Is oat milk really ‘divisive’?

The Cenotaph was called contentious in a secret Metropolitan Police report, exposed by Policy Exchange, on memorials that were open to attack for their links to war, imperialism or slavery. In reality, of course, the Cenotaph brings the nation together each Remembrance Sunday to honour our dead.

In the same way, people are called divisive when others loudly take issue with something they say. J.K. Rowling’s ‘views on gender have proved divisive’, said someone in the Daily Mail, as though the plain truth that there are such things as women were controversial, rather than her opponents’ dogma that one may change gender by declaration.

The trouble at the moment is that divisive has a pejorative flavour but can be slapped on to people or opinions perfectly innocent in themselves. Iago was divisive by intent; Churchill united. Yet Churchill’s statue is among those listed by the police as contentious on the grounds that he ‘referred to Indians as “a beastly people with a beastly religion”’.