James Harris writes the weekly Stiff Upper Quip newsletter on Substack.
The left has long made a fundamental error in describing conservatives as evil. It hands the floor to the right. When facing the accusation, the all that conservatives need to do is show up and sound reasonably benign for their opponents to appear untruthful.
I note the error because I see the same mistake being made now on the right – a tendency to focus on the most extreme elements of the left, taking them as representative, while not engaging with the current mainstream. Take the central image of Liz Truss’s New Year’s message: a call to defeat the ‘left’s weak, woke de-growth agenda’.
This isn’t most of the left’s agenda. Indeed, centre-left candidates are often currently attaining success by running precisely against this part of their own side. Liz Truss says the left is anti-growth; Keir Starmer says ‘The first lever we need to pull is the growth lever’. That the attack on him is inaccurate makes him seem reasonable and also makes it easier for him to be a YIMBY. Flattening out left politics like this comes from engaging not with your actual opponents but with your caricature of them – the exact mistake that the left has long made.
There was indeed a period where what is colloquially known as woke – ‘social justice’ politics imported from America – was in the ascendancy. It had a comic overtone when imported into a British context. Claiming ‘the police shouldn’t have guns!’ makes little sense in a British context, and Starmer never looked sillier than when explicitly allying himself with Black Lives Matter, kneeling in his office alongside Angela Rayner.
But it was a pandemic. We were all locked up, and feelings were running high. Even back then Starmer was criticized for allying with ‘the Black Lives matter moment’; the woke activist left labelled him a ‘cop’. They haven’t grown fonder of him since.
Like anything else, political sentiment has its fashions. At the moment being, the passion on the left for ‘constantly interrogating your privilege’ is inevitably giving way to exhaustion. It’s just no way to live. That particular strand of New Left thinking, which involves foregrounding personal identity over economic, will certainly always form part of the left.
But the recent attempt for it to be made into the left’s dominant mode has failed – mainly because as a mode of politics to exist in it is just too exhausting. Issues around free expression and cancellation remain hugely lively for people in the arts and academia, but most people do not work in these sectors. As such, by centering attacks on ‘anti-wokeness’ the Tories are placing their bets on opposing ‘wokeness’ in a way that intrinsically needs wokeness to remain a growing concern.
The same with the ‘left’s degrowth agenda’. It’s certainly true that there are people on the left arguing for degrowth – people like George Monbiot and Caroline Lucas. But the Greens are is currently polling at just 5 per cent. Anyone sympathetic to YIMBYism can agree that it would indeed be awful to oppose building high-speed railways and onshore wind. It just might be somewhat risky for the Tory Party, as when Ben Houchen attacks Sadiq Khan for being anti-growth while the Government halves TFL’s capital budget.
Liz Truss’ own speech against the ‘anti-growth coalition’, while correct in principle, was somewhat undermined by it taking place at the Conservative Party conference, an event which also serves as the anti-growth coalition’s AGM. By contrast, the vibes of the mainstream UK left are at present unmistakeably YIMBY. Keir Starmer has no discernible political personality apart from a commitment to housebuilding which is, in fairness, probably the one you’d choose. Insisting on the salience of culture war issues in this context begins to look like the absence of an economic offer.
Conservatives must realise that there are an awful lot of people who might share their revulsion at the excesses of hyper-liberal politics but are still not going to vote Tory. We’re fed up of our stagnant economy. To be blunt, culture wars are a luxury we can’t afford. And, of course, there’s a wider sense, which surely conservatives can understand, that it’s not the job of the government to regulate culture in the first place. The excesses of wokery and the pushback against them will work themselves out in a free society.
The Conservatives cannot choose its opponents, but it can choose whether or not to understand them. By caricaturing its opponents, the Tories are less successful in finding attack lines against them. And even if this isn’t true, even if the Tories were to find a winning formula where an obsessive focus on culture trumps an conomic offer – would that really be the country we should aim for?
Personally, I do not look at the political culture of the United States with much envy. Far better to make an offer to voters that the culture war will leave them alone while the Government concentrates on making everyone a little richer. That, not degrowth and social justice, is where Labour currently is, with the Tories stuck in a culture war moment already looking dated.
For culture wars simply aren’t won by fighting them; they’re won by one or both sides succumbing to exhaustion and time moving on. Nor do they leave much behind worth conserving.
