Title page in proof: Culture Wars in Britain: The Myth of Exceptionalism and the Reality of Division. By Nick Hubble. Emerald Publishing (in the Society Now series).
Contents. Preface
List of Abbreviations
1. Introduction: What Are Culture Wars?
2. Culture, War, Class and Gender
3. The Break-up of Normative Britain
4. The Brexit Divide
5. The Culture Wars in the 2020s
6. The Future of the Culture Wars
Bibliography
Index
1: INTRODUCTION: WHAT ARE CULTURE WARS?
The most common response I have received from people on telling them I am writing this book is ‘what are culture wars?’ This is entirely understandable because the idea of culture wars is a very recent addition to British social and political discourse. According to researchers from Kings College London, UK press articles using the term rose from just 21 in 2015 to 534 in 2020 (Duffy et al, 2021). In part, this rapid conceptual shift was due to attempts to understand what had happened in 2016 with the EU referendum and the election of Donald Trump for a first presidential term in America. Since then, we have grown used to a diet of opinion columns and phone-in shows discussing issues such as cancel culture, 15-minute cities, 20 mph zones, free speech at universities, personal pronouns and gender-neutral toilets.
Nevertheless, there remains considerable skepticism in Britain as to the idea of culture wars and whether they are just an import from America that doesn’t really apply to the UK. It should be noted that maybe a quarter of those newspaper articles from 2020 took the position that culture wars are either overblown by the media or manufactured for political reasons. Even these skeptical articles were divided with the right-wing press seeing the left as having overstated the existence of culture wars in its obsession with ‘identity politics’, while the left-leaning press tended to depict the political right, especially the post-2019 Conservative government, as weaponizing culture wars to distract attention away from the hardship and inequality that their economic policies were causing.
Surely, however, it must be clear by now that the British approach to the culture wars since Brexit has led us deeper and deeper into crisis? Unfortunately, current trends at the time this manuscript was completed suggest otherwise.
NO CULTURE WARS PLEASE, WE’RE BRITISH
Following the mainstream acceptance of anti-identity politics, the received wisdom in the mid-2020s has become that the British public are no longer particularly bothered by culture war issues. It is this kind of thinking that makes it possible for Sunder Katwala of the British Future thinktank to claim, as quoted in Byline Times by Adam Bienkov, that ‘the median voter who backed leave in 2016 and the Conservatives in 2019 is actually now very moderate on most of these foundational identity issues’ (Bienkov, 2024: p. 22). The problem with this statement is that ‘moderate’ implies that there is some central ground and those occupying positions on either side of it are, by definition, immoderate or extreme. However, the fate of the current Labour government shows the limitations of acting as though culture war issues are not really important.
Back to reality: the snow has all melted, it's raining against the window, and I'm checking the proofs for my forthcoming book, Culture Wars in Britain. I was tempted to subtitle it, 'No Culture Wars Please, We're British' and that survives as a section head in the conclusion. #proofs #Sociology