There is no option to avoid a culture war - the Left is waging it at full pelt every single day

Tories who frame their own party as the aggressor are political pacifists who will ensure the triumph of the identitarian Left if their advice is heeded.

Photo by Matt Brown on Unsplash

WE ALL have pet hates – the little things in life that push our buttons, grind our gears, boil our blood or however else you want to describe it.

One of mine is people who cross their calf over the knee on their other leg on a crowded tube train, thereby leaving the person sitting next to them in peril of having dirt and dust from the bottom of a shoe bumped onto their leg. I always object if I am that neighbouring person and it has led to several fairly ugly exchanges over the years, mercifully only verbal ones to date.

Given that I have been immersed in the political sphere for 30 years, you will not be surprised to know that I have collected a formidable array of political pet hates too.

Today I want to talk about the one that is really getting my goat (yet another apt three-word phrase) right now. This is when senior Conservative politicians say things like: “We need to give up fighting a culture war.”

For example, just last month, Penny Mordaunt argued that her party should stop “talking about culture wars, because it doesn’t move the country forward”. Coming from someone who once spouted at the Commons despatch box the anti-scientific jibberish that “trans men are men and trans women are women” that declaration came as no surprise.

A few months prior to this Caroline Nokes, the chair of the Women’s and Equalities Committee, declared: “The thing I reject is that there has to be a culture war at all.” There are numerous other examples of this disposition that I could have cited.

The reason such utterances so irritate me is simply that there really does have to be a culture war because it has been started and is being energetically prosecuted every day by the identitarian Left. And that should be perfectly obvious to any Conservative politician. To decide not to fight them is to become a political pacifist and allow the aggressor an uncontested victory.

Not only are social norms which have stood the test of time being dismantled and contested divisive theories being imposed across the public realm and in the corporate world as if they were beyond dispute, but something even more sinister has recently begun to be exposed.

This is the casting aside by cultural “progressives” of the idea that everyone should be equal before the law. We have seen judges create a de facto right of protesters pursuing leftist causes to deliberately disrupt the lives of others through action such as breaking the criminal law against obstructing the highway (Google the Ziegler judgment for more on that). Meanwhile there have been several cases of juries in big cities clearing defendants of criminal damage in cases where there was no dispute that damage had been deliberately caused, such as the Bristol statue-toppling case.

More recently still, cultural progressives have also been exposed for shutting down the bank accounts of ideological opponents. One thinks not only of the Nigel Farage case – and congratulations to him for exposing truly shocking conduct at Coutts and Nat West – but also that of the Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) gender critical feminist who had her accounts closed with no warning by another bank. Then there was that vicar who queried his building society’s zealous celebration of Pride Month. And more such troubling cases are emerging all the time.

How typical that it should have taken a political force of nature like Farage to force our nominally Conservative government out of its habitual slumber and into taking action in this sphere.

I have no doubt what is at the root of this problem. It is the ubiquitous modern Leftist idea that theirs is a morally superior creed and that conservative-minded opponents are venal, evil even. The recent Farage furore provides yet another example of this. Astonishingly, the Labour and Lib Dem front benches did not speak out in his defence even after he had proved that ideological antipathy had been the dominant motivating factor behind the closure of his bank accounts. The left-of-centre opposition parties had to weigh in the balance the right of a citizen to live a normal life against the knowledge that the citizen involved had right-of-centre views. And it was this latter consideration that prevailed in their minds. Persecution was deemed to be just fine.

Polling during the Brexit years also highlighted a sharp difference between the views of Remainers about Leavers and vice versa. The overwhelming majority of Leavers were found to be relaxed about the idea of a grown-up child marrying a Remainer – just 11 per cent said they would be upset. But 39 per cent of Remain voters declared the idea of their child marrying a Leaver to be objectionable.

The same YouGov poll, in August 2019, found that while just two per cent of Tories would be “very upset” if their child married a Labour supporter, 11 per cent of Labour supporters would feel that way if their child married a Tory.

These people are obsessed by political divisions and seek to drive them into every aspect of life. Believing themselves to be on the side of the angels and their opponents on the side of the devil liberates them to act vindictively and unfairly.