We should take the idea of Britain’s ‘culture wars’ seriously – understanding division is important

Is this all simply about manufactured controversies that distract us from real issues, asks Bobby Duffy, or are they an authentic expression of genuine concern? Whichever way you feel, we shouldn’t dismiss them

Three-quarters of the public think that the media makes the country feel more divided than it really is (Getty/iStock)

Are the UK’s “culture wars” real, imagined, exaggerated or manufactured? This is becoming one of the key questions of our times, but, as with so much else in culture war debates, you can always find evidence to support your preferred interpretation.

For example, our new study shows that three-quarters of the public think that the media often makes the country feel more divided than it really is. Nearly half agree that politicians invent or exaggerate culture wars as a political tactic, and only one in ten actively disagree with this.

More generally, few people have very strong feelings on many of the cultural issues at the heart of prominent debates. For example, only one in ten or fewer strongly agree or strongly disagree that UK culture is changing too fast, or that they’d like the UK to be the way it used to be.

But it would be wrong to conclude from this that we have no issue with fundamentally different perspectives on culture change in the UK. Just one in eight people believe that culture wars exist only in the media and on social media, not in real life.

This is mirrored in our sense of division. Three-quarters of people say the country is very or somewhat divided, and half of people say this is the most divided the country has been in their lifetime, compared with only 14 per cent who say we’ve been through more divided times before.

But we need to be careful how we interpret these questions on division: we always have a tendency to think today is the most fractious of times. Survey questions, some going back to the 1980s and 1990s, show similar proportions agreeing that we were the most divided ever back then.

The fact that it feels different now will no doubt be partly due to our faulty memory, although, as our research released this week shows, increased media focus on cultural division has certainly played a role: in 2015 only 21 newspaper articles used the term culture wars, but by 2020 there were 534 articles.

Our detailed analysis of these articles shows just how central a sense of conflict is to this media discussion. A quarter of all the articles we looked at included battle metaphors (front lines, trenches, ammunition, casualties) and a further 15 per cent used words related to division (tribes, splits, rivals).

It’s true, there are an increasing number of articles that are downplaying the culture wars: hardly any pieces suggested the culture wars were manufactured even in 2019, but these now make up a quarter of all articles.

Of course, what the media says and overall public opinion are only very partial measures of division. In particular, these averages in attitudes hide how varied the public’s perspectives are. For example, eight in ten Conservatives say too many people are “running our country down”, compared with just 35 per cent of Labour supporters. Nearly half of Brexit supporters think equal rights between ethnic minorities and white people have gone far enough, compared with just 12 per cent among supporters of staying in the EU.

These utterly distinctive perspectives are at the core of our political identities and worldview, so it’s no surprise they deeply divide us.

So, are the culture wars simply about manufactured controversies that distract us from the real issues, like inequality – or are they an authentic expression of genuine concern about cultural change among large swathes of the public, that’s expressed through a few emblematic examples?

Your answer will completely depend on where you’re starting from. This is why the culture wars are getting so much attention, and why, even if your own view is that they are more exaggerated than real, you should take them seriously.

Professor Bobby Duffy is director of the Policy Institute at King's College London