Colin Brazier: We've seen enough cancel culture in 2021 - we need to predict future threats

Ten years ago if someone had told you that, by 2021, uttering the word woman or mother was rude — and using them might potentially cost you your job — how would you have reacted?

If you’d been told then, that statues of Churchill or Nelson had to be toppled, or that schools shouldn’t teach Shakespeare or classical music, because they might be offensive, what would you have said? Would your response have been “Oh well, you could see that coming.”

Or would it have been more like mine, total, blind-sided incredulity. Utter disbelief that the foundations of our culture… which seemed inviolable…unshakeable… were actually liquefying beneath our feet. Well, here’s another question.

Why is that the forces of tradition and orthodoxy, of patriotism and sovereignty, of family and faith, of common law and common sense, of freedom of expression, don’t employ that most basic of intelligence techniques. Namely, to predict emerging threats, so that they might be better confronted when they arrive. It’s odd when you think about it. We live in an age of forecasting.

From the weather to economics, from covid to climate change, we’re obsessed with the future. COP26 this week is an event almost entirely built on modelling how the world is about to get worse. But when it comes to what we’ve grown to call the Culture Wars, we don’t bother.

That’s not because we can’t guess what will happen, it’s because we don’t want to. We spend tens of millions of pounds every year on guestimates. You’re even paying for them. Most of the crystal ball gazing is taxpayer-funded. The Treasury produces detailed forecasts about inflation and growth and exports.

The Ministry of Defence wargames Chinese aggression in the Pacific. Of course, they don’t know definitively what’s around the corner. There are always what Nassem Nicholas Taleb called Black Swans, events so left-field that they catch everyone off guard. But even covid, though a brutal shock, wasn’t a total surprise. Dominic Cummings was one of those who said a pandemic was a question of when, not if.

So, I say we don’t predict where our culture’s going, not because we can’t, but because we don’t want to. We’re nervous about what we’ll find, where our imagination will take us. We won’t get any help from those who want this stuff to happen. Those people who’ve turned schools and universities and police forces and, increasingly, workplaces, into instruments of indoctrination; they have no interest in sharing their plans for the medium and long-term with you.

They know that knowledge is power, and they have no intention of sharing either. You think I exaggerate? Look at the way organisations like Black Lives Matter or Stonewall have set themselves up as the new arbiters of moral purity, handing down commandments to the unwashed.

And sometimes charging us for the privilege. Ten years ago this was unthinkable. Almost. You could see it starting in America, on campuses. But the speed with which it’s spread across the Atlantic is breath-taking. So let’s try it then. You try it. If ten years ago we couldn’t imagine a time when British police would be investigating non-crime hate incidents – every day – where might we be in 2031?

If we couldn’t conceive in 2011 that by 2021 we’d be barring students from university unless they passed a test on white fragility, where on earth will we be a decade from now? Woke-casting simply requires that you take existing cancel culture trends and see where the curve takes you.

So, for instance, Veganism might mean school canteens phasing out meat, or laws to limit horse-riding, which vegans see as cruel. No institution will be off-limits. Sadly, the Queen is unlikely to be with us in 2031, but BLM will be and, I predict, the hashtag royalstoowhite will be a call to arms for republicans.

Radical environmentalists will renounce procreation in ever greater numbers and urban values will increasingly trump rural values. Game shooting, for example, is probably on borrowed time. Your passport and driving license will no longer offer a choice to be either male or female.

Companies will increasingly make it very difficult for people who don’t agree with a set of corporate values to be employed.

I have no idea whether any or all of these things will come to pass. I certainly hope they don’t, but if you’re one of those people who sees Britain as an increasingly bizarre laboratory of social science, a country you struggle to recognise in the mirror, then taking the time to consider the future might be worth your while.

Don’t be that person, in 2031, yelling ‘the world’s gone mad’. We’ve seen enough of cancel culture by 2021 to have had fair warning of what’s in store. That’s the Brazier Angle.