London Times journalist and author of Empireland, published in 2021 during the premiership of Boris Johnson. Focusing on the colonial front, Sanghera writes of “the government-endorsed front in this imperial culture war”, of “taxpayer-funded culture warriors” who are in “the troubling business of propounding the inane idea that to be proud to be British you need to be proud of British imperial history”, and who “endors[e] campaigns to defend free speech and fight ‘cancel culture’”. “What is driving the government culture war?”, he asks. Answer: “The most convincing explanation [is] … that it was a deliberate political strategy propelled by long-time Tory fixer Douglas Smith”. And he concludes: “This new breed of culture warriors is not interested in national unity: they will sow division, encourage racial discord, do anything, if it wins them elections”.
This is stubborn, head-in-the-sands nonsense. How do I know that? Because the colonial front of the Culture Wars came uninvited to my doorstep eighteen months before Boris Johnson became Prime Minister. In late November 2017 I published an article in the Times making the utterly moderate case that the British—together with Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians—can find cause for both pride and shame in their colonial past. A fortnight later I posted an online description of my Oxford University research project, “Ethics and Empire”, which entertained the possibility that imperial rule may sometimes be legitimate.
War only broke out when Dr (now Professor) Priyamvada Gopal of Cambridge University, responded on the 13th of December with a tweet at 8.45am, in which she called her political allies to arms with the immortal words, “OMG. This is serious shit … We need to SHUT THIS DOWN”. What followed was a campaign of repression, starting the very next day with an online denunciation by a body of Oxford students. This was then supplemented by two further mass denunciations within the space of a week, the first signed by 58 Oxford colleagues, the second by 195 or so worldwide. None of them was addressed to me and the third was directed explicitly at my university, urging it to withdraw its support from the ‘Ethics and Empire’ project.
That was my ‘lived experience’. The Conservative government had nothing whatsoever to do with it. And those who chose to make war came from Sathnam Sanghera’s political stable. Indeed, the fourth of the 195 signatories to the third mass denunciation was an historian on whom Sanghera relies heavily in his book, Kim Wagner. Indeed, he tells us that they travelled together to India.
But if you don’t believe me, ask Kathleen Stock. I don’t know how Kathleen votes, but as a gay feminist philosopher I rather doubt she puts her X by the Tory option on the ballot paper. In October 2021, she felt compelled to resign from her professorial post at the University of Sussex, ending her career in her early forties, because of a sustained campaign of harassment by students and some colleagues—a campaign that her university somehow failed to stop. And what was Kathleen’s sin? She held philosophical objections to prevailing views about transgender self-identification, and she persisted in expressing them.
So, no, Sathnam, it really wasn’t the Tories wot done it. It was your political tribe.
The silencing of free speech versus the future of liberal culture
Not everyone on the left thinks that the Culture Wars are real. And not everyone on the right who thinks they’re real, thinks they’re important. Many Conservative MPs insist that the cost of living, funding the NHS, building more homes, and improving productivity are more politically urgent and electorally more crucial. That is almost certainly true. Nevertheless, what’s at stake in the Culture Wars is important, too.
The first thing at stake is freedom of speech. But if freedom of speech, then also of thought: because what we dare not say becomes, over time, too burdensome to carry on thinking. There is absolutely no doubt that the freedom to voice perfectly reasonable thoughts about colonial history, transgender identity, and race in Britain has come under threat, and has been constrained, in recent years. Indeed, it should be obvious to anyone whose eyes are open: the many cases of repression have been widely publicized in the press.
It is true that, in my case and in Kathleen Stock’s, attempts to silence us have failed: we have continued to say what we believe to be both important and true. But that should not have cost Kathleen her job. And it is a practical certainty that there are many who share her gender-critical views, or are sympathetic to them, but, having witnessed the high penalty she has been made to pay, have resolved to keep their sympathy to themselves and their mouths prudently shut. A single incident of repression, made public, chills the air around thousands of onlookers. And if anyone should think that my case and Kathleen’s are rare exceptions to an otherwise liberal rule, they should apply to the UK’s Free Speech Union for the depressingly long list.
Certainly, the vice-chancellors of most of Britain’s universities should do that, since they have been dogged in underestimating the scale of the problem. For example, in its September 2021 memorandum on the then Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, the Russell Group claimed, in defiance of ample evidence, that the problem is confined to a tiny handful of cancelled events. But as the playwright Sir Tom Stoppard has observed—and I have just implied—the problem is far less cancellation than it is self-cancellation. Or rather, single cancellations causing multiple self-cancellations.
What’s at stake here is not just the freedom of individuals to speak their minds. Nor is it just the testing of prevailing orthodoxies. What’s at stake is the liberal temper of culture and politics among us. If we are not to suffer the alarming degree of political polarization now afflicting the US, we need liberal citizens who have the strengths of character—the virtues—that make them capable of responding to alien viewpoints thoughtfully and civilly. Universities have an enormously important civic responsibility to help student-citizens grow such virtues.
The good news is that two initiatives have improved the prospects of free speech in this country over the past few years. The first was the founding of the Free Speech Union by Toby Young in February 2020. The FSU now boasts over 24,000 subscribing members and is helping to support legal cases that will nudge the future interpretation of the law in favour of freedom of speech. It has also spawned sister organisations in South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. (FSU Australia hosted a speaking tour by Toby in June).
The second encouraging initiative was the Conservative Government’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, which became law in May 2023. By requiring universities for the first time to both defend and promote freedom of speech and academic freedom, by creating a system that would allow individuals’ complaints to rise above their universities to the Office for Students, by creating a new statutory tort that would expose delinquent universities to litigation, and by creating a new Director for Freedom of Speech whose sole mission would be to enforce legal compliance, the Act would help liberate the tongues of students and professors currently tied by fear of harassment and institutional abandonment. Most unhappily, yielding to pressure from vice-chancellors keen not to have to declare their dependence on Chinese funding, the new Labour government announced its intent to repeal the Act completely out of the blue, shortly after it took power in July 2024.
Still, by no means all is lost, for the counter-revolutionary forces of liberal resistance are altogether stronger than they were five years ago. The same group that inspired, informed, and promoted the HEFS Act, organised push-back on several fronts, not least in the press, where seven Nobel Prizewinners published a letter of protest in the Times newspaper. Meanwhile, the FSU was sufficiently well resourced to take the Government to court by applying for judicial review. Reports now have it that the government has been so taken aback by the resistance that it will probably let the Act come into operation, albeit with some of its teeth removed.