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If the culture wars are over, someone had better tell the Daily Telegraph. Ever since the Black Lives Matter protests of June 2020, the paper has waged a culture war on anyone spreading awareness of verifiable truths about the British Empire and its legacies.
The newspaper allied itself immediately with the populist culture warriors who formed the Common Sense group of MPs in the previous government to lead the backlash against the antiracist protests.
Chaired by Sir John Hayes and formed in part of ‘red wall’ MPs, it described Black Lives Matter as “an extreme cultural and political group … fuelled by ignorance and an arrogant determination to erase the past and dictate the future”, with “an intolerant woke dogma”. One of the group’s first targets, though, was an academic.
Professor Corinne Fowler had co-authored a report commissioned before the toppling of Colston’s statue and using peer reviewed research to identify National Trust properties’ connections with colonial activities of various kinds. It was released without much fuss. But in November 2020, Jacob Rees-Mogg condemned it in parliament.
Members of the Common Sense group signed a letter to the Telegraph accusing the National Trust of being “coloured by cultural Marxist dogma, colloquially known as the woke agenda”. The Telegraph urged a referral to the Charity Commission on the grounds that the report was outside the National Trust’s charitable remit, a claim found to be without substance.