Lisa Nandy, Labour’s new Culture Secretary, has said she wants to end the “culture wars” that cause “division”. This from a woman who said male rapists should be sent to women’s prisons and who belongs to a party whose leaders wasted no time in taking the knee for race rioters. The Telegraph‘s Michael Deacon has more.
In her first speech in the role, [Nandy] said our society suffers from too much “division” – so she’s made it her “mission” to end it. “The era of culture wars,” she promised, “is over.”
A noble aim. There is, however, one small problem. Which is that she’s absolutely guaranteed to fail. Because, in reality, the culture wars are only just beginning. And it’s all the Left’s fault.
Left-wingers like Ms. Nandy love to blame the Tories for “stoking culture wars”. But this is the most brazen distortion of the truth. Think of all the culture wars that have been inflicted upon us in recent years. The rows over gender identity, Black Lives Matter, boycotting Israel, “decolonising” universities… Every single one of those conflicts was started by Left-wingers seeking to impose their radical beliefs on the rest of us. So the Left accusing the Right of stoking culture wars is like Putin blaming NATO for his invasion of Ukraine.
And it’s not as if Labour politicians have tried to rise above these conflicts. Time and again, they’ve eagerly embraced them. Take, for example, our new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer – who, at the height of the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, proudly released a photo of himself and Angela Rayner, his deputy, taking the knee.
For another example: take Ms. Nandy herself. When campaigning to be Labour leader in 2020, she was asked whether male criminals who identify as women should be placed in female prisons. She replied: “I think trans women are women and trans men are men. So I think they should be accommodated in the prison of their choosing.”
Three years after Ms. Nandy made these delightfully compassionate remarks, Isla Bryson, who was a man when found guilty of raping two women, was sent to a Scottish female prison. The resulting uproar – which helped bring down Nicola Sturgeon as Scotland’s First Minister – suggested that, funnily enough, locking rapists in a building full of women can actually be quite “divisive”. Yet it was Left-wingers who’d argued for it.
Worth reading in full.
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