Are we... the baddies?

Culture wars, racism, and single sex changing rooms

I used to find the term ‘culture war’ very irritating. It seemed to be applied only to some issues: issues that the speaker regarded as unimportant/irrelevant/inconvenient/dumb, but that sometimes felt pretty important to me. Immigration, for instance, was deemed a ‘culture war’ issue; taxation was not. Whatever your views on immigration (I’m pro-), I couldn’t see any substantive difference between these two things qua politico-economic-fairness puzzles. Rather like ‘moral panic’, ‘culture war’ seemed to be used as a way to embarrass people into shutting the hell up.

‘Culture war’ started to make a whole lot more sense to me when someone explained that it had more to do with the emergence of linked suites of apparently unrelated opinions; big lumps of tangled reckons, like fairy lights. If you take hold of the opinion ‘there’s too much immigration’ and give it a sharp tug, ‘I hate wind farms’ pops up on the other side of the room. That’s a culture war: political alignment along occult ideological axes that would make no sense to someone arriving from Mars.

The culture war mindset is tribal, by which I mean it has to do with our common need for community and fellowship. It instrumentalises the pro-social neediness that is the default state of most human beings; and it necessitates the identification of out-groups, without which you cannot have in-groups. If you and all your mates support Net Zero, god help you if you think the British Museum should keep the Elgin Marbles. Friendship and welcome are the rewards for lockstep ideological alignment; isolation and exile are the punishments. And who doesn’t like it when your smize-worthy Bluesky/X jokes are rewarded with a hundred likes from people you’ve never met?

Everything about this disincentivizes curiosity, compromise and independent thought. After all, you’re in a culture war: the people on the other side already hate you (at least, it feels as though they do). If your own side starts to hate you too, you’ll be cooked.

Over the last ten years or so, Mitchell & Webb’s ‘Are we the baddies?’ sketch has become deeply embedded in British Twitter/Bluesky discourse, which I think is kind of fascinating in the culture war context.

The premise of the sketch is that Mitchell and Webb are SS officers (I think; please do not mistake me for someone who scrutinises Nazi regalia) who become distracted by the skulls on their cap badges. After attempting to find a not-evil explanation — ‘maybe they’re the skulls of our enemies?’ — they are forced to the painful realisation that they are on completely the wrong side of history.

David Mitchell and Robert Webb (and Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain and John Finnemore, who had writing credits on the series) are very clever guys (check out the glorious throwaway joke about Russian agriculture). The reason the sketch is funny is that, like all the best jokes, it plays around with some near-universal human traits, viz:

• Everyone who has a strong opinion thinks they’re on the ‘right’ side. Nobody thinks ‘this side has all the nastiest people and all the cruellest outcomes: sign me up!’ (Not even Nazis.)

• Nobody wants future generations to judge them as having been evil.

The SS officers in the sketch aren’t interrogating the ideological position to which they have literally signed up; they are worried about what people will think. Goodies and baddies are not categories found in nature; they exist only in the context of human communities. Not wanting to be the baddies is entirely human, and again is essentially pro-social. Very few people really don’t care about being on the right side of history — the clue is in the name — and those are people you definitely want to avoid in the pub.

But although, in itself, the sketch is sophisticated and humane, you will be shocked to hear that its use online tends to be neither. Unfortunately for everyone — not least those of us who think it’s an excellent joke and are nevertheless beginning to hate it — its stand-out line is easily bent to fit the dumb contours of culture wars, in which the rewards for separating yourself from your opponents are instant; the punishment for making any concession is painful; and the benefits of compromise are distant. Hell is watching one witless prick scream ‘ARE WE THE BADDIES’ at their perceived enemy for eternity, instead of either of them going away and having a little think about what it is they are actually trying to achieve.

The fact that it fits the contours of the culture war is why, I think, ‘Are we the baddies?’ has been rewarded with a massive bump in virality long after it was first aired. This is a shame, because it deserves to be celebrated for its other qualities, but here we are, treated to a mind-bending meta-usage, in which a joke that is — at least partly — about people caring about the wrong things is pressed into use by people who care about the wrong things.

I’ve been thinking about this because of the Sandie Peggie tribunal that’s been taking place in Scotland recently. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, a) lucky you and b) I’m afraid it has to do with the gender/sex front in the culture wars, which is very much the Somme in this broader martial metaphor. Briefly: when working as a nurse in a hospital in Fife, Peggie was required to share a female changing room with a transwoman doctor. Peggie vocally objected to the doctor’s presence in the changing room, and was subsequently subjected to a disciplinary process which she is challenging via the tribunal.

Let us now have a short pause in which you can decide which side you’re on. Don’t want to? Feel like you need a bit more info? Congratulations, you’re tonight’s winner!