James Harris writes the weekly Stiff Upper Quip newsletter on Substack.
The left has long made a fundamental error in describing conservatives as evil. It hands the floor to the right. When facing the accusation, the all that conservatives need to do is show up and sound reasonably benign for their opponents to appear untruthful.
I note the error because I see the same mistake being made now on the right – a tendency to focus on the most extreme elements of the left, taking them as representative, while not engaging with the current mainstream. Take the central image of Liz Truss’s New Year’s message: a call to defeat the ‘left’s weak, woke de-growth agenda’.
This isn’t most of the left’s agenda. Indeed, centre-left candidates are often currently attaining success by running precisely against this part of their own side. Liz Truss says the left is anti-growth; Keir Starmer says ‘The first lever we need to pull is the growth lever’. That the attack on him is inaccurate makes him seem reasonable and also makes it easier for him to be a YIMBY. Flattening out left politics like this comes from engaging not with your actual opponents but with your caricature of them – the exact mistake that the left has long made.
There was indeed a period where what is colloquially known as woke – ‘social justice’ politics imported from America – was in the ascendancy. It had a comic overtone when imported into a British context. Claiming ‘the police shouldn’t have guns!’ makes little sense in a British context, and Starmer never looked sillier than when explicitly allying himself with Black Lives Matter, kneeling in his office alongside Angela Rayner.
But it was a pandemic. We were all locked up, and feelings were running high. Even back then Starmer was criticized for allying with ‘the Black Lives matter moment’; the woke activist left labelled him a ‘cop’. They haven’t grown fonder of him since.
Like anything else, political sentiment has its fashions. At the moment being, the passion on the left for ‘constantly interrogating your privilege’ is inevitably giving way to exhaustion. It’s just no way to live. That particular strand of New Left thinking, which involves foregrounding personal identity over economic, will certainly always form part of the left.
But the recent attempt for it to be made into the left’s dominant mode has failed – mainly because as a mode of politics to exist in it is just too exhausting. Issues around free expression and cancellation remain hugely lively for people in the arts and academia, but most people do not work in these sectors. As such, by centering attacks on ‘anti-wokeness’ the Tories are placing their bets on opposing ‘wokeness’ in a way that intrinsically needs wokeness to remain a growing concern.
The same with the ‘left’s degrowth agenda’. It’s certainly true that there are people on the left arguing for degrowth – people like George Monbiot and Caroline Lucas. But the Greens are is currently polling at just 5 per cent. Anyone sympathetic to YIMBYism can agree that it would indeed be awful to oppose building high-speed railways and onshore wind. It just might be somewhat risky for the Tory Party, as when Ben Houchen attacks Sadiq Khan for being anti-growth while the Government halves TFL’s capital budget.
Liz Truss’ own speech against the ‘anti-growth coalition’, while correct in principle, was somewhat undermined by it taking place at the Conservative Party conference, an event which also serves as the anti-growth coalition’s AGM. By contrast, the vibes of the mainstream UK left are at present unmistakeably YIMBY. Keir Starmer has no discernible political personality apart from a commitment to housebuilding which is, in fairness, probably the one you’d choose. Insisting on the salience of culture war issues in this context begins to look like the absence of an economic offer.
Conservatives must realise that there are an awful lot of people who might share their revulsion at the excesses of hyper-liberal politics but are still not going to vote Tory. We’re fed up of our stagnant economy. To be blunt, culture wars are a luxury we can’t afford. And, of course, there’s a wider sense, which surely conservatives can understand, that it’s not the job of the government to regulate culture in the first place. The excesses of wokery and the pushback against them will work themselves out in a free society.
The Conservatives cannot choose its opponents, but it can choose whether or not to understand them. By caricaturing its opponents, the Tories are less successful in finding attack lines against them. And even if this isn’t true, even if the Tories were to find a winning formula where an obsessive focus on culture trumps an conomic offer – would that really be the country we should aim for?
Personally, I do not look at the political culture of the United States with much envy. Far better to make an offer to voters that the culture war will leave them alone while the Government concentrates on making everyone a little richer. That, not degrowth and social justice, is where Labour currently is, with the Tories stuck in a culture war moment already looking dated.
For culture wars simply aren’t won by fighting them; they’re won by one or both sides succumbing to exhaustion and time moving on. Nor do they leave much behind worth conserving.