Lisa Nandy's First Rule of Culture War
Nandy claims the Culture War is over while simultaneously doing all she can to advance the capture of our institutions by the likes of the LGBTQ+ mafia. It's the oldest trick in the Culture War book.
The First Rule of Fight Club, you may remember, was “You do not talk about Fight Club”. Lisa Nandy, Britain’s new Minister for Culture, Media and Sport has a new version of this for today’s cultural equivalent of Fight Club….. the Culture War. Her newly-minted instruction reads, “You can talk about Fight Club, as long as you say it’s over”.
In the movie the Second Rule was “You DO NOT talk about Fight Club”. Nandy’s is “When you talk about Culture War, deny you were ever involved.” Not quite so catchy. Or funny.
The truth is the Minister’s argument has all the fake innocence of a teenager protesting to her parents she’d nothing to do with that nasty scuffle outside school where Betty Boring was set upon; despite the fact she’d been dragged from the scuffle by her own mum.
Like this bemused mother you begin to wonder if you’d imagined young Lisa screaming blue murder and encouraging her friends to make Betty Boring’s life hell.
Here’s Lisa speaking for herself at her first press briefing as the new panjandrum of a Ministry the Soviets liked to call the State Committee on the Arts.
“In recent years we’ve found multiple ways to divide ourselves from one another. And lost that sense of a self-confident, outward-looking country which values its own people in every part of the UK.”
Translated: Betty Boring has been causing trouble and riling up a lot of the other girls.
She went on
“Changing that is the mission of this department. The era of culture wars is over.”
Translated: I have been trying to calm things down and now that Betty has a had a good slap….I think we can all agree we’ll be hearing less from her from now on.
Her officials expanded on her message, briefing the press that whereas Conservative Ministers had picked fights with institutions like the National Trust or the BBC, Nandy’s plan
“was to prioritise celebrating British culture and stories rather than battling with institutions.”
In other words Labour’s strategy will be studiously to ignore the fact wild-eyed activists are trying to normalise increasingly bizarre notions in cultural institutions, just as they are in our universities, schools and political parties, not least Nandy’s own.
There is, of course, another way to sum up this strategy. It’s called surrender.
That would be worrying from any senior politician. It’s an extraordinary one given how immersed Lisa Nandy has herself been in the Culture War before now. Indeed, she has been such a resolute crusader for all types of cultural wokery we are surely justified in assuming surrender is the last thing on her mind.
Just four years ago, during the Labour leadership campaign Nandy argued that child rapists should be housed in women’s prisons.
Asked whether men who identify as women should be able to stand in all-women shortlists, Nandy responded,
“Yeah, I think that you have to walk the walk in the Labour party and that means that we have to do two things – one is that we have to accept that people are who they say they are.”
Perhaps the next time Joe Biden claims to be the first black woman President, Nandy will post some celebratory tweets, and get her officials to try and wangle an invite to the White House.
Nandy also signed a “trans rights charter” cobbled together by LGBTQ+ activists within Labour. Point 9 demanded the party, “organise and fight against transphobic organisations such as Woman’s Place UK and other trans exclusionist hate groups.”
I’ve a special affection for Woman’s Place. All the women’s rights and gender critical organisations that emerged in the last five years have their own flavour and there’s a very likeable seriousness about Woman’s Place that reflects its origins in left wing trade unionism.
I saw a tiny glimpse of that at an informal meeting of representatives of many of the different groups held at a flat in Central London.