However, the flip-side is that there are some issues that ACE seems not to care about — like free expression. ACE now warns funded organisations that it will “monitor… artistic and creative output that might be deemed controversial” and requires them to consider “the views and perceptions of different stakeholders, including their appetite for risk”. On the next page of the guidance, there’s the threat of sanctions — from “increased monitoring” to “withdrawal of funding”. This is an object lesson in how to have a chilling effect on culture in Britain. The announcement by Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer this month of a full-scale independent review into the organisation is welcome; the Arts Council’s role in limiting artistic freedom must be examined.

The review could highlight the poor treatment of dozens of artists. In 2022, for instance, the gender-critical ceramicist Claudia Clare was invited to exhibit at ACE-funded Burgh House, Hampstead — only for her exhibition to later be cancelled. The director of Burgh House, Mark Francis, emailed Clare to explain: “We respect the rights of individuals to hold their own beliefs, but once these have been made public by an individual, we must consider all stakeholders in the charity and their rights to feel included and safe.” This is ACE’s approach to free expression in action.

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While freelancers who work in the arts are often unwilling to go on the record about their experiences, for fear of losing work, Clare is far from alone. A number of programming staff at a major ACE-funded organisation recently described to me how they were investigated by its HR department after inviting a gender-critical artist to speak. Their jobs are now in doubt because they “exposed audiences to dangerous ideas”. Similarly, a dance company’s tour was cancelled in 2023 after several venues realised the production contained gender-critical feminist content. The people concerned don’t want to risk further damage to their careers by being quoted here.

The same hostility can be traced back to the Arts Council itself. In June last year, Denise Fahmy, an ACE employee of more than 15 years, won a harassment claim against the body. (She has co-founded Freedom in the Arts with choreographer Rosie Kay.) Her case related to another labyrinthine arm of bureaucracy, the London Community Fund, which had awarded an ACE grant — later suspended — to the gender-critical group LGB Alliance. After an internal meeting in which Fahmy was the only person to challenge the view that the LGB Alliance is anti-trans, colleagues circulated a petition which condemned “discriminatory transphobic staff” and claimed the LGB Alliance had links to “neo-Nazis, homophobes and Islamaphobes [sic]”. When she won the case, Fahmy said: “People in the arts, and especially women, are facing a tide of bullying with spurious accusations of transphobia… I hope my case has woken up leaders in the arts as to what’s going on.”

It’s certainly a shift from ACE’s early vision. When I first started working in the subsidised arts in 1996, ACE modestly described itself as “the key funding body for the arts”. And this was in keeping with its founding principles, dreamed up in the post-war moment of cultural democratisation. Growing out of the wartime Committee for Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), the Arts Council was established by Royal Charter in 1946 to “develop and improve knowledge, understanding and practice of the arts”, and to spread them as widely as possible throughout the country. John Maynard Keynes chaired both CEMA and the new body, and his vision of great art for everyone remained unchallenged for 60 years.

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By the mid-2000s, though, something had changed. ACE had by then become “the national development agency for the arts”, and this heralded an attitudinal shift. Rather than a mere funding body, it began to see itself as the sponsor and patron of the sort of arts it wanted to see. Over time, aspirations towards artistic influence in turn morphed into activism. Last year, the body rechristened itself “the national development agency for creativity and culture”, and announced its new agenda in a 10-year plan, “Let’s Create”, which retreats further than ever from Keynes’s original principles.

Rather than its historical day-job — increasing access to dance, literature, music, theatre, and the rest — ACE now subordinates “the arts” within a grand, utopian social idea of universal creativity: “We aim to recognise and champion the creative activities and cultural experiences of every person in every town, village and city in this country.” And who could be against that? Unlike the more divisive “art”, creativity is a nice, unthreatening word. Some people aren’t into art, but being against “creativity” is like being against puppies.

