Coronavirus won’t kill the culture wars

In early March, more than 300 employees at the Guardian signed an open letter to the editor Katharine Viner to protest against the publication of supposedly ‘anti-trans’ material. The catalyst was Suzanne Moore’s article on the deplatforming of Professor Selina Todd at Oxford University, an action that had been justified by the organisers on the grounds that Todd had previously spoken at a meeting of Woman’s Place UK (a group that campaigns for separate spaces and services for women). The signatories to the open letter argued that by publishing Moore’s views, the Guardian was no longer ‘a safe and welcoming workplace for trans and non-binary people’. To complain to one’s employer about feeling ‘unsafe’ has become a standard manoeuvre among those who have little tolerance for the opinions of others.

Many are now asking whether in the midst of a global pandemic – in which the notion of ‘safety’ has been temporarily restored to its original definition – such tactics can still be effective. The problem has never been with the cry-bullies of the social-justice movement who disingenuously claim that their safety is compromised by alternative viewpoints, but rather with those in authority who capitulate to their demands. When activists called for the removal of the statue of colonialist Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford, part of their strategy was to insist that it was a form of ‘violence’ to expect black students to walk in its vicinity. The statue remains in place because the university authorities had the courage not to defer to this kind of entitlement. The same cannot be said for the plaques commemorating the visit of King Leopold II of Belgium to Queen Mary University in London, which were removed because of his tyrannical reign in the Congo after a student outcry about 130 years too late.

Read here