After the Evil Empire: Britain’s Long War on Difference

“…since the gradual collapse of the Evil Empire of Communism left nothing to unite the rich few and numerous poor on the right into the semblance of unity except a factious agitation over ‘family values’.”
— Edmund White, The Farewell Symphony (1997)

When Edmund White wrote those words in the late 1990s, he was diagnosing America – but it might as well have been a prophecy for Britain. When the Evil Empire fell, the world lost its convenient villain. Suddenly the Cold War’s moral clarity – West good, East bad – dissolved into the messy reality of inequality, greed, and fear. Without Communism to unite the “good guys”, the Right needed a new glue.

They found it, of course, in family values. Or rather, in the theatre of protecting them – a constant performance of moral panic designed to keep a fractured alliance of billionaires, landlords, and the anxious middle classes marching in the same direction. And here we are, forty years later, living through a sequel nobody asked for … a low-budget sequel with the same villains and worse writing

Section 28 and the First Act of Moral Panic

The 1980s gave us Thatcherism: privatisation, deregulation, and the gospel of self-reliance. But alongside the economic revolution came something colder – the moral one. When you rip up the social fabric, you need a story to justify the wreckage. “Traditional values” served perfectly.

Section 28 was its British masterpiece – a legal injunction against acknowledging that gay people even existed, wrapped in the language of child protection. It told a generation of queer people that our lives were shameful, unspeakable, and dangerous to children.

Like many gay kids, school was a nightmare. I didn’t understand my own identity at that time – I was afraid to name it – and the horrendously bullying only made it harder to come to terms with. My parents didn’t know how to help, and my teachers were hamstrung: they did their best, but to go too far risked their jobs. their silence gave power to the tormentors.

Section 28 wasn’t really about schools or libraries. It was about distraction – a convenient outrage to rally the faithful while poverty deepened and inequality soared. You can’t build social cohesion from trickle-down economics, but you can from shared disgust.

The Illusion of Liberation

By the time New Labour swept in, it felt as though the storm might be over. Section 28 repealed, civil partnerships, the Equality Act, rainbow flags fluttering from council buildings – progress at last!

For many of us, those years felt like a homecoming. My partner (later husband) and I felt an enormous sense of relief as Labour swept to power, with its liberal agenda and immediate difference from the sleaze and corruption of the Conservatives.

But even then, the seeds of our current malaise were already sprouting. Blair’s “third way” was really a sleight of hand – economic neoliberalism in a friendlier suit. It offered inclusion without redistribution, visibility without real power. While the culture opened up, the social contract continued to fray. Britain learned to smile for the Pride parade while quietly selling off the NHS.

We mistook tolerance for acceptance – and acceptance for safety.

The Gathering Darkness

Then came austerity, the financial crash, the hollowing of communities. People became angry, frightened, alienated. And when people are afraid, they don’t turn to bankers or politicians for blame – they turn on their neighbours.

Immigrants. Muslims. Trans people. Drag queens. Refugees. Each decade brings a new outgroup to despise, a new “threat to the family”. It’s the same story with different costumes.

My family was by no means a model. There’s a history of alcoholism that has played out in every generation. My dad is a survivor of domestic abuse. My husband has his own stories. Family isn’t the be-all that “conservatives” pretend it is: for many of us it is a kind of hell that is only escaped when we create a “family of choice”.

Brexit brought the poison that had been moving beneath the calm liberal waves to the surface. Since Brexit I have encountered homophobic abuse – I had not experienced that since the late nineties when I first came out. My Muslim friends are also afraid. My European friends are afraid. My gay, lesbian, and trans friends are afraid.

Whatever its original motivations, Brexit has become synonymous with hate and has given it permission to be voiced – and acted upon.

It’s no accident that these moral crusades flare up precisely when the economy is failing and inequality is obscene. The “factious agitation” White described isn’t a side effect – it’s the point. If we’re busy arguing over who can use which toilet, we’re not asking why we can’t afford one.

The New “Family Values“

Now the “family” must be defended again – not from Communists or homosexuals (yet), but from gender ideology, queer books, migrants, and drag storytime. Always, there must be something to fear.

Always a danger. Always a scapegoat. Always a story about innocence under threat.

It’s striking how quickly the same language reappears: “protecting children”, “defending women”, “keeping politics out of schools.” But beneath the slogans lies the same grim machinery – the policing of identity and desire in the name of stability.

When Edmund White spoke of “factious agitation”, he captured the paradox perfectly: the more divided society becomes, the louder the performance of unity must be. And nothing unites a fearful people like a shared enemy.

Who Is the Family For?

The word “family” used to make me flinch. It meant the world that rejected me, not the one that embraced me. But over time, I’ve learned that family is a verb as much as a noun – something you do with others, not something you’re assigned.

In the LGBTQIA+ community there is a phrase: “family of choice”. I mentioned it earlier. Unlike many, I was lucky to have parents who accepted me; but I’ve seen what happens when family becomes a weapon.

For many LGBTQIA+ individuals, the friends they make in the community offer the love, acceptance, and support that their birth families should have offered. I would understand why the word “family” as co-opted by the Right would be frightening and offensive.

Maybe that’s the quiet rebellion: to live as though their story isn’t the only one. To define family by care instead of conformity, by love instead of lineage.

They can keep their “family values.” We’ll keep the values that make family worth having.

Coda: The Empire Strikes Inward

So yes – the Evil Empire fell. But the machinery that needed enemies didn’t. It simply turned its gaze inward, building new moral empires within the ruins of the old.

Their story of the traditional family isn’t just nostalgia – it’s a weaponised idea, built to create outsiders and silence dissent. In previous posts I have written about Stigma Machines and Systemic Violence. I suggest that “The Family” as forced upon us by the Right is a Stigma Machine designed to create disenfranchisement and persecution of minorities to distract for the real issue of the massive accumulation of power and wealth into the hands of few and fewer individuals. The Right’s business is creating Stigma Machines to perpetrate and legitimise Systemic Violence.

And yet, despite everything – the laws, the headlines, the hate – I don’t believe they’ve won. Because the one thing fear can’t destroy is connection. And as long as we keep reaching for one another – in words, in protest, in tenderness – their empire will always be smaller than ours.