This is what “cancel culture” really looks like: businesses, shops and charities, colleges, schools and public servants, any minor figure in the public eye has been rendered petrified, terrified of doing the wrong thing during days of mourning.
Cancel culture has paralysed the country, but the culprits are not the hundreds of thousands quietly queueing good-humouredly for miles to experience a moment in history. Intimidation comes not from the citizens, but as usual from Britain’s self-appointed bullies, often with absurd consequences. The mighty weight of authoritarianism comes not just from the Conservative party that has governed most of my life, but the overwhelmingly rightwing press and its social media, ready to terrorise any hapless victim caught in its sights.
TalkSport’s Trevor Sinclair, a former England footballer, was just one, tweeting: “Racism was outlawed in England in the 60s & it’s been allowed to thrive so why should black & brown mourn!! #queen”, and later deleting it with a grovel.
A period of mourning is for grief or quiet contemplation, but that hasn’t quite been the way of it. Instead, beneath the dignity and pomp, a kind of panic clutches a very large part of society. What’s the right thing to do in these 12 long days? The mourning police are watching you.
I doubt any of this is willed by the royal family, or would have been by the late Queen, who made her own funeral plans. But it exposes the nature of Britain’s bullying culture as its intimidators hunt out any victim they can find. Fear of the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Telegraph, GBNews or TalkTV shockjocks and their social media followers has frightened common sense out of a great swathe of organisations.
Center Parcs decided to evict all its guests on funeral day, until sanity prevailed. The Premier League bent over, but golf and cricket, perhaps more class-confident, carried on. Politicians are the most frightened of uttering a single word out of place, so they fall silent in the depths of a cost of living crisis, despite a chancellor reportedly planning to end the cap on bankers’ bonuses and Liz Truss offering an energy bills support package that will barely touch the sides of many people’s spiral into poverty. Even so, political presenter Adam Boulton tweeted that it was worth asking the question: “Why are MPs and their hangers on boozing away on the terrace as our sovereign lies in Westminster Hall?” One moment of unalloyed joy came from the much-mocked video of GBNews’s Dan Wootton performatively laying flowers at Buckingham Palace.
Strikers and Extinction Rebellion dared not continue their protests. Hospital appointments and funerals were cancelled as a “mark of respect”. I hear of even internal meetings nonsensically stopped across public and private sectors lest some sneak report them to the self-appointed inquisition. Charities have sought panicky advice: any misstep is particularly dangerous to their reputation.
The BBC is most vulnerable, on the front line in all culture wars, the crucible where every word is fought over across our great national divides. Now, it quakes under threat of yet deeper cuts and the abolition of the licence fee. The result is an excruciating volume of vacuous verbiage filling interminable hours, with carefully picked, tearful vox pops misrepresenting a country not so united. It would be invidious to pick on any single sonorously overdone BBC voice, all of them under orders. Even the Daily Mail praised it this time, which is no badge of honour. Mindful of attacks on BBC presenter Peter Sissons for wearing a burgundy tie – burgundy! – to announce the Queen Mother’s death, this time it was lambasted for wearing black ties too soon: TV presenter Alastair Stewart tweeted it was “pre-emptive and misjudged”.
Piers Morgan fumed on Twitter when the BBC called off the Last Night of the Proms, but presumably the BBC did that out of fear of the likes of him. What will they say about Mark De-Lisser, Songs of Praise presenter and conductor of the Children in Need children’s choir, who yesterday called on King Charles to prevent the singing ever again of Rule Britannia? Have it “confined to the history song books for ever,” he says. “It was written in a time when colonialism was the name of the game and this is the bleak history of the UK, which we should never forget.” He is right.
However, search as hard as they might, the heresy hunters have unearthed disappointingly little lese-majesty. The Sun blasted the lone protester arrested for heckling Prince Andrew as a “sick old man”, but for lack of local prey, they hunt abroad. The New York Times gets a blasting from many for an article by a Harvard historian, under the polite headline “Mourn the Queen, not her empire”, for suggesting the Queen helped “obscure a bloody history of decolonisation”, highlighting repression in Malaya, Kenya, Yemen and Ireland. “The New York Times’ hatred of Britain has gone too far,” writes Douglas Murray in the Telegraph. Cue financier Ben Goldsmith: “appalling,” he says, adding: “so revolted I’m finally cancelling my subscription”. The French, who Liz Truss refuses to call friends, get a blast for flags on some lefty town halls not being at half-mast.
But it’s been slim pickings. Why? Because the bullying by this section of the media has been so thorough over so many years that everyone is already intimidated into silence – and into taking some daft decisions, which, of course, the bullies attack them for, too.
When you next hear them trying to stir up bogus “cancel culture” indignation about a few students no-platforming some speaker on a college campus somewhere, remember what real cancelling is, how dangerous, nasty and powerful. It is the megaphones of the right intimidating a whole country by seizing on minor peccadillos, mild anti-royalism or anti-colonial sentiment.
This week, they have been half-starved of enemies to fight, but that’s because they have already succeeded in forcing so much pre-emptive self-censorship. Here’s an irony: the person these guardians of propriety will be watching like vultures for even a twitch of an eyebrow over the climate crisis or conservation will be the King himself. He is in more peril from them than from republicans.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
