So obviously this story is part of a much broader trend. And one of the strange aspects of the so-called

culture wars is that the Conservatives have been in power for a decade. They have an ETC majority.

The Labour Left has been defeated and lost its pretty precarious control of the Labour Party. Brexit is

assured. Right-wing media seems to be thriving. And the BBC never a particularly convincing counterweight to the right-wing press is increasingly cowed.

And yet we see this determination on the right to depict the left as culturally dominant and on the offensive.

Why do you think the right so persistently portrays its project as always embattled and under threat?

Well, because it works. It's incredibly effective and because they really have nothing else to offer,

to offer their voters on an economic level. When you compare previous Tory electoral messages

and the sort of short history of the party to where we are today, there has been a shift from

making promises, making electoral promises, painting a vision

of a country, giving people a sense of social mobility, prospects, or hope, etc., to a very

defensive position that's happened in the US as well, which is that if you vote the other lot

in, what we guarantee you now, which is whatever nominal security order, stability,

closed borders, et cetera, is under threat. And so when you have nothing to offer people,

when you have no economic salvation to offer them, when you have no welfare expansion to offer

them, when you've hacked back the state so drastically, then the only thing you have to offer your voters is a sense of

cultural siege, basically, a sense that they are under attack from other forces. And those forces,

for them to be threatening enough to cast or to spawn a defensive conservative vote,

they have to be framed as incredibly powerful and coordinated

and sinister.

One thing we hear a lot more of recently is this idea of an agenda.

Everybody has an agenda.

...