Who are you calling a ‘culture warrior’?

Whenever someone, usually a Tory politician, raises an objection to the latest hyper-progressive initiative on matters of gender or race, he or she is invariably accused of ‘stoking’ or ‘waging’ a culture war. This happened with due predictability to Kemi Badenoch last week, when the UK minister for women and equalities pledged to protect single-sex spaces for women. ‘Time and again we have seen how [the Conservative government] tries to wage these phoney culture wars’, came the typical reaction from Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper. Or as Peter Tatchell observed more colourfully: ‘Kemi Badenoch is the Darth Vader of British politics with her latest anti-trans culture wars! The Rebel Alliance fights back to defend the trans community!’

These accusations betray either stupidity or mendacity. The likes of Badenoch are not seeking to ‘stoke’ a culture war. If anything, they are trying to quell it, to put an end to it – to lay to bed the dangerous and fantastical philosophies that have entered the political domain in recent years and have since wormed their way into all our institutions.

These philosophies include the two most pernicious ideas of today: that men can literally become women, and that the colour of your skin determines your moral worth. Thus, those who fight the culture war feel that they have to, not because they want to. They fight back because this war was started by belligerent, hyper-progressive ideologues beholden to a worldview that is hostile to the principles of a liberal, tolerant society.

Those like Daisy Cooper who dismiss the culture war as ‘phoney’, or a ‘distraction’ from ‘real issues’, are also off the mark. It can be a life-changing matter. It affects you if you are a middle-ranking author seeking to bolster your modest income at a book festival that has now been placed in jeopardy by coercive campaigners. It matters if you are a young person applying for a job at the BBC, and you just happen to be white and male. It matters to academics who are intimidated into signing loyalty oaths to gender ideology, such as at Exeter University, where staff say they were ‘coerced’ to sign a ‘Stonewall anti-transphobia pledge’. It matters if an NHS nurse whose second language is English is told that men can get ovarian cancer, as the charity Ovarian Cancer Action claimed last week.

The culture war matters very much to rape victims, women in jails and girls at school who could be forced to share their private spaces with men or boys. The grim prospects facing young girls also range from being edged out of sports to being lured into permanent bodily mutation.

The culture war matters to those who are now afraid to speak their minds in public, lest they lose face or their livelihoods. It is in no way a mere ‘distraction’.

Labour leader Keir Starmer said this week that he is ‘exhausted by culture wars’. Aren’t we all? But that is no reason to give up the fight against this madness.

The myth of Europe’s ‘far right’

One of the most misleading phrases of the moment is the appellation ‘far right’, currently employed by the BBC and various centrist commentators as an umbrella term for the populist parties who made gains in last week’s European Elections, as well as the Reform Party making headway in the UK.

The sweeping term ‘far right’ here is inaccurate and sensationalist. Some of the populist parties in continental Europe do indeed have far-right pasts, such as the post-fascist Brothers of Italy and National Rally, or far-right tendencies in the present, such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and its now dissolved extreme-right faction, Der Flügel. But the populists on the continent, often described in Italian and French newspapers slightly more accurately as ‘confederalists’ or ‘sovereignists’, are an assorted lot.

Dutch populists are concerned especially with environmental diktats, hence the astonishing success of the farmers’ party, the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), in last year’s regional elections. The National Rally in France appeals to ‘left behind’ voters outside the metropolis who are unhappy with deindustrialisation, Islamist attacks and a feeling that France is losing its culture and identity. Its reputation notwithstanding, the AfD garnered a large youth vote last week, not least due to young people’s concerns about job prospects and housing.

The divisions between these parties also confound the ‘far right’ slur. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally kicked the AfD out of the Identity and Democracy group in the European Parliament last month, owing to some of its far-right innuendo. The two main parties in Italy’s right-wing coalition government, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and Matteo Salvini’s League, are at odds over Ukraine and Russia. The two right-wing, Flemish-nationalist winners in Belgium’s elections, the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) and Flemish Interest, are bitterly divided, too. The N-VA calls for greater autonomy for Belgium’s regions, while Flemish Interest wants Flanders to secede from Belgium outright.

All these parties can scarcely be categorised as one united body, let alone a ‘far right’ one. The only matters that unite them are a concern with immigration and disquiet with EU over-centralisation.

The BBC can perhaps be excused for its laziness in using the term ‘right wing’. The same can’t be said for commentators who use terms like ‘far right’ sensationally, implying that Europe is sleepwalking towards fascism and tyranny. As they themselves might say, this is ‘dogwhistle’ politics.

The shallowness of the intelligentsia

I’ve been re-reading Confessions of a Philosopher, the 1997 autobiography of the late television presenter and everyman philosopher, Bryan Magee, who graced the small screen in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s a wonderful work, not only as it doubles up as an introduction to Western philosophy, but also for some of its observations that seem pertinent today.

Magee was often scathing about the state of philosophy in academia, ranging from his time at Oxford in the 1940s, where insular linguistic and analytic philosophy snuffed the life out of most other areas of interest, to his return there as a tutor in the 1970s, by which time continental philosophy was on the rise. At the time of writing, he concluded: ‘There are whole university departments in which the uninspired and boring is being driven out by the pseudo-profound.’ He also lamented how his contemporaries in philosophy departments had scant interest in history, humanities or the arts – or even much time for Aristotle or Kant.

Magee was particularly critical about universities that he felt, often through courses in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), were churning out unthinking drones and philistine technocrats, people he characterised as having a ‘clever shallowness’. Such people are ‘self-congratulatory, complacent’, combining ‘intelligent self-assurance with blinkeredness’, he wrote.

In a different, more recent book, Chums (2022), Financial Times journalist Simon Kuper notes that if you look again at that infamous 1987 photograph of Oxford’s Bullingdon Club, of that ‘tiny caste of Oxford Tories [who] took over the UK’, the students pictured who took PPE voted Remain in the Brexit referendum, while those who read history or classics voted Leave.

It’s usually the case that those who know history understand why a united Europe is a foolish and dangerous idea. The clever, self-assured and shallow are incapable of understanding why.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.