It was only a month ago that the new Culture Minister Lisa Nandy declared that the era of culture wars was over. But this morning Daily Telegraph reports that teachers are taught in professional development courses to challenge “whiteness” in the classroom to ensure that future educators are “anti-racist.”

The guidelines in question come not from the government itself, but from universities – more specifically, the National Education Union in England (which is funded by Newcastle University) and ten universities north of the border, which have endorsed an “anti-racism framework” drawn up by the Scottish Council of Deans of Education.

Some of the guidelines include instructions on how to interrupt “white centrality” in schools, a best practice document says. The word “white” appears almost 400 times in the guidelines, and “whiteness” 121 times. The literature also confronts other related hate objects of the ultraliberals, such as “notions of objectivity” and “tools of whiteness,” which include “individualism” and “belief in meritocracy.” “As we have seen in recent public unrest across the UK, racism is pervasive in our society,” a Newcastle University spokesperson explained, “the framework has been developed to provide practical guidance on this.”

The cliched, repetitive language will sound all too familiar to anyone who has interacted with local government, secondary schools, museums, galleries or many other public institutions in recent years. It confirms the tenacious grip that identity politics has on our institutions and the minds of those who run them.

As the uproar over who would be allowed to compete in women’s boxing at the recent Olympics shows, the entire debate is far from settled. On the issue of women’s sport, Lisa Nandy herself was quick to backtrack from her initial boast. Just two weeks after assuring everyone the war was over and saying that “we have found numerous ways to set ourselves apart from each other over the last few years… Changing that is the mission of this department,” she put a pretty sweeping condition on that truce. She said it was now up to individual sports federations to decide which athletes would be allowed to compete in their disciplines: “I think that’s the right approach. And I think we should respect the fact that they are far more competent in judging and making decisions than we are.”

Speaking of the continuation of the culture wars. Or should we say: “inflaming” them.

That is, of course, the favorite word used against any conservative, feminist, or classical liberal, small or capital C, who has the audacity to make a statement or policy proposal against the hegemony of the woke left. It fits particularly well with a long-standing caricature of right-wingers as inherently evil, divisive, unfeeling souls, in contrast to the compassionate left who care so much about the poor and disadvantaged.

When then-Women and Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch promised in June to protect gender-segregated spaces for women, Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper stepped in and responded: “We’ve seen time and time again how (the Conservative government) tries to fight these false culture wars.” Keir Starmer added, in a more detached manner, that the public was “exhausted by the culture wars”, as if his party or the left had nothing at all to do with starting and continuing them.

Because if the liberal left continues to perpetuate the culture wars, whether through direct statements from government ministers or through decrees from public bodies committed to the same divisive ideology, it is because it started the culture wars itself.

These wars had their well-meaning origins in 1960s America, when the mission to eradicate racial injustice captured the minds of the well-meaning middle class. They became more acute and explicit in the 1980s and 1990s with the rise of “political correctness” and its unequivocal control of language in public discourse. They were given a turbo boost in the middle of the last decade by the emergence of the “woke” genre, with its new, arcane language and philosophy drawn from science and postmodernism.

Today, it is no longer conservatives and old-fashioned liberals who are fomenting the culture war. They are simply fighting back, trying to suppress a bizarre hyper-liberal credo that has already caused division in the US but seems even more inappropriate in Britain, with its highly contrasting history of race relations.

Many on the left simply cannot stand when conservatives react and object, hence the accusation that they are “fomenting” war. Conservative resistance under the guise of protecting women and vulnerable teenagers challenges the identity of the liberal left: that they alone are the guardians of compassion and tolerance. That is why the culture war is not over. That is why it is still alive.