Nigel Biggar is Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford and the author of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023, 2024).
The “era of the culture wars is over”, declared Lisa Nandy in her inaugural speech as the Labour government’s Culture Secretary shortly after the general election. Those who reckon that recent rows over gender, race, and colonial history have all been confected by Conservative governments for grubby political advantage, will nod their heads in vigorous agreement. It’s hardly surprising that left-wing supporters of dominant progressive orthodoxies like to dismiss dissent as a Tory artifice.
But the culture wars are not an artificial political distraction. What’s at stake in them is very important. So, it’s also important that they be fought and won by those who uphold evidence and reason against ideological bigotry.
On the gender front, there’s plenty of reason to doubt the intellectual coherence of transgender-self-identification. When a biological male believes his inner, authentic self is female, what exactly does he think being ‘female’ is? I’m still waiting for someone to explain why this doesn’t trade on gender stereotypes that feminists rightly taught us to abandon decades ago.
As Hilary Cass’s recent report argues, there’s even more reason to doubt that the well-being of young people is well served by uncritically allowing them to align their bodies with their imagined genders by making irrevocable physical changes. Or—as J. K. Rowling has long been contending—that the safety of women in changing-rooms and toilets should be jeopardised by obliging them to suffer the presence of men who happen to identify themselves as female.
On the race front, ‘progressive’ anti-racism threatens to deepen racial alienation and conflict in Britain by importing radically pessimistic American ideas that espouse a sharp, divisive opposition between ‘white’ and ‘black’, seeing ‘white’ society as essentially, structurally, and irredeemably racist.
As the report of Tony Sewell’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities argued in March 2021, this dismal theory does not map onto the complex realities of race in contemporary Britain, which include considerable elements of progress and signs of hope. Last year Sewell’s conclusions were confirmed in effect by two books written by non-white Britons: Tomiwa Owolade’s This is Not America: why black lives in Britain matter and Rakib Ehsan’s Beyond Grievance: what the left gets wrong about ethnic minorities.
On the colonial front, the politically driven, unhistorical, wholesale denigration of the British Empire not only trashes the record of the West but corrodes faith in it. It also puts wind in the sails of Scottish separatists who justify the disintegration of the United Kingdom in terms of Scotland’s repentance from an evil, British, imperial past. What’s more, it exposes the UK Government—and British taxpayers—to opportunistic Caribbean claims of reparations for slavery two centuries ago. According to June 2023’s Brattle report, Britain’s debt amounts to 108 trillion American dollars.
Outlandish though it seems, this could gain political traction. In May 2018, David Lammy, now Labour’s foreign secretary, tweeted, “In 1833 Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act. £17 billion of compensation to slave owners for the loss of their property—my ancestors. The slaves received no reparations”. In March 2023, Clive Lewis, a Shadow Defence Secretary, under Jeremy Corbyn, called for the UK Government to enter into “meaningful negotiations” over reparations with Caribbean countries—supported by Labour MPs, Nadia Whittome and Dawn Butler. And since the autumn of last year, Lewis’s parliamentary office has been running a parliamentary campaign in support of reparations.
The present culture wars over transgender identity, race, and colonial history are not a frivolous distraction. What’s at stake in them is the political triumph of truths important for the physical and mental well-being of children, the building of a harmonious multi-racial society, the effective remedy of unfair disadvantages between ethnic groups, the survival of the United Kingdom, the self-confidence of an important part of the liberal West, and justified resistance to exorbitant claims of slavery reparations.
Yet, of all the contenders for the leadership of the Conservative Party, only one has a consistent record of grasping the importance of what’s at stake: Kemi Badenoch. As women and equalities secretary, Badenoch championed legal reform to allow the exclusion of biologically male ‘transgender’ persons from spaces reserved for biological females. As minister for equalities, she backed the Sewell commission and launched its report. As International Trade Secretary, she rejected claims that Britain owes its economic prosperity to colonial exploitation, especially slavery.
For sure, if they are ever to govern again, the voters whom the Tories will need to win back care more about the cost of living, ready access to the NHS, and the high rate of net immigration. But they care about other things, too. In Scotland, droves of nationalist supporters were so angered by Nicola Sturgeon’s determination to relax the conditions for legal transgender transitioning that they abandoned their hitherto unshakeable faith in her.
And that straw in the wind commands broader social scientific backing. Eric Kaufmann’s 2022 Policy Exchange report, The Politics of the Culture Wars in Contemporary Britain, found that “the British public leans approximately two-to-one against the cultural leftist position across twenty culture wars issues”. Therefore, says Kaufmann, these form the ideal ground “on which conservative parties can unite both the right and the centre”.
And that is the ground on which only Kemi Badenoch stands.