Yet this dilution of ACE’s original commitment has been accompanied by the politicisation of its internal culture. The Nolan Principles (established in 1994 as an ethical code for public life) require ACE to be objective and “take decisions impartially, fairly and on merit, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias”. But ACE’s impartiality is clearly under severe pressure from many of its own staff. Last year, for instance, ACE’s own independent Equality, Diversity and Inclusion review warned that some Arts Council staff’s perception of themselves as members of the artistic profession, rather than employees of a governmental body, was leading to a widespread failure to understand their responsibilities.

Denise Fahmy saw this first-hand in her time at the body. “The Arts Council struggles with being a mere funder,” she said, “they see their jobs as much bigger than this”. She explains how the Arts Council developed a new environmental responsibility policy, initially requiring funded organisations to supply straightforward data on fuel use to contribute to the Net Zero government policy. This was then developed into a new “investment principle”. Applicants for funding are now required to consider “how creation, programming and partnerships can help support your commitment and provoke debate”. Fahmy says: “If you’re wondering why there are so many shows about climate change, check organisations’ funding requirements. Arts organisations increasingly see themselves as activists, and the Arts Council is driving this through its funding criteria.”

I contacted ACE to ask where I might find an Arts Council policy on free expression. I spoke to a helpful ACE staffer, but he couldn’t find anything. He promised to consult colleagues “to see if anyone has any info tucked away”. In fact, it turns out that there are just two sentences about free expression in the guidance for organisations: “For the avoidance of doubt, we expect all NPOs to support freedom of expression. We see this as essential for a thriving cultural sector in this country.”

The consequences of such half-hearted support aren’t hard to glean. As the need for a government review attests, the original organisation is being pulled apart by the competing demands of political fashion, a levelling attitude to art itself, and the increasing dominance of activist staff. Ultimately, ACE isn’t just ignoring the developing crisis in artistic free expression — it appears to be actively fostering an intolerant culture. “Do not think of the Arts Council as a schoolmaster,” wrote Keynes in 1945, “the arts owe no vow of obedience” — by which he meant obedience to government. What he didn’t anticipate was that, nearly 80 years later, the Arts Council has become the schoolmaster and the disciplinarian, dishing out orthodoxies from on high.

War tends to increase social cohesion, leaving those statistically at the edge, exposed. And in the aftermath of World War Two , discrimination against gay people reached its zenith. “Homosexuals” were thought too different to be tolerated: they were criminalised and given a psychiatric diagnosis and “treatment”. Considered relatively benign, the so-called “conversion therapy” was deemed a way for troubled people to avoid worse fates and social rejection. Some gay men and women requested the “therapies”, presumably with the hope of passing through life more easily and being socially affirmed as “acceptable”.

Today, conversion therapy is at the heart of another war, as the Government attempts to ban it. Again it involves a marginalised cohort, who despair of fitting in. But this time, “conversion therapy”, which was always ill-defined, has taken on several different meanings.

The term is used to describe a range of medical and psychotherapeutic interventions, early versions of which were offered to gay men and women on the NHS during the Fifties — although these were focused on aversion more than conversion. Pavlovian attempts were made to disrupt any association between (same-sex) sexual stimuli and sexual responses, with electric shocks or medically induced vomiting. Later therapists attempted to actively re-orientate people’s sexuality towards heterosexual stimuli. Methods also included religious counselling, talking therapies, and finally, for some gay men, hormonal treatments.

These attempts to either avert homosexuality or convert lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people to heterosexuality didn’t work — and even killed people. Alan Turing committed suicide two years after opting for “chemical castration”, rather than imprisonment.  Eventually, though, society started to shift. In 1967, homosexuality was decriminalised in England. In 1973, the term was removed from the 2nd version of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM-II), a handbook used by healthcare professionals to guide the diagnosis of mental disorders. Outside of LGBT communities, the concept of conversion therapy may have comfortably drifted out of consciousness for a while.

