Is the UK in the clutches of a culture war? – New Statesman

At some point, you've probably come across the term culture war. It describesa battle of perceptions, a fight between two seemingly phantom sides about what society is, what it should be, and whats threatening it. Its a phenomenon conceived inand, for the most part,fought in America.

But avid readers of newspaper op-eds or social media in Britain could be forgiven for thinking it is just as present herethat we are equally polarised on the issues that are shoehorned into culture warssuch as trans rights, climate change and overseas aid as people in the United States.

Except, actually, it's not.

There is a tendency in the media to import US social and political discourse, just as we import so much else. But this doesnt always come with the necessary translation. The number of times culture war has been mentioned in UK publications has rocketed since the election of Donald Trump, and so too have the "hot takes".

Mentions of "culture war" in UK publications have surged since the election of Donald Trump

Index of "culture war" mentions in British English publications since 2010 (100 = 2010).

Google Books Ngram Viewer

But while it is one thing to assume a UK audience might be interested in the cultural and political issues gripping America, its quite another to assume they will respond to them in the same way. Something that vexes Trumpian Republicans might not incense supporters of Boris Johnsons Conservative Party.

British audiences are, for example, often assumed to have precisely the same sensitivities to the racial issues being fought over in America, but in some instances, this isn't true. The furore over the singer Adele wearing her hair in Bantu knots for the Notting Hill Carnival was American-led (the artist was accused of cultural appropriation by US journalist Ernest Owens), and when discussed in Britain, largely synthetic. As Helen Lewis writes for theAtlantic, when LBC, TalkRadio and the BBC sought to give oxygen to the debate over whether Adele was engaging in cultural appropriation, very few black Britons came on to profess outrage (shadow justice secretary David Lammy, for instance,went in the opposite direction), or to support Owens.

[see also:First Thoughts: How Suzanne Moore split the Guardian]

The assumption, nonetheless, persists; and some campaigns have already been fought on the basis that if a culture war doesnt already exist here, it can be made to do so. For example, Dominic Cummings, the former chiefaide to the Prime Ministerhas,along with the administration he served, been identified by reportersand commentators as an instigatorin importing culture war issues to UK election campaigns. Recent plans to simplify the process for changing your legal gender for instance, were shelved in June, and werebilled by the Sunday Times asa move to fuel a culture war "gripping" Britain.The purpose? To retain and bolster Conservative support at the ballot box.

But for that strategy to work and talk of a UK culture war to have resonance the country must at least be willing to entertain and be enthused by it. But the evidence so far suggests that when compared to America, Britons are far less likely to be exercisedabout the issues that make culture war the political soccer ball it is across the Atlantic.

Take gay rights, for example. Though overwhelmingly supported in both the UK and US, the share of Britons who believe homosexuality should be accepted is significantly higher than the numbersin America.In 2002, just over half (51 per cent) of the US population believed homosexuality should be accepted by society. That number has since risen to 72 per cent.In the UK, 74 per cent were accepting of homosexuality in 2002, and the figure now stands at 86 per cent. That is a gap between the US and UK of 14 percentage points.

What about transgender rights? The issue is, to a great many voters in the US, a sensitive one, and unlike gay rights, support for trans rights doesntcommand cross-party approval.Data from Pew Research, a Washington think tank, shows Americans are divided on the subject along partisan lines. Just 19 per cent of those who identify with or lean to the Republican Party say a man or a woman can bedifferent from their assigned gender that trans people do, in essence, exist. YouGovreportedsimilar findings when itasked Republicans whether trans women were women.

But what about British voters? Compare those figures to thepartisan divides in the UK, and the difference is stark.

US Republicans appear a lot more likely than UK Conservative and Leave voters to regard a trans woman as a man

YouGov polling conducted in 2018 (UK) and 2019 (US). Questions posed, although they should be noted as similar, are nonetheless different.

What we see here is a greater level of nuance in the UK on trans rights. While right-leaning respondents in Britain are still more sceptical on the issue than those on the left, there is less unanimity than in the US. Even if you were to substitute Conservative voters for those whobacked Leave in the 2016 EU referendum, those sharp American dividing lines are simply not there.

The main pointis that if the culture war was wielded in Britain with reference to trans rights, it would do little to unite the body of voters already supportive of the cause, nor would itspeak to existing prejudices in the same way thatit does in America.

