Culture wars risk blinding us to just how liberal we've become in the past decades Kenan Malik
almost 4 years in The guardian
Britain appears to be fractious, divided. And yet the nation has never been more united in its social attitudes. What’s really going on?
“Prime minister Boris Johnson stirs culture war over Churchill statue.” So ran a recent New York Times headline. The Washington Post agreed. As “counter protesters” took to the streets to “protect” statues and as controversy erupted over foreign secretary Dominic Raab’s comments on “taking the knee”, many British commentators, too, saw a nation divided and a prime minister stoking the flames of a culture war.
Yet an Ipsos Mori poll, published last week, paints a different picture. Nine out of 10 Britons, it showed, would be happy for their child to marry someone of another ethnic group. Just 3% thought someone had to be white to be “truly British”. “The British public,” the pollsters observed, “have become avowedly more open minded in their attitudes towards race.” Continue reading...
Who is popular today?