The collective amnesia did not last long. In 2011, The Guardian reported that some religious therapists were still trying to convert gay men. This forced therapy organisations in the UK to confront their history, and in 2015 the first Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Conversion Therapy was signed by 16 organisations. All agreed that it was unethical for a therapist to try to change someone’s sexual orientation via any means. Two years later, a second memorandum — the MOU2 — was announced. This one had expanded the concept of conversion therapy to include any “therapeutic approach, or any model or individual viewpoint that demonstrates an assumption that any sexual orientation or gender identity is inherently preferable to any other”. The inclusion of “gender identity” is significant.

Gender identity is the term used to describe the profound internal sense that some people have of their maleness, or femaleness, or neither. Gender non-conformity didn’t escape diagnosis for long; when the updated DSM-III was introduced in 1980, the concept of “gender identity disorder”, previously absent, slipped into the gap left by homosexuality.

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In July 2018, the day before the MOU2 was officially launched in parliament, the government presented the results of its National LGBT Survey. The online survey of more than 108,000 self-selected respondents stated that, overall, 5% of respondents had been offered conversion therapy, and 2% had taken it up. This rose to 9% and 4% of transgender respondents.

The idea that conversion therapy could still happen in modern Britain is abhorrent to most. And this is why there has been a move to ban it in parliament.. Yet feelings and facts matter. The LGBT survey did “not provide a definition of conversion therapy”. As such, the survey measures whether people perceived something to have been conversion therapy. Furthermore, for those who did feel they had been offered it, only 19% said that it was via a healthcare provider or medical professional. No one knows how many of these were in the NHS.

It is easy to think we understand what we are talking about when it comes to conversion therapy when maybe we don’t. And given the controversy over Government’s decision to include trans people in criminalisation of the practice, it’s vitally important that we do.

In 2018, no one claimed to be receiving electric shock treatments, or medically induced nausea. These interventions are of course already and rightfully illegal. So what is it exactly that people are experiencing? In the NHS, the only conversion therapy treatments that are still offered — albeit not with the aim of “converting” homosexuals — are talking therapies and hormonal interventions.

Let’s address talking therapy first. There is no doubt that some “therapists” will have actively tried to alter their patients’ gender and sex-related thoughts, feelings and/or identities. We have troubling anecdotal evidence that this has happened to some trans-identified people in modern Britain. Whether this is happening away from religious settings — in the NHS or mainstream clinical or psychological practice — is harder to ascertain, but it is possible. After all, potentially damaging interactions between mental health professionals and trans- or gender-questioning people aren’t a new phenomenon.

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Treatments attempting to convert gay and lesbian people to heterosexuality were just as unethical and also failed. But they gave rise to an affirmative practice which has taken hold today and which includes medicalisation. “Gay Affirming Therapy” was developed in the early Eighties as a reparative response. This approach wasn’t intended to be a whole-scale model of care, but a therapeutic position wherein the clinician demonstrated warmth and acceptance of a client’s non-heterosexual identity to counterbalance negative messages from society.

It is this affirmative position which has been adopted, and adapted, by clinicians working with transgender adults and gender-incongruent children. But the term “affirmative care” has changed. It has morphed to include, the offer at least, of “medical affirmation” — or hormonal intervention. Medical gender affirmation aims to help reduce an individual’s suffering by trying to better align their physical body with their felt gender identity. The World Health Organization defines it thus: “Gender-affirmative health care can include any single or combination of a number of social, psychological, behavioural or medical (including hormonal treatment or surgery) interventions designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity.” Note here how the idea of hormonal interventions has been turned on its head, previously offered as a “conversion therapy” for gay men.

Despite the fact that there is no consensus or good quality evidence to demonstrate that — on balance, on average and over time — these novel gender-affirming medical interventions do reduce suffering, and despite the evidence that they will certainly harm some, many people report that for them, personally, they have felt “life-saving”. These evocative first-person narratives have led some to argue that access to gender-affirming medical interventions should be a human right. From this vantage, anything other than immediate affirmation can be considered equivalent to conversion therapy. As a result, psychotherapy, which might explore different ways of understanding ourselves and in doing so may delay medical intervention, is now understood by some as inherently harmful.

