One of the techniques of international liberalism is to encourage divisive culture wars. From the top down, it seeks to impose its values on populations at home and overseas without informed consent through the educational system, the public relations, marketing and human resources departments of major corporations, through the ‘chilling effect’ of regulation and legislation and through arts and cultural patronage. This has created a class of intellectuals which has declared war on its own national and working class cultural traditions.
The British working class is known for its easy-going tolerance and welcoming stance towards new ideas and cultures. It challenged the racism imported by American troops in the Second World War and it has adapted to a succession of migration challenges over centuries, absorbing and appropriating anything from Chinese takeaways to Bhangra. Tolerance and open-mindedness are central to WPB cultural policy. However, this tolerance is very different from top-down ideologically-driven progressivism, imported from the very different conditions in the US with its understandable racial obsessions and lack of any tradition (due to brutal repression) of a collective working class politics. Progressivism fails to allow communities to live and learn alongside one another but imposes alien values through incentives and threats from above. It is manipulative. We particularly oppose all attempts to impose identity politics and division in our communities. We are one nation with many lifestyles.
The WPB’s cultural policy will start with a radical overhaul of the funding of the arts, the charitable sector and the educational system to re-emphasise critical thinking, free debate, free speech and mutual respect. Life-long learning (see our policy on education) will be central to our mission.
We will enshrine the right to dissent and enjoy a private life and lifestyles that harm no other in employment law and we will restrict the ability of private wealth, directly or through the increasingly sinister international NGO-industrial complex, to engage in cultural engineering. We will ban foreign interests from interfering in British culture untowardly while encouraging the free flow of foreign creativity into the country. We will also take a far more critical approach to corporate ownership of information and common artistic heritage through investor exploitation of intellectual property and copyright legislation whilst supporting the struggling individual or co-operative creative in their fight to get fair recompense. We want the best of non-British culture to reach the working class and British working class culture to find its place in the world. Our socialism is not a dour socialism. There is room, through culture, for beauty, wonder, deep independent thought, pleasure and excitement, for K-Pop or Haydn, blockbuster films, sustainable fashion, good food and architecture that fits human needs.
Julie Lowe 