Toxic Cancel Culture Is Eroding The Very Values That Define Us

‘This encapsulates the intolerant arrogance of the ideologues’

- Leo McKinstry

In his epic novel 1984, George Orwell set out a nightmarish vision of Britain under a totalitarian regime that was determined to obliterate the country’s heritage. “Every record had been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every statue and street building renamed,” he wrote. This was a bleak, oppressive land where “nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right”.

For most of us, 1984 is a warning about the dangers of extremism, but to woke campaigners, it is a blueprint. Brimming with self-righteous zeal, they see everything through the prism of their blinkered dogma. Their aim is complete submission to their narrow code. Their bullying methods feature witch-hunts, online show trials, censorship, invented grievances, indoctrination and remorseless propaganda.

This week saw a new low in the culture war. In a move that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, graduate students at Magdalen College in Oxford voted to remove the portrait of the Queen from their common room, because depictions of the Monarch “represent recent colonial history”.