Visibly desperate Conservatives are counting on their opposition to the left’s cultural revolution to save them, if not from defeat, then at least from annihilation. The party’s deputy chair Lee Anderson forecasts that a ‘mix of culture wars and trans debate’ would be ‘at the heart’ of the party’s coming election campaign. You only need to listen to Tory ministers or read the Tory press to see that plan being followed.
Left-leaning commentators have a convincing response which boils down to a simple exclamation of, ‘who the hell are you trying to kid?’ As by-election results show, the electorate will punish the Conservatives for 14 years of national decline with the anger of a subject population turning on an occupying army. No amount of campaigning against the trans lobby or cancel culture will save them.
Then left-leaning commentators go on to say that the public does not care about woke politics, or if you dislike the term, identity politics. And here I disagree. Nothing will stop Keir Starmer becoming prime minister. But if Labour panders to authoritarianism, in power, if it rules over a country whose citizens are frightened of speaking their minds, it is easy to imagine the public revolting, not least because the intellectual foundations of woke politics are already collapsing around us.
The vigour and the intellectual challenge of the movement have gone. As Franz Kafka said, ‘every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy’. So it is proving with the woke revolution. The good it achieved has been supplanted by conformism that is enforced by intimidation
You see the bureaucratic slime piling up in HR departments. They force bored and resentful employees to sit through unconscious bias courses. They do it because they need to justify their existence, not because there is evidence that the training brings benefits. On the contrary, the courses may exacerbate racism. A core belief of identity politics, upheld by Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, is that it is not good enough to be colour blind. Treating people equally regardless of colour or creed is a form of racism, they maintain. The true anti-racist must always be aware of race. Their strange dogmas have formed the basis of the multi-billion dollar diversity, equity and inclusion training business.
But there is at least some evidence that the emphasis on race in unconscious bias training is inducing anger and frustration among employees. Far from tackling racism, the focus on racial identity fosters tribalism and communalism. To put it bluntly, the old socialist and liberal critique of identity politics – that you don’t build a successful progressive movement by emphasising what divides people – appears to have life in it yet.
Less noticed has been the growing evidence that ‘trigger warnings’ are also a worthless exercise. In August, psychologists at Harvard and Flinders universities published a meta-analysis of whether the warnings truly did help individuals cope with traumatising content.
No, not at all, they were a waste of time, the researchers found. Trigger warnings had no effect on subjects’ emotional responses to the material they studied. They did not make them more likely to avoid books if they were distressing. And they had little to no effect on participants’ comprehension. All trigger warnings did was slightly raise anxiety levels.
‘Relying solely on trigger warnings, especially as a disingenuous gesture of trauma awareness, does more harm than good,’ they concluded.
For many in the 2010s, reports of trigger warnings were the first news they heard of a new ideology growing on US campuses. In his Triggered Literature Cancellation, Stealth Censorship and Cultural Warfare (out this week from Biteback) the critic John Sutherland offers a fair but quietly devastating account of the movement against freedom of speech and the freedom to publish.
I imagine conservatives despairing as they read his account. As so often in the past, the market has undermined traditional values.
For it was not postmodern academics or cultural Marxists who demanded safe spaces and trigger warnings about the content of books that might disturb nervous readers, but students themselves. The whopping cost of fees transformed the power balance in higher education in the 2010s. In the UK and US students were now the customers and the universities were the degree supermarkets. As every retailer knows the customer is always right, and academics could not override student wishes, even if they wanted to.
In 2014, the first reports appeared in the US press of student bodies demanding trigger warnings for novels including Things Fall Apart, The Great Gatsby, Mrs Dalloway and The Merchant of Venice.
John Mullan, who writes wonderfully on Jane Austen, spoke for a literary culture that was already dying, although he did not know it then. The head of English studies at UCL responded to the reports from America by saying that stout, freeborn British students did not want lecturers to mollycoddle them.
‘Essentially literature is full of every kind of upsetting, provoking, awkward-making, saddening, embarrassing stuff you could ever think of,’ he told the Guardian.
The Americans were ‘treating people as if they are babies, and studying literature is for grownups at university. You might as well put a label on English literature saying: warning – bad stuff happens here.’
Alas for Mullan, British students or rather the politically motivated students with the loudest voices, insisted on being treated like babies too.