This leaves us in a position whereby offering a medical intervention to someone who identifies as LGB is very clearly understood to be conversion therapy, while not offering the (sometimes same) treatment to someone who identifies as transgender is also understood, by some, to be conversion therapy. Meanwhile, offering psychotherapy that aims to reduce distress by increasing self-acceptance without the need for change is seen as the right approach for LGB people but, sometimes, the wrong one for transgender people.

To complicate things even further, the population of people understood to be transgender has broadened. “Trans” has become an “umbrella term” under which a broad range of experiences are collated. As well as those who identify as the opposite sex, the category now includes gender-questioning people, gender non-conforming people and the gender fluid, among others — depending on who is defining it. The term non-binary, used to describe people who identify as neither male nor female, entered the clinical literature less than a decade ago, but is already being medically treated in the NHS.

We must also note that the demographics of those who identify as trans have also changed significantly over the recent years. No one yet knows why. These changes are particularly striking in younger people, with the number of adolescents and young adults questioning their gender and sexuality has increased exponentially in recent years in particular among young women.

On top of this, sometimes the same individuals move between identity categories — from LGB to T or T to LGB for example — increasing the risk that a treatment felt to be right, lifesaving even, the first time can be experienced as devastatingly wrong for the same person the second time. One person’s affirmation therapy might be another person’s conversion therapy — but no one can agree on which is which.

History doesn’t repeat but it often rhymes. And the NHS is once again trying to reduce the suffering experienced by some gender non-conforming people. Once again, it is offering a range of treatments that don’t — yet — have sufficient evidence to allow us to guarantee any outcome. Once again, people seeking to pass through their lives with more comfort are requesting treatments. And once again, the profound uncertainty about what will work for whom leads to inevitable medical risk-taking. If a patient can’t always predict how they will feel about something in the future, then a doctor or therapist certainly can’t.

No one can envy Dr Hilary Cass, the paediatrician charged with delivering an independent review of the NHS’s gender identity services and find a way forward, for children and adolescents at least. She finds herself on a battlefield where people are fighting over how to define key clinical terms, not least the concept of conversion therapy itself. Yet a quick search of her interim report makes it clear that Cass isn’t too worried. The word “conversion” doesn’t feature once. Instead, without taking medical treatments completely off the table, she calls for the NHS to increase access to psychotherapy. According to Cass, then, gently supporting people to explore identities in therapy is not akin to conversion therapy as most people understand that term.

As we turn our minds to the future, we must keep one eye on the past. Wars, cultural or otherwise, aren’t good for anyone, particularly minority groups. No ethical clinician wants to repeat history and inadvertently hurt the very people they are trying to help. We must focus now on developing therapies that will be acceptable to and appropriate for everyone who might seek them, minimising the risk of current or future harm. To do this we must accept that when it comes to issues of sex and gender, uncertainty and cultural change are the only things we can predict.

Many of the fears of a “populist” or “Right-wing” drift appear to have been accelerated by a focus on identity politics, or what has become known as the “war on woke”. A piece in the Metro laments the missed opportunity for candidates to move away from the “shameless baiting” around “wedge issues” such as structural racism and trans rights. Suella Braverman said that the country needs to “get rid of all this woke rubbish”. Penny Mordaunt hit back at those who wish to “damage” her reputation by depicting her as “woke”. Even the frontrunner, Rishi Sunak, has taken a swipe at “clumsy, gender-neutral language”. According to the Metro, all of this represents “a notable swing to the Right”.

But is it really the case that “woke” politics are in any meaningful sense Left-wing? This movement’s cheerleaders are predominately middle class, and rarely seem to show any interest in the traditional leftist goal of redressing economic inequality. The overwhelming number of feminists who have been targeted for their gender-critical views in recent years have been staunchly on the Left. Yet issues such as free speech, and how the recognition of biological differences between men and women is necessary for the preservation of women’s rights, are now routinely dismissed as symptomatic of a “Right-wing culture war”.

