Is it possible to stop the culture wars? Lisa Nandy has decided to try. Days after she was appointed as culture secretary, the Labour MP gave a speech to staff at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, telling them that “in recent years we’ve found multiple ways to divide ourselves from one another, and lost that sense of a self-confident, outward-looking country which values its own people in every part of the UK. Changing that is the mission of this department. The era of culture wars is over.” It was a commendable statement, but was it a realistic one? Can it be?
According to Rob Ford, a professor of politics at the University of Manchester, ending the culture wars may be easier said than done. “You can’t wish away the pretty substantial divides in the electorate about the set of issues that we loosely call culture wars,” he says. “There are big differences by age, by education, by social background. They don’t just disappear because the government decides it doesn’t want to discuss them.”
He is right, of course. As a study from King’s College London (KCL) found last year, 49 per cent of people believe that culture wars are a “real-life problem”, as opposed to 22 per cent who view them as primarily a “media and social media” phenomenon. Back in 2020, 43 per cent of respondents saw culture wars as a “serious problem”; three years later, that figure had risen to 52 per cent. These are real societal cleavages, and people clearly care about them, which raises the question: what exactly are we talking about when we talk about culture wars?
Over the past few years, academics have attempted to come up with some definitions. Writing for the UK in a Changing Europe thinktank, James Breckwoldt defined a culture war issue as “a primarily non-economic issue that attempts to entrench a moral worldview in one part of society, with the hope this will filter through to wider society”. The examples he gave were “allowing trans women athletes to compete in female-sex sports, keeping up statues of people who profited from the slave trade, ending mandatory diversity training, diversifying the curriculum, increasing LGBT+ representation in children’s TV, and efforts to stop university speaker cancellations”.
The one thing uniting all those subjects is that they have little to do with central government. Does this mean that Nandy overreached by assuming that she could put an end to debates her department would have little power over? Yes and no.
As Ford explains, “what governments have is tremendous agenda setting power. They have the power of the state behind them. What decides what the conversation is every day in the newspapers, on the Today programme, on Politics Live? It’s what the government says more than anything else.”
The culture wars featured heavily in the news in recent years because the government was happy to give them oxygen. By trying to create dividing lines between the Conservatives and Labour, or by simply attempting to divert people’s attention from their own policy failures, successive Tory PMs indulged in fanning those flames. Now in opposition, Tory MPs will soon realise that their fits of rage about rainbow lanyards aren’t front page material anymore.
Happily for Labour, Nandy’s promise does seem to be what voters want their politicians to do, or rather to stop doing. That same KCL study found that 62 per cent of people believe that “politicians invent or exaggerate culture wars as a political tactic”. A government deciding to focus on other issues instead may well turn out to be a popular one. After all, it seems worth noting that, though the country is divided on culture war issues, it actually doesn’t care about them all that much.
That is where the Conservatives went wrong, time and time again. They correctly identified policy areas that split voters in half, but overestimated the extent to which those voters actually wanted to see those issues being discussed. “For the bulk of the arguments that have been grouped together as woke and anti-woke policies over the past few years, the thing is that, frankly, most people don’t really care,” says Ford. “It’s not going to be very difficult to just drop those things down the agenda and seek boring, grinding compromises and policies in these areas. People will be fine with that on the whole.”
The flipside of this, however, is that Keir Starmer’s government can and will eventually find itself having to deal with contentious issues it would rather sweep under the carpet. As Ford points out, regardless of its views on Israel and Gaza, the Labour party would have preferred voters not to focus on the war during the recent election.
The Conservatives failed because they assumed that they could make the public care about things the party cared about. Labour could yet fail by trying to tell the public not to care about issues people do want to focus on. Governments can set the agenda most of the time, but events can and will sometimes overtake them. On top of this, senior figures in a political party can decide to move away from controversial topics, but that doesn’t mean that their activists will choose to do the same.
Keir Starmer tried to sidestep the debate on gender identity for several years but ultimately found that, as the leader of a party that was split on the issue, there was no running away from it. The general public may not feel strongly about culture wars topics, but they don’t need to. If enough enraged people with Twitter accounts choose to fight about something, it will often end up making its way into the news agenda.
What remains to be seen, then, is how Nandy and her fellow cabinet ministers will deal with those debates when they do occur. It is entirely possible that merely choosing to cool things down will change the tone of the debate entirely, but Labour shouldn’t be too optimistic. It takes two to tango, and wars rarely end because one side decides that they’re done.
