Dr Jen Birks
Associate Professor of Media at the University of Nottingham. She is the founder and co-director of the Centre for Media, Politics and Communication Research, and co-convener of the Political Studies Association’s Media and Politics Group. Her latest monograph is Fact-checking Journalism and Political Argumentation (Palgrave Pivot, 2019), and she also co-edited The Routledge Companion to Political Journalism (Routledge, 2021).
Email: jennifer.birks@nottingham.ac.uk
UK Election 2024
Section 1: Democracy and representation
1. Public anxiety and the electoral process (Prof Barry Richards)
2. How Nigel Farage opened the door to No. 10 for Keir Starmer (Prof Pippa Norris)
3. The performance of the electoral system (Prof Alan Renwick)
4. Tory downfall is democracy rectifying its mistakes (Prof Stephen Barber)
5. Votes at 16 and decent citizenship education could create a politically aware generation (Dr Ben Kisby, Dr Lee Jerome)
6. “An election about us but not for us”: the lack of communication for young people during GE2024 (Dr James Dennis)
7. Election timing: masterstroke or risky gamble? (Prof Sarah Birch)
8. The dog that didn’t bark? Electoral integrity and administration from voter ID to postal votes (Prof Alistair Clark)
9. A political gamble? How licit and illicit betting permeated the campaign (Dr Matthew Wall)
10. Ethnic diversity in politics is the new normal in Britain (Prof Maria Sobolewska)
11. Bullshit and Lies on the campaign trail: do party campaigns reflect the post-truth age? (Prof Darren Lilleker)
12. Stoking the culture wars: the risks of a more hostile form of polarised politics (Dr Jen Birks)
An interesting consequence of the increasing electoral volatility of recent years is that parties face the challenge of trying to serve an increasingly diverse set of supporters. Politics has always been about values as well as interests, even on the economic issues that define the traditional left-right divide, but more so the divide between social liberalism and conservativism. The underlying values are illustrated in Figure 1, with the war between culture warriors such as Kemi Badenoch, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman and what the latter has called the “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati” taking place between hierarchist-communitarians and individualist-egalitarians.
The salience of disagreements along these fault lines increased significantly during the fractious Brexit debates. But the reason that this is potentially damaging to British democracy is that it was not an ideological polarisation so much as an affective one. Affective polarisation involves partisans regarding their opponents not just as wrong, but as bad people with malevolent motivations. This kind of hostility is well-established in the US, where it is implicated in democratic dysfunction including conspiracy theory cults such as QAnon and the 2021 insurrection.
In this context, it is not entirely accurate for Labour’s John Healy and the Lib Dems’ Daisy Cooper to dismiss Conservative culture warring as merely a distraction from the issues people care about. Surveys show that while Labour are closer to voters on economic issues, the Conservatives are closer to voters on social values. They’re especially close to voters who switched from Labour to Conservative in 2019, largely in Brexit-voting areas – the so-called ‘red wall’. It is true that, other than immigration, culture wars issues are not especially salient to most voters – polling last year placed identity politics issues and freedom of speech at the bottom of a list of 21 issues in terms of what would determine respondents’ vote. However, research suggests that even those who are not ideologically polarized “may be susceptible to ‘affective polarization’ in aggressive disputes.” The risk is that a woke/anti-woke identity becomes the new Brexiter/Remainer.
With the opportunity to appeal both to red wall voters and many in the southern Tory shires, we might have expected to see culture wars taking a more prominent role in the campaign than they did (see John Steel in this volume) but there were some eye-catching policy announcements in the first week. The proposal that most animated the anti-woke media – GB News, Spiked and Unherd, in particular – was Kemi Badenoch’s policy to amend the Equality Act to clarify that sex, as a protected characteristic, means biological sex. She argued that this was necessary because definitions of sex and gender had shifted over time, so clarification was needed to ensure that organisations such as women’s refuges could refuse trans women entry, although legal guidance already states they can. Challenged on what material difference this would make at the door of a refuge, Badenoch told the BBC it was “not a paperwork issue.” While she appealed to genuine concerns about the balance between women’s and trans women’s rights in some circumstances, the key purpose of this policy announcement was rather an expressive one. It spoke directly to the key definitional nub of the gender-critical position, which is against the notion that ‘trans women are women.’ This entrenched disagreement on how we interpret reality is what makes this debate so toxic.
One aspect of this is refusing to even countenance the other side of the argument or offer counter-arguments. For instance, Joan Smith, writing in Unherd, refused to recognise trans women’s identities, describing them as “men who claim to be women,” and othered them as less important than “actual women.” Similarly, Joanna Williams in Spiked said that gender recognition “would force women to accommodate men in their spaces.” Lauren Smith, also in Spiked, argued against a straw man version of Labour and the Lib Dems’ position by portraying them as dismissing concerns over single sex spaces.
These commentators also questioned the motivation of those who support trans rights, as “posing” and “parading their credentials,” implying a common accusation of ‘virtue signalling’ – in other words, being motivated by a communal sense of moral superiority – or alternatively as being afraid to stand up to a powerful trans rights lobby. They also accuse their opponents of being intransigent ideologues while framing their own position in intransigent terms as unambiguously ‘true.’ For instance, Joan Smith described gender identity claims as “unreasonable and unscientific”, and claimed “rights” for women while attributing only “demands” to trans activists.
It is important to be able to disagree on socio-cultural political issues, but much needs to be done to enable people to disagree well, whilst believing their opponents to be reasonable and well-intentioned. After a shallow win in terms of the share of the vote, Labour needs to win over those who didn’t vote for them. But there is also a threat of disillusionment from those who did vote Labour but feel culturally alienated from them. The magnanimous remarks of both Sunak and Starmer in the handover of power should set the tone for mending our broken approach to political debate.