The minute-by-minute progress of the tribunal was followed fervently online by at least two groups of people who definitely already knew which side they were on: gender-critical feminist activists, and trans-inclusive activists. Evidence that favoured Peggie’s case was greeted with celebratory social media posts from the gender-critical side and glum silence from the trans-inclusive side. Evidence that favoured the other side produced the same response in reverse. Witnesses whose evidence clearly aligned with one side or the other were simultaneously lauded and decried, celebrated and denigrated, and subjected to detailed positive/negative commentary on their hair, weight and make-up, all because they’d done their civic duty and devoted a few presumably-unpaid hours to the principle of fair employment. Every single one of these poor sods must wish they hadn’t bothered.

When it comes to ‘things that are not typically box office’, employment tribunals are right up there with downloadable PDF printer manuals. As the FT’s associate editor Stephen Bush said (on Bluesky), it’s really not healthy when people treat them like a football match. It’s legit, of course, to have an opinion on the broad principle of the thing — in this case, whether work-based facilities labelled ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ should be single-sex or trans-inclusive. (My personal preference when getting undressed is for a sealed concrete tomb.) But tribunals are not venues in which broad principles are established or conceded. They have a very narrow purpose, which is to determine whether an employer has sufficiently met their legal obligations. The people treating the Peggie tribunal like a football match had brought their burgers and tinnies to the wrong venue, which is the kind of thing people do when they’ve signed up to a culture war battalion.

This came into sharp focus when — at the very end of the tribunal hearing -- it was conclusively established that Peggie had shared astonishingly racist jokes in a WhatsApp group that included some of her nursing colleagues. Really just hate speech forced into joke structures, they were like something copied and pasted from a National Front forum.

This was a prime ‘Are we the baddies?’ opportunity, and sure enough the meme was immediately deployed roughly 50,000 times by trans-inclusive activists. Absolutely classic use of the form, fair play. The truly awful thing — the drab, inexcusable, socially-motivated bollocks of it all — was that so few gender-critical feminists instantly said ‘That is totally inexcusable’. Instead, a depressingly large number of them spent the subsequent 24 hours contorting themselves into racist pretzels — the jokes weren’t really racist (they were) — before arriving at a consensus: even racists are entitled to single-sex spaces. Which, yes, OK, but I wouldn’t open with it. And if you hadn’t spent the last three weeks turning Sandie Peggie into an icon because she shares one political opinion with you, you wouldn’t have wound up here. This is what happens when you treat this stuff like a football match.

How did supposedly intelligent people get themselves into this mess? Well, I’m glad you asked. Left-aligned gender-critical feminists are an outstanding case study in what happens when political viewpoints become entangled with deep social imperatives; that is, when you enter a culture war. They have been very effectively, unwillingly and bloodily cast out by the progressive left over the past 15 years, often suffering real social, financial, reputational and employment consequences because they hold views that are — let’s be real — totally normal. (Robert Webb, ironically, had the temerity to express some mildly gender-critical views on Twitter some years ago and seemed to suffer some critical career injuries as a result. I hope everything’s alright with him now, although a brief glance at some comedians’ forums suggests he’s still getting kicked around for it.)

Trans-inclusive progressives are convinced they’re on the right side of history; left-aligned gender-critical feminists are particularly injured by the implication that they’re bigots. This kind of intellectual and political exile is painful; indeed, it was intended to be, which is something the progressive left might want to have a little think about. It was in this context that many gender-critical feminists retreated further and further into communities that didn’t treat them like highly infectious thought-criminals.

Now, those communities are closed, guarded and suspicious of anything that looks like backsliding. One of the dreadful things about the Sandie Peggie racism revelation was seeing the social imperatives of the culture wars operate within gender-critical communities, as the voices condemning Peggie’s racism were shut down with yet more robotic slogans: you’re a hand-maiden, you’re a head girl, you’re in a purity spiral. On and on it goes. I get that it’s painful to be told you’re a bigot. I don’t like it either. Honey, nobody does. But here’s the thing: trying to relitigate whether or not flat-out, balls-to-the-walls racism is bad is just not, strategically, going to help you with that difficulty.

And that’s without even getting into the morality of pretending not to see racism in explicitly racist things. Because, as we all know, when it comes to being the baddies, the last thing anyone cares about is whether your position is morally indefensible. All that matters is professing all of the same opinions, in all the same forms, as the people who are on your side. And if history teaches us anything, it’s that that attitude absolutely never leads to dark places.

---

For more reflections on ideological discomfort — and the pitiless passage of time that eventually leaves us all exposed, like beached, bigoted whales — try our essay about ‘Life on Mars’ and Tony Blair’s autobiography (a combination that you will simply NOT get anywhere else):