In August 2022 the Times found, via freedom of information requests, that British universities had triggered over a thousand texts, including the work Shakespeare, Chaucer, Austen, Brontë, and Dickens.
It’s easy to mock, and rage about snowflakes. But Conservatives are deluding themselves if they think that a waning of woke ideology will see the old order restored. We are not returning to a world where mental health problems were neglected or British institutions could get away with covering up the crimes of the empire. Racism, misogyny, and ableism, have been tackled. Progressives welcome that, of course they do. Why should they or a Labour government want it any other way?
The answer lies in the means rather than the ends of the woke movement. Its authoritarianism and contempt for any value that does not fit its agenda would be terrifying if Labour were to back it with the coercive power of the state. Rather than go off into another piece about cancel culture, allow me to explain the danger by sticking with the example of trigger warnings.
On the one hand, they are just alerts. Done responsibly they should not erase or meddle, just tell sensitive readers to be on their guard.
On the other, they can be an announcement that an author is guilty of dangerous and reprehensible thinking, which is the first step to suggesting that they should be banned.
There are now vast sites online devoted to documenting the crimes of writers. The Trigger Warning Database, founded in 2021, lists searchable alerts on 6,000 or more books supplied by voluntary contributors. That’s right, voluntary. Readers who were little better than coppers’ narks, gave up their own time, free of charge, and went through books like secret policemen, as they searched for reasons to denounce authors who betrayed the glorious progressive vision.
No fault, however small or contentious, can be ignored. John Sutherland found that database accused Jane Austen of ‘antiziganism [racism towards Romani people]’ (Emma), ‘incest’ (in Mansfield Park, apparently, although I have to say I missed that), ‘classism’ (in Pride and Prejudice), and ‘animal hunting’ (Sense and Sensibility). I typed in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and found the unnamed cultural commissars were telling readers to beware the novel’s ‘bullying and hazing, child abuse and neglect, fatmisia and body shaming, fire and arson, torture, and slavery and indentured servitude’. (I have no idea about the fatmisia but think the indentured servitude may refer to Dobby and his fellow house elves.)
The informers give no context. They offer no evidence. They showed no appreciation of how literature works. They just applied their labels and expected their evidence-free condemnations that Austen promoted incest and Rowling promoted slavery to be accepted without a quibble.
If you doubt that a modern dictator would find any number of willing spies to help him, just look at the database or go onto Twitter. Or look at academia. The spirit that leads Edinburgh university to cancel David Hume or Manchester University to ban Kipling (who most certainly was an imperialist) and paint over a mural containing his If (which most certainty is not a racist poem) would be devastating if it drove the organs of government.
Will Labour turn authoritarian in office? In many areas of public policy, it will have to. The crisis in the NHS requires sweeping health initiatives to save money and save lives. And if they include banning sugar-filled foods, I cannot see West Streeting or any other Labour politician paying the smallest heed to Tory complaints that the ‘nanny state’ cannot tell people what to eat.
But if Labour treats the marketplace for ideas like a marketplace for junk food, we will rapidly become an ugly country. Dispiritingly, there were unconfirmed reports this week that Labour might be thinking of doing just that.
The Daily Mail claimed that under Labour ‘transphobes’ would face two years in prison for the new crime of ‘misgendering’. Let us suppose the story is true, and that Labour would jail that enslaver of house elves, J.K. Rowling, for the crime of expressing her sincerely held views. Here are three reasons why the woke project would fail for a party that was serious about governing.
The first is that the woke movement has been going since 2014 and people will be sick of it by the mid-2020s. Many, and not only on the right, already are. Fashions change. The failings and hypocrisies of new movements become obvious as they grow old. A Labour government would be jumping onto a woke bandwagon just as it was starting to stutter.
Second, if Labour does go woke and attack basic freedoms it will make implacable enemies. Democracy depends on allowing citizens to argue against the status quo and challenge the ruling elite. A Labour government that criminalises argument will both incentivise its opponents to refuse to accept its legitimacy and fuel a Tory revival.
Finally, after Brexit, this country is sick of ideology and wants practical solutions. Labour has sensibly refused to be drawn into culture war politics in opposition because it knows the public want practical solutions to pressing economic problems. The old leftist critique of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo makes a good slogan for a Labour government: you win by emphasising what unites people not by exacerbating our divisions.
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