The Tories see culture as something that needs to be protected, but it’s a shifting landscape transformed by each generation
The culture war, much like the war on drugs or the war on terror, is a metaphorical state that seems fated to go on for ever. The left blames the right for instigating a cynical distraction from its economic and public health failures; the right insists it is merely acting in self-defence after years of clandestine advances by the left. The indefinite nature of this battle stems from a general failure to define what is being fought over, or to determine what is meant by culture, where it comes from or why it matters.
One of the people who thought hardest about the idea of “culture” that so preoccupies today’s culture warriors was Stuart Hall, the sociologist and founding figure of British cultural studies. Hall arrived in Britain from Jamaica in 1951 to find a rigidly hierarchical society that was undergoing profound social changes in the aftermath of the second world war. The “Windrush generation” had been recruited from the far corners of a fragmenting empire to help rebuild a devastated mother country, bringing with them new music, food and language that would reshape Britain’s atmosphere. At the same time, television, cinema and radio were spreading a new, irreverent image of British culture around the world, while the rise of the welfare state and increasing disposable income among working people meant the audiences for art and sport were growing just as their barriers of entry began to lower.
