Despite Conservative attempts to fuel culture wars, there is no such thing as ‘woke’

I have had to rewrite the introduction to this column several times because it keeps turning into a eulogy of the England football team. It is hard to avoid; they are wonderful men who have done their country proud. In normal times, I probably wouldn’t have cared – French people rarely tend to want what’s best for England.

Still, their pull was irresistible; they were players who cared about each other and about those less fortunate than them. They wanted to win but they also wanted things to be right; who could resist that?

A fair few Conservative MPs, it turns out. Lee Anderson boycotted the matches because of the team’s decision to take the knee before kick-off. Brendan Clarke-Smith compared the knee-taking to the Nazi salute. Priti Patel refused to condemn the supporters booing the gesture. After the final, Natalie Elphicke told a WhatsApp group that Marcus Rashford should have spent “less time playing politics”.

It has been unedifying to watch but only the tip of the iceberg. The comment that felt the most telling did not come from a named MP but from a piece published by the Financial Times last week.

Gideon Rachman wrote: “Some [Conservatives and Johnson supporters] seem to believe that Southgate is becoming a tool of deep woke, with one Tory strategist telling me that the England manager’s patriotism essay was ‘suspiciously well-written’.”

The quote was roundly criticised online but the anonymous adviser is not alone in their thinking. I remember speaking to a Conservative MP last year, at the height of the school meals row. Though not a hardline Tory by any means, he was convinced that Rashford had been working with the Labour party from the start and was effectively a front for the Opposition. As such, the spat was simply business as usual.

These points of view are interesting because they are so obviously wrong; there is no “deep woke”, just like there are no Labour party cells giving secret instructions to football players. Someone caring about feeding children does not have to be a Marxist in disguise; white men standing by their black teammates are not plotting a revolution.

In fact, there is no such thing as “woke”, not really. Cleavages on social issues aren’t new at all; there is nothing unique about our generation, or the times we live in.

Instead, some Conservatives seem to have forgotten that social issues evolve in a way economic ones do not. Being economically conservative 30 years ago meant, broadly speaking, to be fighting for a smaller state and lower taxes. It means the same today. On the other hand, being socially conservative 30 years ago meant approving of Section 28 and a higher age of consent for same-sex relationships.

Some fringes may still argue for those today but even self-professed social conservatives have seemingly accepted that gay and bisexual people exist and should be free to be with one another. Even if they do not like it privately, they no longer campaign on those issues; they know the battle has been lost, and the country has changed.

It is striking, then, that they cannot accept that a similar thing is happening with other issues. Fighting against racism by taking the knee can be edgy and radical to them and utterly natural to the players and younger supporters. They do not get to decide what becomes normalised and accepted by the mainstream.

In a way, their paranoia ends up coming off as slightly desperate. The idea of an all-powerful woke cabal working from the shadows will always be more reassuring than the possibility that maybe – just maybe – times have changed and they have been left behind. By waging endless culture wars, they can keep convincing themselves that it is all still in play, and that they can win.

Perhaps the solution, then, is not to take them entirely seriously. If they want to fight, let them fight the strawmen they keep building to reassure themselves. Forcefully pushing back can be tempting but ridicule can work just as well. Labour launching a petition for Lee Anderson to keep boycotting the team for the final in order not to jinx it was funny and astute, and the right thing to do.

Sadly it didn’t work but maybe that doesn’t matter; in many ways, this lovely and well-meaning England team did everything it set out to do. I should know; on Sunday night, for the first time in my life, I had three lions on my shirt.