The motivation to write this book started from my increasing concern with contemporary ‘culture wars’, as Chapter 1 explained. There were fundamental challenges for community education and development here, challenges to their theoretical underpinnings, challenges to a critical understanding of their histories and challenges to the very basis of their practices. Key theorists were being dismissed as ‘cultural Marxists’. And the histories of community education and development continue to be at risk of distortion by cultural warriors’ refusals to recognise, let alone to engage with, the legacies of slavery and colonialism.

Most importantly, cultural warriors focus on blaming ‘the other’, especially migrants and refugees, along with their ‘woke’ supporters, such as ‘lefty lawyers’ and bleeding-heart liberals. Those who have been characterised as ‘woke’ are supposed to be responsible for the challenges of the day. It is in this way that cultural warriors aim to divert attention from the underlying causes of increasing polarisation, discrimination, poverty and xenophobia, along with increasing threats to the very future of the planet. Cultural warriors’ methods represent the very antithesis of. community-based approaches that start from communities’ own experiences and feelings, taking them as the basis for critical but respectful processes of dialogue while aiming to contribute towards democratic processes of social change for the longer term.

In contrast, cultural warriors focus on stirring feelings of resentment and fear, fanning divisions within and between communities as a result. Far from disappearing, manifestations of such toxic divisions have been continuing, and indeed increasing, as I have been writing this book. For example, the previous UK Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has been strongly criticised for her incendiary statements about migrants and refugees, including her unfounded allegations about their supposed criminality – statements than could, and too often have, encouraged violent mobilisations from the Far Right. There have been community mobilisations, such as in Llanelli in 2023, when a protest camp was set up outside a hotel where asylum seekers were to be housed. This has been described as bringing a deluge of hate to a previously peaceful Welsh town (Chakrabortty, 2023). Such mobilisations provide chilling illustrations of the effects of these divisive strategies, potentially aggravated by more recent statements warning of a hurricane of migrants arriving on British shores.