As Clare Foges notes, in the Times today (£), there was very possibly more going on with the election result than just Brexit and a strong dislike of Corbyn. In a moderate country like the UK, perhaps many voters - especially traditional "red wall" Labour voters - felt that Boris was the only candidate who'd stand up to the increasingly loud and increasingly bizarre "woke" metropolitan culture:
For a long time the “culture wars” seemed nothing but a succession of silly stories: Marks & Spencer withdrawing a sandwich containing Gentleman’s Relish because it was “sexist”, sombreros banned from university campuses on the grounds of “cultural appropriation”, Christmas carols cleansed of the mention of Our Lord, lest he should cause offence to those who don’t believe in him.
In recent years things have taken a more sinister turn. Consider, as 2019 draws to a close, how bizarre it would have seemed at the beginning of this decade to be told that people who are still biologically male would soon be able to enter female hospital wards or prisons. Imagine how our less “enlightened” selves of 2010 would have responded to the recent statement from the University and College Union that a person may self-identify as whatever race they choose.
Again and again, truth and sense and the stating of biological fact are recast as bigotry. Last week we had another giant leap down the road to crazy town with the employment tribunal of Maya Forstater. The tax expert had tweeted that transgender people are not able to change their biological sex, and was fired as a result. She lost her case against her former employers, with the judge giving the breathtaking verdict that stating the facts about XX and XY chromosomes is an “approach not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.
The judge’s words call to mind the prophecies of the author JG Ballard, who declared that “the advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.” Once I would have thought this rather pessimistic. Now I’m not so sure. [...]
So intense has this battle become that at election time we will naturally look for political leaders who are on our side. In the 2017 election the silent majority didn’t have a true champion. Theresa May may have looked like the embodiment of sensible, middle-of-the-road Englishness but she was unwilling to stand up to woke tyranny: attacking stop and search for being racist, introducing the simplistic Race Disparity Audit and passing misconceived laws on gender identity.
It was only at the recent election that the woke warriors and the silent majority had their clear champions — leaders who were cartoonishly exaggerated mascots for each tribe. In the woke corner we had Jeremy Corbyn pledging to allow adults to self-identify their gender, and Jo Swinson, who declared that biological sex was not “as binary as is often presented”. The silent majority had Johnson, whose jokey, merrie England, un-PC persona is antithetical to the po-faced policing of humour that so many now despise. The truth (which many in the woke tribe will find deeply troubling) is that the endless repetition of his old remarks on Muslim women or gay men probably made him go up in the estimation of many voters, who are tired of the offence-taking minority that controls the conversation in our country.
The key word here is “minority”. The split between the woke warriors and the silent majority does not fit neatly over that between Remainers and Leavers. This is not a 50-50 issue. If Labour wants to win again, the new leadership must realise that though the “woke” voices may shout the loudest on social media they are far outnumbered. Tony Blair once said that if a “traditional left-wing party competes with a traditional right-wing party [you get] the traditional result” — a reflection of the innate small “c” conservatism of many in Britain, which endures. The era of the culture wars needs a new rule for Labour to absorb: if a party championing woke concerns competes with a party championing the concerns of the silent majority, the latter will smash it.
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