Labour is the culture war’s greatest victim

How damaging is the ‘culture war’ to the Labour party’s hopes of one day regaining power? On the left there is a fragile consensus in place that it doesn’t matter very much. The Times columnist David Aaronovitch set this out recently, using some opinion research from King’s College, London.

According to the study most voters don’t fully understand terms such as ‘cancel culture’ or ‘identity politics’. For many younger people, the term ‘woke’ denotes something positive about appreciating the hurdles others may have to overcome. Only among the over-55s is ‘woke’ seen overwhelmingly as a negative thing, with just 13 per cent of people thinking it a compliment to be so described.

Recent rows such as the one about the National Trust ‘decolonising’ its collection pass most normal people by and are an obsession of elites of both right and left, Aaronovitch argues.

This take is in sympathy with the view of another leftish commentator, Rafael Behr, who argued that Sir Keir Starmer had developed a deft strategy for dealing with the culture war — just avoid it.