Tag Archives: culture war

It’s worth reading the right-wing media to try to understand where the policies our opponents are advancing come from. In the Sunday Telegraph some weekends ago Simon Heffer was encouraging Michael Gove to continue to fight ‘the Blob’, which for Heffer includes the staff of the NHS as well as school and university teachers, most civil servants and others in the public sector, theatres, museums and charities, the BBC (of course), and the clergy of the Church of England – a large chunk of our population, possibly even a majority of its university graduates. On September 26th Eric Kaufmann warned the Telegraph’s elderly readers that ‘Britain’s education system and cultural institutions have succeeded in shaping the worldview of millenials, which will make conservatism unelectable.’ The task for Conservatives is therefore ‘to change the direction of the culture’ before too many young people have been indoctrinated by ‘woke’ radicals.

Robert Shrimsley’s Op-Ed in the Financial Times in July was headlined ‘Tory culture war is fight for a new establishment.’ He notes that ideological Tories realise that ‘the Conservatives have lost the establishment and with it many of the shapers of society’s values’. He adds the judiciary and big business to their perceived progressive ‘blob’. He discerns ‘an attempt to create an alternative establishment, … that much of what happens in society happens outside of government and in places where conservatives feel outnumbered.’

The struggle to regain ground stretches from reorienting the BBC, through reshaping cultural institutions through public appointments, to bringing Britain’s universities under tighter control. The appointment of Nadine Dorries as Culture Secretary demonstrates that public appointments will be a central focus for coming battles. The next chairs of OFCOM, of the Charity Commission, of the Committee on Standards in Public Life and others will be chosen with careful regard to their ‘anti-woke’ stance. The Equalities Commission and the Office for Students have already been reoriented; British Museum trusteeships have been fought over, and other similar bodies closely examined.