Patrick West

Are the culture wars real? Some assume that they're an imaginary affair, or, at best, a distraction from the real, pressing bread-and-butter concerns of today. As Matthew Syed put it in the Sunday Times yesterday: ‘The culture wars...may be seen not as genuine debates but as a form of Freudian displacement. The woke and anti-woke need each other to engage in piffling spats as a diversion from realities they both find too psychologically threatening to confront.’ We are familiar with this line of thinking, both from left and right. The culture wars about race and gender are irrelevant and ‘piffling’, so some say. It’s all fuss and nonsense.

The government’s proposal to overhaul and tighten betting laws, ostensibly to target problem gamblers, has understandably raised concerns about government interference and nanny-state overreach. Yet viewed from a wider perspective, we should welcome these initiatives and for the precedent they could set: they could be the final recognition that young adults do not reach maturity until the age of 25.  As part of its gambling curbs the government will place ‘enhanced’ checks on the finances of under-25s, amid concerns that they’re less able to ‘regulate’ their impulses and make rational decisions. For example, the under-25s will have stakes limited to a maximum of between £2 and £4 for online slot machines.

Ever since Monty Python created their internecine, bickering and ridiculous groups of freedom fighters – the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front – for their 1979 film The Life of Brian, it’s always been easy and tempting to mock and deride the fissiparous nature of ideologues and tin-pot revolutionaries. Those who believe in the purity of a cause tend to have a semi-religious mindset – and consequently one semi-divorced from reality – which brooks no heresy from orthodoxy. Thus extreme, quasi-cult movements are always prone to split into factions.

The veteran BBC show Have I Got News for You is ‘due to become BBC television’s only satirical comedy show’. This is the likely result of The Ranganation – also a panel show which dissects the week’s news – reportedly being cancelled. Satire at the BBC has been vanishing alarmingly quickly. Only last week the corporation announced the end of Frankie Boyle’s New World Order, amid dwindling viewership. Mock the Week was cancelled last year, while The Mash Report was put to bed in 2021 (to be revived as Late Night Mash on Dave, only to suffer the double indignity of being cancelled again earlier this month).

There's nothing worse than a grass. Or so goes the wisdom expressed in soap operas like EastEnders. Of course, there are worse things than being a grass, but such an overstatement does reflect a common taboo found in many cultures: no one likes a snitch, telltale, narc, informer or sneak. Which is why the news that South East Water is asking its customers in Kent and Sussex to get in touch if they notice a neighbour ignoring a forthcoming hosepipe ban is unlikely to win it many plaudits. The supplier has placed a contact link on its website for people to report on miscreants they see flouting the instructions, inviting people to grass up neighbours they see watering the grass. What a charmless, alienating idea.

The BBC's 50:50 project is designed to empower women. One of its targets is to ensure that half of the contributors are female. But while this aim might have been questionable from the outset – is this really something the BBC should be focusing on? – its mission has been undermined: the BBC has admitted it does 'not monitor whether a contributor's gender differs from their sex registers at birth'.  In effect, trans women, who were born as male, will be counted as women. 'The BBC has now 'disappeared' women as a sex class and instead monitors 'gender identity',' fumed one senior BBC insider, one of many Corporation staff who have protested about the change.

There's an inherent contradiction at the heart of liberal thinking that perpetually raises its head. It's one which has become ever-more pronounced in our age of ultra-progressive politics: the tension between equality and liberty. Many progressives think you can have both. Alas not. You can only have either, or a greater emphasis upon one at the expense of the other. This contradiction has once more been made evident today amidst reports of a lecturer who says he is the latest victim of 'cancel culture'. James Treadwell, a professor of criminology at Staffordshire University, says that he is 'being investigated for transphobia' after his employer received 'formal and official' complaints about his gender-critical views on Twitter.

Is anyone else fed up of corporate virtue-signalling? From banks boasting of their commitment to diversity and equality, to train companies changing their liveries to the rainbow flag, or supermarket chains proclaiming they are fighting racism, enough is enough. Thankfully, the moneymen who matter to big businesses – and whom they might actually listen to – are now finally speaking out. Fund manager Terry Smith and leading shareholder in Unilever – owner of the notoriously woke ice cream firm Ben & Jerry's – has attacked the company for its underperformance, pointing a finger at its obsession with political posturing.

Will comedy become the latest victim of 'cancel culture'? Dame Maureen Lipman fears as much.  'Cancel culture, this cancelling, this punishment, it's everywhere,' she told the BBC yesterday. She says that the world of comedy is in danger of being 'wiped out' because comedians are scared that audiences will take offence, and that they self-censor their material as a precaution. 'It’s in the balance, whether we’re ever going to be funny again,' she said. It would be an ironic tragedy if this were true, because in no other field of entertainment as comedy has 'cancel culture' been at its most insidious, relentless and blatant. Lipman's warning is therefore unfounded, superficially at least.

Broadcasters in the UK have declared they will no longer use the acronym BAME to refer to black, Asian and minority ethnic people. Following a report by the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity, the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 have committed themselves to avoiding this catch-all term 'wherever possible', in favour of more specific terms to describe ethnicity. This is good news.  Last year a task force set up by UK Music, which represents the commercial interests of the sector, called the term 'outdated and offensive'; this latest report concluded that it could cause 'serious insult'. Quite so. The categorical term 'BAME' might as well have been called 'Miscellaneous', in crudely lumping together all non-white people.