But a culture war isnt only about trans rights. In Britain it could mean something else a battle between two distinct identities, perhaps.

Since the 2016 referendum, the growth in the new tribal allegiances of Leave and Remain could provide the basis for such an ideological divide: a battle between perceptions of how the country is and how it should be.

In 2019, the fight between Get Brexit Done and whatever forgettable messaging the opposition parties produced could be interpreted as a strand of culture war, but its unlikely to go further than that. Theres very little that pits Leave and Remain voters against one another aside from the perception they are opposedand, obviously, Brexit. Pluralities on both sides believe in and are concerned by climate change. Both sides favour increased funding for the NHS, and Leave voters arent even wholly united on one of the key drivers of the Brexit vote: immigration.

[see also:Keir Starmer must expose the governments shortcomings on Brexit]

One subject that does divide opinion along Leave/Remain lines is that ill-defined phrase political correctness.

What political correctness actually means is irrelevant to voters. What it represents depends on which side of the fence you sit. To some, it is a clampdown on the ability to say what you like. To others, it is a necessary protection from prejudice and hate.

A culture war could be fought on this divide. Butit isnt, and the battlelines would in any case actually be quite hard to draw. Even here there is nuance: the overwhelming majority of Britons, for instance,agree that political correctness sometimes goes too far and exceeds common sense. Theres majority agreement, too including plurality support from Labour voters that political correctness is employed as a smokescreen to avoid necessary discussion ofissues such as societal integration.

Vast majority of Britons agree political correctness sometimes goes too far

Opinium polling conducted in 2019

Where there is disagreementand where the country is seemingly split down the middle is on whether political correctness is a price worth paying for a more equal society, and whether it even helps to create a better society.

Trying to use this as a wedge issue in a UK culture war would be, at best, extremely risky. The messaging would have to be far too nuanced. A Conservative campaign that went hard on political correctness would likely inflame the passions of as many voters as it would alienate. There was, after all, a reason why the Vote Leave campaign only chose to focusimmigration in the final few weeks of the 2016 race. It was because itrightly recognised that the coalition of votes needed to get to 50 per cent plus one was just that: a coalition, and not a band of Ukip-supporting hardliners.

This isnt to say a culture war couldnt take rootin the UK. It could. But if it did, it wouldnt resemble that in the US, and norwould it look anything like what we see on social media. The number of Britons fighting these culture wars and who are vexed by them ishugely unrepresentative of the wider electorate. A minority (22 per cent, BSA 2015)of Britons use Twitter, and in 2017, those Britons on Twitter who were Conservative supporters were outnumbered two-to-one by those that supported Labour. A recent More In Common study found that though 15 per cent of Britons were prone to sharing political content online, those numbers were not nationally representative, for they skewed overwhelmingly in favour of those identified as "progressive activists".

Social media is unrepresentative in the extreme: it is full of activists arguing politics with activists, convinced those other activists are representative of the rest of Britain.

As Bobby Duffy of Kings College Londonnotes, the rhetoric of political leaders plays a huge role in whether a culture war can exist. For it to work in Britain, wed need mainstream leaders willing to entertain it, and entertain it both for a prolonged period and in a way that can resonate.

[see also:Why some Conservatives are nervous about making the next election a culture war]

When Boris Johnson, shortly after he had resigned asforeign secretary, described veiled Muslim women as resembling "letterboxes" in a Telegraph column, we were, perhaps, given insight into how a culture war may play out in Britain. With condemnation from all corners even from sections of his own party, it was a subject that, according to aSky Datapoll, split the country down the middle:45 per cent said Johnson should have apologised, while 48 per cent said that he shouldn't.

Culture war,if waged from a leadership or prominent position, as Johnson did, may just work in the UK. But theissues on which it would be fought do not come top in the list of priorities of UK voters. Culture war in Britain has, so far, been waged mostly on the sidelines.Its the reserve ofprovocateurs, of which the UK when compared to America has few,and by fringe parties and groups on social media and in newspaper op-eds. In 2017, it wasnt the Conservative or Labour parties fighting over the burqa in Britain, for instance, but Ukip and the Green Party.

The conditions to create a culture war are there, but thewill to make it so and the appetitefrom the wider British publicare not.

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Is the UK in the clutches of a culture war? - New Statesman