The culture war, much like the war on drugs or the war on terror, is a metaphorical state that seems fated to go on for ever. The left blames the right for instigating a cynical distraction from its economic and public health failures; the right insists it is merely acting in self-defence after years of clandestine advances by the left. The indefinite nature of this battle stems from a general failure to define what is being fought over, or to determine what is meant by culture, where it comes from or why it matters. One of the people who thought hardest about the idea of “culture” that so preoccupies today’s culture warriors was Stuart Hall, the sociologist and founding figure of British cultural studies. Hall arrived in Britain from Jamaica in 1951 to find a rigidly hierarchical society that was undergoing profound social changes in the aftermath of the second world war. The “Windrush generation” had been recruited from the far corners of a fragmenting empire to help rebuild a devastated mother country, bringing with them new music, food and language that would reshape Britain’s atmosphere. At the same time, television, cinema and radio were spreading a new, irreverent image of British culture around the world, while the rise of the welfare state and increasing disposable income among working people meant the audiences for art and sport were growing just as their barriers of entry began to lower. These changes were experienced as a loss by Britain’s elite. In the pyramidal structure of the British empire, culture had long been defined and monopolised by the country’s boarding schools, elite universities and rarefied cultural institutions. Together, this establishment promoted a set of ideas that, in the minds of imperialists, could be distributed across the empire to civilise the natives. The version of culture they projected was stable and unchanging, a unifying story connecting the elites who ruled Britain to the soil from which their ancestors sprang. In the 1960s and 70s, when Hall was writing, most British intellectuals dismissed the new mass culture taking hold in the country as a passing fad that did not deserve the attention given to Shakespeare, Elgar or Hogarth. But Hall recognised how it offered an increasingly multicultural British population the opportunity to interpret and experience life as it was lived on the ground. Rather than seeing culture as something fixed and unchanging that needed constant protection, Hall saw it as something that underwent “constant transformation” and was always being made and remade by the people living it, a moving force that perpetually created new identities. It is no coincidence that so many of the primary battlegrounds where today’s culture wars are being staged are the elite institutions that represent a traditional British hierarchy: stately homes, Oxford university common rooms, the Last Night of the Proms. To culture warriors on the right, these institutions best represent Britain’s national culture as a whole. That they are exclusive is part of their appeal: when culture is defined as something that only a few people can access or control, its preservation is best entrusted to high-ranking authorities. But attempts to control mass culture have always been unsteady ground for the Conservative right. One of its major recent missteps was the attempt to cast England’s football team as enemies of the nation for taking the knee, believing their disdain for figures such as Marcus Rashford or Tyrone Mings was shared by the rest of the country. This attack did not account for how the momentum of football can galvanise mass support in a way that isn’t possible for the National Trust or the BBC director general or the Last Night of the Proms. Some of the other unsuccessful targets of this war have been popular musicians such as Stormzy, briefly framed by the rightwing media as an enemy for saying that he believed “100%” that Britain is racist and encouraging his crowds to chant “Fuck Boris” in one of his biggest songs. Yet the attacks on Stormzy did little to harm his mass popularity or make him reverse his position. Neither did those launched on fellow rapper Dave after he said “our prime minister is a real racist” during a performance. Indeed, ITV subsequently invited Stormzy and Dave to open the Euro 2020 semi-finals with an advert where they declared “This is England. Modern England”, pointing to themselves while images of a multi-racial football team flickered in the background. For the culture wars to no longer dominate British politics, we first need to understand that culture is something that is always alive. Hall saw how British culture mutates and regenerates with each generation, absorbing new youth movements and migrant communities every passing year. The right is fighting to conserve a fossilised version of British culture, which it sees as akin to property, something that can be possessed by excluding others; something that needs to be protected from thieves and trespassers. Victory in the culture war might mean total domination of the institutions that are appointed as the guardians of culture, as well as a narrowing of the spaces available to people outside these institutions. If so, it seems the right is already winning. The government increasingly interferes in the appointment of museum and art boards, while the conditions that produced the working-class artists who remade culture in postwar Britain have been steadily eroded by a decades-long weakening of the welfare state. Artists and other culture-makers now lead far more precarious lives, unless they are already wealthy, while successive governments have cut funding for arts and creative education (most recently, the government has proposed dramatically reducing state funding for arts and creative subjects in higher education). Yet this fixed, hierarchical model of culture inevitably has weaknesses. It still leaves gaps for those engaged with grassroots culture to seize the conversation, if they are somehow able to make an intervention. Hall’s work reminds us that culture is about more than just defining the shared foundations you must accept to be part of the community, and establishing the so-called “common sense” of the nation. Culture is what allows us to make sense of the world and interpret our society. When culture warriors become fixated on setting the rules for the nation and not on capturing the shifting sands of contemporary experience, they may begin to sow the seeds of their own demise. Dr Kojo Koram teaches at the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London, and writes on issues of law, race and empire