Labour’s invisible culture war

‘The culture war on university campuses ends here.’ So said Labour education secretary Bridget Phillipson last month. Just days later, she announced the scrapping of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which is designed to uphold free expression on campus. This was a clear statement of intent – an opening salvo in a war on free speech. How can a minister and a party who claim to be defusing the culture war engage so readily in such a brazen act of culture-warring? How much worse could things get under Labour?

Toby Young – general secretary of the Free Speech Union – returned to The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss the state of free speech in the UK and why a woke, technocratic party like Labour poses such a serious threat to our liberties. What follows is an edited extract from the conversation. You can listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: Is the left still in denial about the crisis of free speech on campus?

Toby Young: When campus activists say that inviting Nigel Farage to speak will traumatise the children of immigrants, I don’t think that they’re consciously deploying a rhetorical argument in order to shut down someone they disagree with. Instead, it seems to me that they have persuaded themselves that they are actually protecting vulnerable students. Of course, they don’t like to think of themselves as censors, nor do they see their behaviour as censorship. Most even still claim to believe in freedom of speech.

Activists are able to reconcile this attitude with their indifference to the impact of pro-Palestine protests on Jewish students because of cognitive dissonance. That is, they are not conscious of being hypocritical. They seem to believe that they’re acting consistently. One reason why they are able to maintain this dissonance is because there is so little challenge and debate. There are so few people on campus saying: ‘Hang on a minute, aren’t you being a bit hypocritical? Isn’t there a double standard here?’ Almost no one says that to these activists.

A good parallel of this would be what happened during the Paris Olympics opening ceremony last month. Speaking about the controversial pastiche of the Last Supper, the ceremony’s artistic director claimed that he was creating a ceremony in which everyone felt ‘included’. But his decision to ridicule the world’s largest religion actually made Christians feel excluded. Was all the talk about representation and tolerance just a smokescreen for shoving a rather narrow ideology down the throats of viewers? No, it probably wasn’t. He probably thought he was being inclusive, and that he just accidentally overlooked Christianity. The very same cognitive dissonance is at work here.

This is a perfect example of how ideology infects people. Bridget Phillipson, and the rest of the Labour cabinet, do not think that her wanton acts of legislative vandalism are part of a culture war. She’s probably persuaded herself that scrapping the bill is the gentle and kind thing to do. People are able to do the most brutal things by persuading themselves that they’re being nice.

O’Neill: Why is it that Labour only sees their opponents as culture warriors?

Young: It is tempting to conclude that Labour ministers are just trolling us when they engage in these naked acts of culture war-like aggression, all while claiming that they are ‘unburdened by doctrine’. But I do think that there’s something slightly more complicated going on. It seems to me that technocratic managerialism has become fused with progressive ideology. That’s why French president Emmanuel Macron, while witnessing the unbelievably woke Olympics opening ceremony, tweeted: ‘This is France.’ You could not hope for a more perfect embodiment of technocratic managerialism than Macron, and yet he embraces radical progressive ideology. It’s a weird hybrid.

Macron and other technocrats are able to make these statements because they don’t see their progressive ideology as contentious. They think that all the arguments have been settled. There is such a strong moral consensus about the need to defend LGBTQ+ rights, for instance, that any and all opponents to gender-affirming care are transphobes and bigots. For them, their worldview is simply the view of all right-thinking people. They can’t even imagine that their opponents might be acting in good faith. That is why, in their eyes, they are not prosecuting the culture war.

For the global elites today, their claim to authority rests not just on their technocratic expertise, but on their claim to having superior ‘moral’ expertise. In this, they are responding to a deepening crisis of legitimacy. Elite power used to rest almost entirely on the elites’ claim to be experts, that their superior education meant that they could help countries navigate various crises, but this notion has been shattered in recent years. The elites did a very poor job of navigating the global credit-crunch. They did a very poor job of stewarding the ‘war on terror’. And their response to the pandemic was catastrophically awful. The elites’ crisis of legitimacy is getting greater and greater.

As a result, the elites present themselves as morally superior beings. This is the root of the fusion of technocratic managerialism and radical progressive ideology. You can see this when you watch Eurovision, or the Olympics opening ceremony. Allowing drag queens to perform in a pastiche of the Last Supper during the latter was the ne plus ultra of progressive values. It seems as though we’re living in a technocratic theocracy, a postmodern version of Iran. The reason they hate populism is not because it’s actually a threat to democracy, but because it questions the integrity of the elites’ sacred moral values.

However, if what we saw at the Olympics opening ceremony – Papa Smurf dancing around in a tableau based on the Last Supper – is the best that the technocrats can do, then they’re not much longer for this world.

Toby Young was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here: