Liberals, eh? Dontcha just hate ‘em? Or should I say ‘so-called’ liberals, who aren’t really liberal at all because they want to silence their opponents. And whatever happened to John Stuart Mill? He’s been taken off the curriculum of course — because he’s a Dead White Male and the Cultural Marxists who control the universities don’t think their snowflake students will be able to read him without bursting into tears…Want to hear more? Sign up to my YouTube channel…

Of course, I don’t really have a YouTube channel, but a lot of people do. And this sort of Right-wing dissent from liberal orthodoxy proliferating on social media and video-sharing websites these days.

The raucous and antagonistic online culture has sprung up as traditional media’s gatekeeper role has diminished. And such are the financial incentives — rewarding controversy and gotchas rather than reasoned debate — that decent money can now be made from stoking the Right-wing id with jeremiads about millennial snowflakes and Cultural Marxism and post-modernist wreckers. It’s a problem.

The circuit of this alternative media is now pretty well established: mostly YouTube-based discussion programmes, broadly opposed to the progressive cultural consensus. There are different styles. For example, the Triggernometry podcast is presented by two very funny comedians and has a fairly informal approach, full of jokes and occasionally quite profane, whereas Conversations, hosted by former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia John Anderson, is more polished and old-fashioned. Nevertheless, the programmes have the same kind of guests, who tend to make the same kind of points, in the same kind of way. 

There are two topics that arise time and time again. First, cultural decline, i.e. the gradual loss of knowledge and understanding of the great art, the great literature, the great achievements of Western civilisation. This is usually ascribed to the dominance of the academy by highly politicised Left-wing academics with a bad case of what Sir Roger Scruton called “oikophobia”, that is a strong feeling of dislike and repugnance towards their own cultural and religious inheritance. 

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The second subject is the increasing censoriousness of culturally dominant progressives, who are keen to silence and delegitimise critics of the Current Year social consensus. A stern and humourless progressive piety reigns in the citadels of the British cultural establishment, empowered and encouraged by the dynamics of social media. 

These are important subjects. However, they cannot be the only topic of conversation. Clearly there’s a problem. What about the solutions? 

When I worked for a pro-life organisation, we used to grumble about media bias, how big broadcasters stacked the deck against pro-lifers in interviews and debates, and how the print media gave endless column inches to outright liars and propagandists. Such complaints were all rather futile. We should, instead, have been asking: “Given the media landscape, what are we actually going to do?” It’s hard to fight a battle on a field you didn’t choose, but you do still have to fight.

In his thoughtful piece for UnHerd after the death of Sir Roger Scruton, Ben Sixsmith noted, correctly, the lack of intellectual heft within British conservatism. The problem isn’t just in the academy; it’s in virtually every field of cultural endeavour. Where are the conservative painters and poets and sculptors and TV writers? Perhaps more importantly, where is the institutional infrastructure to support conservatives in the arts?  

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If conservatives genuinely want to challenge the progressive hegemony, they need to get serious and they need to get organised. They can’t afford to get bogged down in cultivating resentments. Resentment, as Scruton himself often noted, is a corrosive and dangerous dead end. 

Of course, tweaking the nose of the po-faced consensus, with its bizarre, ever-changing shibboleths and bureaucratic vindictiveness, is great fun. There is a glorious heritage in Britain of robust opposition to hectoring officialdom. People who stand at the back and hurl tomatoes at the stage will always be needed. But conservatism can’t be just about that. 

Sure, it might feel good to say the unsayable and to get hundreds of RTs for a devastating put-down of Polly Toynbee or some withering remarks about the suffocating piety of BBC drama. But, generally speaking, the juggernaut rolls on regardless. The task is not to make the drivers of the juggernaut feel embarrassed or angry, but to actually stop the juggernaut. This is one reason to be concerned by the preponderance of comedians among the heroes of the anti-woke counterculture; while comedy can advance dissident goals to some extent by breaking progressive taboos, it is ultimately a destructive force, not a constructive one.

Maybe conservatives should take a step back from the day-to-day combat of the culture war. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not one of those conservatives who retires to the fainting couch with a glass of sherry when the culture war is mentioned. 

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In Western countries in the modern era, it is entirely natural and reasonable for there to be culture war, i.e. a rigorous, ongoing debate about the attitudes, expectations and moral imperatives that should govern public and private life — especially in areas such as education, entertainment and the media. The alternative is so-called Tory pragmatism, the school of thought whose main principle seems to be “whatever the Guardian editorial page says, but four years after the editorial appears rather than 18 months”.  

The point is not that the culture war shouldn’t be fought; rather, conservatives need to fight smart, and remember the culture bit as well as the war bit. This means thinking about strategy and not just tactics. One tendency in the world of Right-wing podcasters and YouTubers is to seek out the latest person to fall foul of the dreaded libs and thrust a microphone in front of them. 

The problem is that those people don’t always have anything very interesting to add, and that giving them more publicity simply feeds into a reactive and antagonistic atmosphere of snark and counter-snark. It also contributes to a climate where grifters can flourish; it is very easy to carve out a niche for yourself as The Person Who Says What They Don’t Want You To Say, without contributing much of value to conservative thought and action. 

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Which brings us to another difficulty. There are really (at least) two factions on the Right-wing side of the culture war: classical liberals or libertarians, and traditional conservatives. They have overlapping concerns and shared enemies, but fundamentally they have quite different aims and so want to fight different battles in different ways. 

Traditional conservatism, my own part of the political forest, is not simply concerned with removing restraints on speech and clearing obstructions from the public square. It has a vision of the true and the beautiful, a particular understanding of what a good and orderly society should look like. For adherents to this philosophy, the future cannot simply lie in joining forces with the libertarian loudmouths and provocateurs. 

Imagine a podcast or YouTube video series that wasn’t content to condemn the decline of Western civilisation or the absurd censorship attempted by academic liberals, but actually sought out conservative artists to interview them about their work. Imagine a new media show that was not a lament about how X university won’t teach Dante or Plato or Shakespeare, but instead gave a voice to a young poet seeking to write within the great tradition, or an up-and-coming architect seeking to build beautifully and creatively, or a painter rejecting the sterile conceptualism of establishment art.

It won’t be enough on its own — not without the impressive and enviable institutional support available for conservative artists in, say, the USA — but it would be a big step in the right direction.

Inevitably, the woke press have been quick to condemn the new series. Just as these commentators have mastered the ability to divine the secret motives of their political opponents, they have also developed a form of clairvoyance which enables them to pronounce judgement on creative endeavours in advance of their existence. The Guardian has produced two hit pieces in quick succession to bewail the return of this ‘problematic’ show. An article for Glamour claims that Little Britain’s brand of humour is ‘dangerous’ and that we should be “leaving behind an era we should all be ashamed of”. In a further twist, a source at the BBC has apparently said that a new series has been ‘ruled out’ because the show is too ‘offensive’. The claim has since been denied by friends of Lucas and Walliams but, if it turns out to be true, that means that the new series of Little Britain will have been announced, denounced and cancelled in the space of five days.

This tells us a great deal about the cultural climate we now occupy, one in which social media can catalyse a flurry of competing storms. Offence is a contemporary form of currency, and declarations of virtue are deemed an adequate substitute for virtuous acts. Little Britain was never to my taste, but there has never been a greater need for mainstream comedy that teases the limits of our tolerance. When the new series was mooted, the headline in The Sun posed the question: “Will it fall foul of PC killjoys?” The answer was never really in doubt.

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One of the many problems with the identitarian Left is an apparent inability to assess art or comedy by anything other than ideological standards. A film is judged successful if it is sufficiently diverse and sends a positive message about social justice. This is why Avengers: Endgame was lambasted for its ‘fat shaming’ by The Guardian, in spite of Marvel’s desperate efforts at woke posturing. Ideologues demand purity, and mistakes are not to be brooked.

It is difficult, therefore, to see how a Little Britain that even remotely resembles the original series could possibly be forgiven were it to be broadcast today. Perhaps the solution will be to modify the targets according to the prevailing intersectional creeds. For all their censuring of ‘bullying’ comedy that ‘punches down’, the woke are happy to indulge in the most vicious forms of bullying so long as the targets are approved. Ageism is fine, for example, because elderly people voted for Brexit and tend to subscribe to outlandish and outdated belief systems. Many, for instance, insist that there are only two genders, or that obesity can lead to health problems. Whatever you say, boomers.

Attacks on working class people are also acceptable, of course. This is a consequence of the social justice movement’s poisonous influence on the left. Not only has it rehabilitated racial thinking and abused the principle of diversity in a way guaranteed to foster division, it has failed to prioritise its traditional mission of redressing economic inequality. In the early days of Little Britain, commentators for The Guardian and The Independent would often cite the character of Vicky Pollard — the tracksuit-clad teenage mother who swapped her baby for a Westlife CD — as an example of how Lucas and Walliams were ‘punching down’ at the oppressed. Owen Jones devoted a substantial part of his book Chavs to criticising what he perceived to be Little Britain’s damaging stereotypes.

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Yet many of the leftists who took umbrage at such characterisations at the time are the same who now routinely demonise the working class in the name of progress. In today’s context, Vicky Pollard could work well as a satire of the kind of attitudes held by prominent left-wing columnists who dismiss working class people as ‘gammons’. For all their pretence that the slur was aimed at affluent Little Englanders, in practice it was mostly reserved for white Brexit voters on the very lowest incomes.  In trendy metropolitan circles, it is now de rigueur to deride the working class as stupid and suggestible creatures, fuelled by race hatred, who can’t stop themselves from voting the wrong way.  If Vicky Pollard does return, we might well expect to see her gloating about Brexit to her gammony friends, or spending her dole money on a tattoo of Boris Johnson.

And what of the other characters? How might they be sanitised to avoid the ire of a new generation of intersectional Mary Whitehouses? The padded bodysuits of Bubbles and Desiree would be considered fat-shaming; the masculine ‘ladies’ Emily and Florence would be deemed transphobic; the mail order bride Ting Tong would be dismissed as legitimising racist stereotypes. Caricatures are always offensive to somebody.

But a new series of Little Britain also has the potential to take aim at the intolerance of the identitarian Left and ‘cancel culture’, should the creators be inclined to take the risk. The character of Daffyd, the “only gay in the village”, was based on the type of gay man who is obsessed with victimhood, determined to detect prejudice even where it doesn’t exist. In the intervening years, overt homophobia has become far less common, while sensitivity to homophobia has increased. This means that the joke actually works better in today’s context, because the victim-centred social justice movement has spawned innumerable Daffyds, all desperate to denounce the homophobes of their imagination. But this is also why in a 2020 reimagining of Little Britain, Daffyd would probably be the first for the chop.

“Humour normalises thoughts and behaviours,” writes the author of Glamour magazine’s pre-emptive critique, “and we definitely don’t need bigotry any more normalised then [sic] it already is.” No evidence for this assertion is forthcoming. Like so many woke mantras, the idea that there is a causal link between entertainment and public behaviour is simply taken on faith. Comedy can flourish in this kind of puritanical atmosphere if comedians are willing to subvert the new dogmas. It will be interesting to see whether or not Little Britain makes it back to our screens and, if so, whether it will resist or embrace the new oligarchy of social justice.

Andrew Doyle will be touring the UK with Douglas Murray later this year for a live political discussion show “Resisting Wokeness”. Details available at resistingwokeness.com.

In the aftermath of that outrage, the Board of Deputies of British Jews – among others – expressed their concern that the phrase was in and of itself anti-Semitic. Since then, the Board has met with Ms Braverman and announced that it has discerned that there was in fact nothing “intentionally anti-Semitic” about her comments, and expressed sorrow about any hurt having been caused to the MP (who happens to have a Jewish husband).

It is unlikely that any lesson will be learned about claiming to hear things beneath or above the pitch of normal words. Not least because there is now a phalanx of self-appointed bodies and individuals dedicated to this peculiar form of voluntary service.

One oddity of the whole business of trying to hear dog-whistles is very basic: if you can hear the whistle, you must surely be the dog. It is the nature of the analogy that a non-canid cannot hear what the dog hears.  So to be able to hear on a whole different aural wave-length to everyone else – to be peculiarly attuned to the tones of the time and to be able to explain to everyone else – is one heck of a power to bestow upon yourself.

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Which brings me to Paul Embery. I suppose I should state first – since journalism is a trade rightly under suspicion from the reading public – that Embery is not a friend of mine. I do not believe I have ever met him, though I may have once stood in the same room as him.

Nevertheless, we write for the same publication and that is the sort of thing that raises eyebrows if one rushes to another’s defence. So, I should probably add that Embery is generally regarded as being of the Left. Whereas close readers will have noticed that I am not always seen as being of that throng. Embery is a trade union man, which I am not. I suppose we have other differences.

But I have read him ever since he began publishing at UnHerd because I think he is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time. British journalism is not always an open race. In the talent stakes the best talent does not always rise (apologies if this sounds chippy). Often it gets nowhere near the starting blocs. Outside of the hereditary bloc in the House of Lords, journalism in Britain may be one of the most hereditary professions in the land. So as well as giving a cheer whenever any talented voice breaks through, I have to admit that I give an added cheer whenever somebody who was not themselves born into a family of journos breaks through.

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Which is quite enough throat-clearing before pointing out the unfairness of the treatment allotted to Embery this week. It was meted out after he tweeted a response to a folk singer called Mike Harding who had said ‘A nation is not a home’. To this Embery replied, “I fear this encapsulates the divide in our society – between a rootless, cosmopolitan, bohemian middle-class… a rooted, communitarian, patriotic working-class.”

It’s a point with which one may agree or disagree, but of course we live in an age where disagreement is not enough. Character assassination must stand in for debate, and so it was with Embery, with the charge being led by people who claim to hear things with the aural capabilities of a dog.

For example Labour MP Alex Sobel immediately responded, “Literally an anti-semitic trope used by Stalin the culmination of which saw many good bundists imprisoned by East European Communist regimes (including my grandfather) just what I needed to see after the @JewishLabour AGM.  Stop othering Jews.”

Since Mr Sobel is so sensitive to echoes of anti-Semitism that he can find it in two words separated by a comma, then you would have thought he would long ago have heard them in the political party of which he remains a member. Other Labour MPs have described Labour as so “institutionally racist” that they have had to leave the party. Yet Sobel stays. How you can detect anti-Semitism in adjectives online and bypass the klaxon of it on the benches is a matter for serious amazement.

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David Aaronovitch of The Times also decided to join in the lambasting of Embery. He did so by implying that Embery must lurk in very dark places if he can so easily regurgitate these particular two words and separate them with a comma. To which Embery rather smartly replied that of course not all of us spend our lives suffering from the same problems as recovering Stalinists.

Aside from being a neat rejoinder, there is a serious truth underneath this. Everybody knows that people can be extra-sensitive – sometimes over-sensitive – about characteristics which they have which they have at some point in the past had used against them.

A similar dynamic inevitably exists among those who were once devotees of totalitarian movements. Although some people who were once fascists or communists are genuinely able to slip the mindset, not all are. Many slip from the central beliefs but have to spend the rest of their lives assuming that everybody is as vulnerable to the most crazed and dangerous ideas as they once were. A more sensible interpretation would be that it requires a rather special set of character defects – to put it no more rudely – to find oneself in the grip of such ideologies in these times. Most people manage to avoid it.

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Anyhow – the censorship mob have had their way. The trade union of which Embery is a part – the Fire Brigades Union – has ordered him to dial back his online activities. Presumably there is now less chance of him using the wrong adjectives or punctuation and more chance of global peace and harmony.

But this constitutes yet another victory for a contrived hyper-sensitivity and that must surely at some stage reach its limit? If people honestly believed that Embery was an anti-Semite then they should have come out with it and said so. The fact that they did not is because they knew that to do so would be wrong, and that it would make them look ridiculous.

Perhaps it is time to mention how ridiculous they also look seeing phantoms where they do not exist. Perhaps they might also reconsider their determined distortion of the nation’s ability to hear things which certainly do exist but which normal human ears are perfectly able to discern.

“Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.”

We saw a fascinating example of this when a Conservative MP received heavy criticism for using the term ‘cultural Marxism’. At a meeting of the Bruges Group this week Suella Braverman was reported to have said during a speech, “We are engaged in a war against cultural Marxism. We’re engaged in a battle against socialism.”

If you’re a regular at the Right-wing Bruges Group meetings, then this might seem fairly standard fare. But on this occasion, the meeting was attended by a Guardian journalist for whom the phrase stood out and she promptly alerted the Twitter-sphere that there had been an unacceptable term usage in Westminster.

Suella Braverman: “We are engaged in a war against cultural marxism. We’re engaged in a battle against socialism.”

— The Poisonous Euros Atmosphere Fan (@DawnHFoster) March 26, 2019

The response was swift and the denunciation almost wholesale. Taking its lead from the Board of Deputies, The Guardian described the term ‘cultural Marxism’ as being “anti-Semitic“, while the New Statesman has described it as an “alt-right meme“. Also according to the New Statesman: “To people who have spent a modicum of time on 4chan, 8chan, YouTube, or Reddit, this sentence raised blaring, screeching alarm bells.”

And this may well be so. But many people do not spend even a modicum of their time on any – let alone all – of these platforms and I very much doubt that Ms Braverman does. Nevertheless, various charities that say they wish to tackle racism also attacked Braverman for using an allegedly racist term. Although it may not exonerate any person of all charges of anti-Semitism or racism, the likelihood of a daughter of immigrants who is married to a Jewish man (as Braverman is) knowingly using a racist or anti-Semitic term would appear to most fair-minded people to be a remote one.

There was some attempt to push back against this, with attempts to explain that the phrase was a perfectly well-known one which had been in mainstream circulation for decades time.  The journalist and editor Fraser Nelson explained that it was a term so standard that it was used by his lecturers at university.

How absurd. The standard phrase “cultural Marxism” – so old I was taught about it at uni – is labelled an antisemetic conspiracy theory (the power of Wikipedia editing!). So an MP with a Jewish husband is cast as an antisemite. https://t.co/hX0JLCxrft

— Fraser Nelson (@FraserNelson) March 27, 2019

The journalist Iain Martin agreed, explaining that the phrase “relates to the Frankfurt School (which came to the awkward realisation that markets work so Marxism needs to be, er, cultural, in our institutions)”.

Martin went on to say that he had first heard the phrase used in the late 1980s from “a Marxist tutor”.  The phrase is, he said, “widely used by conservatives (not extremists, conservatives) to indicate Marxism that is cultural”.

But other people disagreed. The journalist David Aaronovitch claimed that every time he had encountered the expression “in nearly half a century” it had been “from the mouth or the pen of someone the [sic] neofascist far right. It has been used to mean Jewish subversion via race-mixing and sexual perversion”. Martin and Aaronovitch got into an exchange on this. The latter expressed doubt that the former had indeed heard the phrase in the lecture hall. But Martin insisted. Well, Aaronovitch went on, he had last heard it “hissed” at him by “a BNP heavy at an election meeting in Maidenhead.”

This seems to be the root of the ridiculous Cultural Marxism row – a Marxist editor on Wikipedia objected to the term (which has been in standard use for many decades) and now people who should know better draw their history from Wikipedia. Great. https://t.co/INd6lxjWTS

— Iain Martin (@iainmartin1) March 27, 2019

This exchange and the whole brouhaha over the term is symptomatic of the age. A similar row has been taking place in the Netherlands where the word “boreal” has bizarrely had to have its Wikipedia page locked. This is due to the fact that the leader of the Forum for Democracy, Thierry Baudet, used the word in passing in his victory speech after his young party stormed to first place in the elections to the Dutch Senate.

The Dutch media and others heard an unfamiliar word and immediately started speculating as to its meaning. Dark connotations were drawn. Some pointed out that it simply meant “northern”. Others insisted that the word had once been used by Jean-Marie Le Pen, and, therefore, must be some kind of code. Much more of these code-words being deployed and the whole Netherlands might be triggered to rise from its slumber and become fascist…

The ‘cultural Marxism’ row has likewise descended not into what it might actually mean but into a quest to uncover the worst person to have used it. It’s the “Hitler said ‘good morning'” problem. If Hitler once said ‘good morning” – and he must have done – then is the phrase forever to be associated with the worst man who ever said it? Today’s answer would seem to be that nobody is quite sure.

The term ‘cultural Marxism’ was frequently used in the ‘manifesto’ of the Norwegian mass-murderer and terrorist Anders Breivik. The fact that Anders Breivik used it makes the use of the term more problematic – to use one of the words of the decade. But does it make it impossible to use? Or does it prove that no such thing has ever existed?

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I would have said that it is fairly obvious – indeed undeniable – that a form of Marxism which sought to insinuate itself into the cultural, as opposed to political, sphere has long existed. That it can be traced to the Frankfurt school, among others, is also a part of political history.

It seems rather dishonest to claim that no such movement has ever existed. Though it is possible, if you grew up in a household of communists, as Aaronovitch did, that you would probably have heard a different political lexicon from that which Suella Braverman might end up deploying. Just as if you had never heard some BNP thug hissing about cultural Marxism you might never have realised that it might have moved from the lecture hall to the beer hall.

For my own part, I have heard the phrase fairly frequently and stay away from it. I have no doubt that such a phenomenon exists; I have read many of the texts from which it arises. And yet I have never felt quite comfortable using it myself. That isn’t because I have ever heard a particular anti-Semitic tinge to the term, and certainly not anything to do with “race-mixing and sexual perversion”.

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I have avoided it because it has always seemed to me a little too over-simplistic. A year or more ago, somebody asked me after a talk why I had not referred at any point to ‘cultural Marxism’. I explained to them that firstly, I will refer to what I want to refer to, and second that although part of the concept is helpful I tend to find single, totalistic explanations for massively complex events to be unpersuasive.

In any case, this is dangerous territory. Political debate can barely occur in an atmosphere in which people assume words and terms to have distinctly different meanings. They slide, slip and decay.

But in the world we are in – where anybody might edit a Wikipedia definition, and where plenty of people are learning on the hoof about complex and disputed ideas – we need to try to agree on what words mean rather than define them for ourselves. And then use these definitions as the missiles with which to assail our political opponents.