THE culture war has fundamentally broken Britain’s ability to engage with reality. For the better part of a decade, the public has been bombarded with messaging on shadowy trans cabals and activist lawyers operating behind the scenes to undermine the status quo.

And, having been primed to do so, Britain’s loudest culture warriors are ready to see “the gay agenda” everywhere they look … even where it isn’t.

Stomping past government and opposition complicity in genocide in the Middle East, the British commentariat has instead spent this past week raising an indignant finger at “woke” football tops, rainbow lanyards and misrepresented hate crime legislation, the reporting of which could not be even generously described as accurate.

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On paper, the one-off English kit design should have been a slam dunk for our southern neighbour’s loudest patriots – a limited edition interpretation that pays homage to England’s last world cup win in 1966.

That seems a world away from the “woke, virtue-signalling” that Nike has been accused of.

For that reason, you cannot convince me otherwise than that the outrage comes from anything other than a few reactionaries mistaking Nike’s St George’s Cross as a cheeky reference to the Pride flag, then refusing to back down after being corrected.

Allegedly serious GB News commentators even shared comparisons between the new colour scheme and various LGBTQ+ flags as evidence – while being so obsessed over finding hidden messaging in everything that they never stopped for long enough to realise the colours don’t even match.

With the rainbow being a representation of the spectrum of visible light, it would be hard to find much of anything that doesn’t share a shade or hue with the Pride flag.

Maybe Rishi Sunak was right about investing more in STEM if this is the best we can get from our political class. Or maybe it’s time we banned the entire study of refracted light, lest these kids get any ideas.

The message is clear – even a whiff of support for queer identities in contemporary Britain, real or imagined, will come with a price.

The proof is in the struggle with which the design’s opponents have had to verbalise what they even disagree with about it – or why previous instances of flag rebrands have failed to provoke the same level of hysteria.

It is a fundamentally reactionary response grounded in vague feelings over facts, one that has been weaponised time and again by the Right to undermine and destroy progressive legislation and policy efforts here and abroad.

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Ireland’s recent referendum on updating the constitution is a prime example, wherein an effort to update a sexist clause on the duties and role of women in the household was instead spun into rhetoric on trying to erase the word “woman” from the constitution. Now doesn’t that sound extremely familiar?

Likewise, the Scottish Hate Crime Bill has been attacked and misrepresented as a crackdown on free speech when, in reality, it’s really just standardising existing legislation. The Telegraph went as far as to highlight that even podcaster Joe Rogan believed this to have humiliated Scotland, as if this isn’t the man who has also fallen for various other right-wing conspiracies, including pushing misinformation about the Covid vaccine.

And I say this as someone who doesn’t believe hate crime legislation to be an effective way of tackling systemic bigotry and bias. But if we’re going to talk about it, can we at least do so honestly?

In fairness though, if I spent every waking moment I had sharing the most vile and hateful opinions on a minority group online, I suppose I’d be concerned of falling foul of hate crime legislation too… But while the gender-critical movement is waxing lyrical over what could (not actually) happen, it remains intent on removing similar displays of free expression from others. The Scottish Parliament, at the request of anti-trans activists, has banned the wearing of rainbow lanyards by Holyrood staff.

When I first heard that political and social issue-related symbols were to be banned for staff, it didn’t strike me as such an outlandish idea. If anything, I was perversely looking forward to seeing the reaction to the news that poppies would also fall foul of this change; except they didn’t. Nor did lanyards that indicated trade union membership, nor do lanyards relating to disabilities.

In fact, the more exceptions to the rule that appeared, the clearer it became that this alleged blanket ban was actually rather targeted on the face of it … and it coming from a Labour MSP who resigned from her role in the party over the Gender Recognition Reform Bill is definitely nothing to be concerned about.

What a monumental waste of everyone’s time. But that’s the result of years of anti-LGBT indoctrination, endorsed by successive right-wing governments, a compliant opposition, and a staggering amount of dark money that has sought to derail and delegitimise every challenge to power on these crumbling islands.