Keir Starmer’s Labour is complicit in the woke takeover of Britain’s institutions
I can’t recall a Leader of the Opposition who makes such vacuous speeches, devoid of policy or a plan, as Sir Keir Starmer. He was at it again this week when he took to the stage to give us his views on the culture wars. “All in life is art and politics”, Ai Weiwei once remarked, but those hoping for an incisive account of their intersection were disappointed. With so many words, he managed to say so little.
The one soundbite that awoke those present was a flippant defence of wokery. Starmer described a Tory party, in his words, pursuing “McCarthyism, trying to find woke agendas in the very civic institutions they once regarded with respect”.
But for a supposedly forensic barrister, Starmer had no evidence to back up his charge. He simply asserted that the National Trust had been “demean[ed] ”. The imposition of rainbow badges on public-facing volunteers or the sloppy and error-strewn report linking historic houses with slavery, including Winston Churchill’s Chartwell, were conveniently ignored.
Unwittingly, Starmer’s analogy conceded the arguments conservatives have been advancing. For McCarthy was correct to say that there had been an infiltration of America’s institutions. In fact, he underestimated the degree to which America’s civic bodies and government departments had been compromised by Leftist intelligentsia. And contrary to Starmer’s reading of history, McCarthy himself was not the protagonist – communist subversives were.
Fast forward to today and the parallels are clear. The national security threat is less pronounced, but the grip of anti-Western woke ideology on our institutions is clear to see. From businesses and universities to museums and charities, Left-wing groupthink has a powerful hold. Wrapped in the garb of promoting “fairness”, something we can all support, elites then push intensely political and identity-led policies, from critical race theory to extreme climate politics. The difference now is that the power balance has reversed. In today’s world it is not the “Right” that cancels those they vehemently disagree with.
That Starmer felt the need to make such an intervention is itself revealing. Voters have little appetite for politicians siding with cultural crusaders intent on besmirching our history and weakening our traditions. But Starmer had no choice but to pander to a Labour Party still riddled with activists wedded to woke doctrines. The same day Starmer’s speech attempted to gaslight the country that the culture wars were “of [the Tory party’s] making”, his own shadow secretary of state for culture said the concept of white privilege should be taught in schools.
It is, of course, Labour and the extreme Left who are driving the culture wars. And wherever Labour is in power, the party is at the forefront of these battles. Most recently, for instance, Sadiq Khan has used the pulpit of City Hall to erase the contributions of the white working class and push the wildly inaccurate narrative that “migrants and refugees” built London.
If they aren’t peddling woke agendas, Labour politicians stand meekly by as hostile takeovers take place. When a primary school teacher in Batley faced harassment and intimidation from Islamists after showing a cartoon during a religious studies lesson, Tracy Brabin, the then Labour MP for the area, described the “upset and offence” caused by showing that cartoon “understandable but also predictable”.
After 14 years in office, there’s disappointment that our cultural life is so dominated by those pushing fringe theories. But the problem is structural. The writer John O’Sullivan observed that “all organisations that are not actually Right-wing will over time become Left-wing”. Why? Because they tend to be run by those who don’t like business, making money, the current organisation of society and, by extension, the Western world. Too many are weathervanes, rather than anchors.
That’s why, when the British Museum was founded in 1753, the government of the day gave it the legal architecture of a family trust, because the goal was to treat its collection like an ancestral estate: to maintain, enhance and pass on to future generations, not to constantly and abruptly rearrange or dispose. Is it stoking a culture war to remind today’s curators of this sentiment as Sir Keir implies? Of course not.
Conservatives don’t seek to politicise the public realm. All we seek is neutrality.
We want to give the public the space to breathe – for politics not to intrude on people’s lives at every moment.
And as long as we are privileged enough to be in government, we have power we must wield. When I changed planning laws as communities secretary to stop statues being torn down by Leftist mobs, there were howls of outrage. But it worked. Since then, few if any statues have been removed. Rhodes did not fall.
If we don’t want conservatives being cancelled, we must stand firm against the frenzied mob. As housing secretary, I welcomed back the late Sir Roger Scruton to my Building Better Building Beautiful Commission after his name was wrongfully dragged through the mud. And if we don’t want precious artefacts like the Elgin Marbles being lost, use those same powers of appointment to install trustees to institutions like the British Museum who share the instinct to preserve more than the present incumbents appear to.
Time and again, resistance to wokery has been rewarded, from Rishi Sunak’s opposition to Sturgeon’s self-aggrandising self-ID laws to the backlash against Coutt’s politicised banking.
As Sir Roger Scruton once said, “conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created”. Now more than ever, the common-sense majority will stand by attempts to preserve what is precious and restore our institutions to their original purposes.