This was particularly apparent to me at an event on Monday at the House of Lords in support of freedom of expression arranged by Riverside Advisory. I was the MC for a series of speeches which featured members of the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats and the SNP. Far from being a “Right-wing talking point”, the range of political affiliations represented on the bill demonstrated that free speech is, or at least should be, a non-partisan issue.

The first speaker I introduced to the platform was Tory leadership hopeful Kemi Badenoch. At one point, she directly addressed the common misapprehension that free speech is “a cover for bigoted middle-aged white men to spout politically incorrect nonsense”. When Badenoch pointed out that she was neither middle-aged, white, nor a man, a heckler shouted: “Are you sure?”

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Without missing a beat, Badenoch replied: “I’m sure. I am a woman and I know what a woman is.” This was greeted by cheers and applause, particularly from the strong contingent of Left-wing feminists who were present. The debates that have since raged online about the prospect of Badenoch as the next Tory leader have revealed that she has considerable support from traditional leftists by virtue of her stance on the culture wars. Can this really be described as “a notable swing to the right”?

The political designations of “Left” and “Right” date from the National Assembly established in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Members who felt that the power of the king ought to be restricted sat to the left of the assembly’s president, those who did not sat to the right. The historian Marcel Gauchet has outlined the subsequent “long drawn-out process that lasted more than three quarters of a century”, but by the beginning of the twentieth century the association of the “Right” with traditional values and the “Left” with progressive reform was firmly established.

The rise of the “woke” movement has destabilised these terms to the point of irrelevance. Many people whose socialist credentials could not be more well established have been dismissed as “Right-wing”, “far-Right” or “fascist” simply for insisting on the importance of evidence-led analysis and free speech. Queer theorist Judith Butler has claimed that the “anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our time”. Where there are no shared definitions of terms, discussion becomes impossible. Maybe that’s the whole point.

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The way in which culture warriors have taken control of our institutions — including, crucially, the civil service — has meant that their worldview will inform major policy decisions irrespective of whether a Labour or Conservative government is at the helm. We might be able to vote a particular party out of office, but we cannot do anything about the sundry quangos and publicly funded bodies who are in the grip of this ideology.

Take, for instance, the College of Policing, the body responsible for law enforcement training. In April 2021, the Home Secretary instructed the College of Policing to modify their guidance so that police no longer record “non-crime hate incidents”. In December 2021, the Court of Appeal ruled that the recording of non-crime hate incidents was unlawful. To this day, the College of Policing remains committed to this unlawful practice. With this public body seemingly so determined to ignore the Home Office and high courts, we can be certain that it has been ideologically captured.

The redrawing of the boundaries between Left and Right was escalated by the Brexit vote, another political matter that was co-opted by culture warriors. For many commentators the vote was reduced to a Manichean struggle of good versus evil, or racist versus not-racist. Few genuine socialists could have possibly countenanced our membership of a pro-corporate trading bloc with capitalism at the heart of its constitution, but to vote Leave was suddenly perceived as a vote for the “Right”. This made little sense, given that the Remain campaign was spearheaded by the Conservatives, and the most prominent politicians in Brussels at the time — Guy Verhofstadt, Donald Tusk, Jean-Paul Juncker, Michel Barnier — all hailed from centre-Right or neoliberal parties.

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The same binary thinking has been imposed onto all subsequent political disputes; even discussions about the efficacy of lockdowns during the pandemic became reduced to a question of whether one was on the “right” or “wrong” side of history. One’s position on gender self-identification, structural racism, free speech, or any of the other “culture war” topics, is now commonly deemed a marker of where one is situated on the Right/Left spectrum. This human tendency to reduce complex discussions to simple binaries is understandable, but it is a temptation to be resisted.

These circumstances have birthed some strange alliances. Many Left-wing feminists are now writing for Right-wing publications, and cross-party support for the principle of free speech is growing. That conflicts on these issues have arisen within both the Conservative Party and Labour should remind us that the culture wars cannot be understood as a battle between Left and Right. Whereas it was once possible to agree on how these terms were defined, such a consensus no longer exists. Perhaps we need to accept that the very concepts of “Left” and “Right” are now beyond the point of utility.