Now that same political consensus is collapsing across the world wherever it had been established. The idea of these newly founded values being contested would have seemed like time going backwards. In other words, social liberalism was not merely a popular point of view: it was the new normal. Something tolerant, something amiable.has left its mark upon the country.” In 2006, the Conservative and Blair critic Matthew Parris conceded in the Times: “Britain is a nicer place than when entered Downing Street. The culmination of this was that the Tories – historically the party of homophobic legislation – would eventually outflank New Labour by overseeing the introduction of equal marriage. The most salient example of this is the Conservative party, which under the leadership of David Cameron recognised it would have to lean in to socially liberal values in order to gain a hearing. The reason liberals still believe this consensus holds is that the politics New Labour ushered in was so dominant and all-encompassing that almost every opinion that existed outside of it was dismissed as the view of cranks. The new received wisdom dictated that women and LGBT+ people were equal (sort of), and racism was to be condemned (unless you were a Muslim). Exhausted and demoralised by the polarising Thatcher years, British people were apparently ready for a more liberal and tolerant era. New Labour’s landslide victory in 1997 didn’t signal just a change in government, but an ostensible change in our nation’s culture. The progressive tendency to regard “anti-woke” crusaders as aberrations is a hangover from the liberal consensus established in the late 90s. Among liberals, Fox may be the object of mocking scorn – but his sudden notoriety is just one symptom of a growing “anti-woke” backlash that deserves closer examination. Walliams implied that Fox would find himself friendless following his appearance on Question Time, presumably expecting laughter and not the chorus of “oohs” that came instead.
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Note, for example, how David Walliams’ joke about Fox went down at the National Television Awards.
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Not least because recent political developments suggest that there are millions of Laurence Foxes up and down the country, and that their views are mainstream. It was therefore intriguing to see how many progressives regarded Fox’s outburst as a surprising event – as if the actor was a foreign object that suddenly crashed into our harmonious world of social liberalism.