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In the heat of the culture wars we have lost our moral compass

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One of the sickest aspects of Britain’s culture war is that the Left accuses the Right of starting each battle. Yet the reality is that from cancel culture to the denigration of British history, from gender fluidity to the racialisation of almost everything, it is always the Left firing the first shots.“But what about flags?” scoff Left-wing culture warriors. “You can’t see ministers these days without a Union Flag behind them.” But this only proves the point. The Tories have realised that flying the flag sends their opponents into paroxysms of fury, and this suits Conservative electoral objectives. Yet recall pictures of past Labour leaders with the flag, like Attlee and Wilson, and you see that it is the Left that has changed, not the Conservatives and not the country.It is weird that national symbols, traditions and institutions should provoke indignation and outrage. They are things that are unremarkably good, that we share, that forge a common identity, and their goodness should not be contentious. But for a minority of nihilistic ideologues, they are icons that need to be smashed.The trouble, increasingly, is that despite Conservative successes at the ballot box, this minority is starting to override the values and interests of the rest of us. The ideologues have either taken over the decision-making positions of important organisations or frightened others to the extent that powerful people have lost their confidence, moral compass and ability to judge what is reasonable.Consider Pimlico Academy in London. There, pupils led a strike against the head teacher over a “racist” school uniform policy, a curriculum focused too much, supposedly, on “Caucasian” kings and queens, and the fact that the Union flag flew on school premises. The school appears to have done nothing out of the ordinary. Yet forbidding hairstyles that “hide the face” was said to be racist and requiring hijabs not to be “too colourful” apparently Islamophobic.After pupils tore down and burned the Union Flag, hundreds staged a walkout and videos were posted online of the head teacher fleeing an aggressive teenager, the school backed down. The uniforms policy has been amended and the Union Flag will no longer fly. The pupils, carrying Socialist Worker placards and daubing graffiti complaining about “white schools for brown kids”, have been backed by the National Education Union, which organised a successful vote of no confidence by teachers in the head.The very same union has remained silent in the case of , where a teacher remains suspended and living in hiding with police protection after giving a lesson on blasphemy and – perfectly legally and in line with past school practice – showing pupils pictures of the Prophet Mohammed. As more information comes to light, the more it seems that the school threw the poor teacher to the wolves,. Yet the union that represents him did not say a word.In one case the union was noisy, in another it was silent, but in both it sided with a mob that sought to intimidate teachers. No doubt the union was itself afraid, but it is as likely that its decisions stem from its own ideological conviction. The NEU has arranged “decolonising education” conferences and supported the Marxist Black Lives Matter campaign. It has hosted training sessions for staff from Mend, a Muslim campaigning organisation accused of extremism, and made a £3,000 donation to Purpose of Life, the charity that named the Batley teacher and encouraged violence against him by likening his actions to terrorism.With the police, matters are a little more complicated. While officers danced with Extinction Rebellion protesters as they broke the law by blocking public highways, took the knee during violent Black Lives Matter protests and chose not to enforce the law when protesters gathered outside Batley Grammar, in London last week,– broke up a Good Friday church service after officers claimed it contravened coronavirus regulations.This might be an example of the classic policing problem of the tendency to pick on soft targets. But in a sense this is the point. Christianity, even at Easter, is an unfashionable cause for what might be called the activist “community”. In fact, as a part of Britain’s long national story it is a ripe target for those who want to smash the connections with our past. It has no seething mobs to pressure the police into giving up their promise to act “without fear or favour” and no front organisations to provide “education” for officers.This is the context – of the influence of radical ideology and the fear it engenders – in which the Government’s report into racial disparities was published last week. It is possible to disagree with the report’s central argument – that racial disparities can be caused by discrimination, but most are caused by wider social and economic factors – but the Left’s response was hysterical in the extreme. The report’s lead author – Tony Sewell, a black educationist – was denounced as a member of the Ku Klux Klan by a Labour MP and compared to Josef Goebbels by a Left-wing academic.In fact, the Sewell report reaffirms that “outright racism still exists”. It accepts controversial concepts such as unconscious bias and institutional racism. And it concludes that Britain is not yet a “post-racial society”. The report’s recommendations – including the creation of an Office for Health Inequalities and the liberalisation of some drug laws – go further than any Labour government has in the past.And yet it was rejected and its authors smeared. All for challenging the idea, now ascendant on the Left, that every social and economic problem is racial, and every racial disparity is caused by systemic discrimination in which we are all culpable.As ever, this latest battle in the culture war is caused not by conservatives but the rapid recent radicalisation of the Left. And, as ever, the Left will go on getting their way, because sensible people and moderate organisations have, through the accommodation of extreme ideologies and fear of angry and violent mobs, surrendered to their cause.Related TopicsAdvertisementRelated TopicsWe rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism.We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future.Thank you for your support.Need help?Visit ourpage.Close

One of the sickest aspects of Britain’s culture war is that the Left accuses the Right of starting each battle. Yet the reality is that from cancel culture to the denigration of British history, from gender fluidity to the racialisation of almost everything, it is always the Left firing the first shots.“But what about flags?” scoff Left-wing culture warriors. “You can’t see ministers these days without a Union Flag behind them.” But this only proves the point. The Tories have realised that flying the flag sends their opponents into paroxysms of fury, and this suits Conservative electoral...

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Nick Timothy

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In the heat of the culture wars we have lost our moral compass

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