You could argue, of course, that all this doesn’t really matter that much. It’s a series of small storms in ungenerous teacups. And sometimes in the past few years I’ve thought that too. I spent five years as chair of the freedom of expression advocacy group, Index on Censorship, and in that time its dedicated staff highlighted the cases of artists and writers and journalists in many different countries, who face imprisonment and sometimes death for telling the truth or expressing themselves artistically. The courage of some of these people would often make me weep. The exiled Belarusian journalists who went back into the country to support the democratic candidate in the stolen election of 2020 and are now in prison in terrible conditions. The Mexican journalists who try to expose the criminal cartels that run their towns and cities and regularly end up dead. Last week for my BBC radio programme The Briefing Room I spoke to a journalist in Niger who is in fear of his life. After those kinds of conversations it’s easy to become dismissive of our culture wars-based arguments. They seem so petty.