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In a PR360 session focused on the challenges associated with culture wars, Celia Richardson, director of communications and marketing at the National Trust, gave delegates advice shed taken from a political podcast.

According to the comms director, the advice was: Dont close down attacks on yourself too quickly when you are being attacked for doing the right thing.

She believes the approach offers a helpful way of having a conversation about what an organisation or brand stands for. For the National Trust, it allows the team to talk about the organisations mission that nature, beauty and history are for everyone.

Richardson, whos led the comms at the biggest conservation organisation in Europe for the past five years, told delegates that culture war issues are now part of the territory.

The National Trust has been getting shells from the print media for years, she said.

The idea is we are pandering to minorities, the idea is that weve gone woke, that we are no longer who we were, and we are a great breeding ground for culture wars.

Richardson later said: If you work on anything like climate, or if your organisation is vociferous or even just open about ED&I these hot-button issues that can be devisive you have to accept its how we live now, its part of the terrain.

She added that these challenges are no different to logistically or financial problems for brands and comms teams.

Its part of the industry we work in now get ready if youre the sort of brand that might be attacked.

Richardsons advice when facing challenges or attacks is to remember brand values.

How can you use this situation to serve that purpose? I think thats always got to be the question when you hit obstacles. What might you learn from this? What might you gain from this?

She also advised delegates against courting the culture wars.

Richardson, who worked for Historic England before joining the National Trust, admits shes no stranger to culture wars.

According to the comms boss, the National Trust faced some of its worst controversy when it published a report on the links between its properties and places in its care with slavery and colonialism.

You have to listen to everybody, you cant start disrespecting people and getting into rows with people that disagree with you when you are a national institution, she explained.

You are there to serve everyone, whether they agree with your current pursuits or not.

But we made some mistakes we tried to reason with people who didnt want to be reasoned with.

She said: What we did learn was, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The National Trust employs12,000 members of staff and has 40,000 volunteers across its 400 historic sites.

Richardson urged brands to listen to everyone in the organisation, saying that its everybodys job to combat the challenges associated with cultural conflicts everyone in the whole organisation has to get involved because you need a lot of different opinions and voices.

She also advised delegates to ensure senior decision-makers arent illiterate in media,becauseconsistent attacks can destabilise an organisation.

I think you have to make sure your board is exposed to whats going on in the world and if you find that they are not, then you are going to have a much harder job, she warned.

Comms professionals shouldnt block social media channels by having controversial debates online, said Richardson.

Referring to the National Trusts social media channels, she said: They are coming to look at pictures of horses, daffodils, we dont do counter-disinformation there. We try to use other places, including my personal Twitter (X), she explained.

As a director of communications, Richardsons personal account is followed on Twitter/X by journalists and politicians offering a way of actually talking to people.

I found, actually, youve got a lot more power and authority than you might think that you have as a third source for your organisation.

Youve got to be really careful, of course, because youre using your own personal channel to talk about something work-related, but I just think in the modern time you have an opinion... organisations do need a plethora of voices to speak for them and a plethora of personas.

However, she warned PRs not to debate people on their own terms and to avoid race-baiters online.

They are trying to have an ideological battle with you and sometimes they will lie and spread misinformation. Dont try and debate the ideology with them, just go for the method. Just always be clear on what youre doing and why you are doing it.

Commenting on how to handle the spread of false information, Richardsons method is to take a broken windows approach to repairing disinformation.

Repair every window, otherwise its much easier to break more windows, she said.

You know what sources are like now, you get the Woozle effect that a lie becomes the truth by sheer repetition.

So we unfortunately had to put a lot of time and effort into insisting [on] corrections to stop journalists casually reproducing [false] stuff about us. Its intensive if youre a small organisation.

When asked by an audience member if the comms team gets blamed for negative coverage caused by operational issues, she said: Yeah. Someone once said to me: You cant talk your way out of a situation you acted your way into.

Often they put the pressure on to do a U-turn when often you havent done anything wrong. I think thats one of the real dangers of being involved in situations like this.

Ive learned that sometimes, your job isnt to stop it, she explained.

PRWeeks two-day PR360 conference was held in Brighton on 8 and 9 May.

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'Don't close down attacks too quickly' National Trust comms boss on 'culture wars' - PR Week

Increasingly, vegans, vegetarians and others looking for meat alternatives are seeing a new option on the menu: patties that look, taste and even appear to bleed like beef hamburgers, but are actually made of soy, pea protein and other ingredients.

Now, a leading plant-based meat company called Impossible Foods plans to rebrand, in order to reach a wider audience.

From now on, Impossible Foods says that all of its green cardboard packaging will be switched to red, in a bid to appeal to the carnivorous cravings of meat eaters, according to a March 2024 news release.

Big-name, plant-based meat alternative brands like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are losing revenue at an alarming pace. Multiple brands, like the vegan chicken nugget brand Nowadays, are going out of business. And Impossible Foods private share value has dropped 89% since 2021.

Some of the plant-based meat substitute industrys woes can be attributed to politics. Many consumers associate plant-based meat substitutes with veganism, animal rights activism and left-wing politics.

Impossibles CEO, Peter McGuinness, said in 2023 that his company has an elitist reputation and that the companys rebranding is a rejection of wokeness. The so-called wokeness of Impossible and other plant-based meat substitutes shows the symbolic power that food can have in politics.

As communication scholars, we study and teach our students about the persuasive power of symbols. Even innocuous items like the food we eat are symbols that come with attached meanings and values.

Amid the highly polarized politics in the U.S., plant-based meat substitutes and their analog, real meat, have become weapons in a symbol-laden political battle between some conservatives and liberals, sometimes nicknamed the Meat Culture War. In other words, while an Impossible burger might literally be a soy patty, it is also a symbolic threat to the right-wing ideological order, a symbolic stand-in for the left-wing villain of the week.

While costs vary, products made by the plant-based meat industry can cost two to three times more than animal-based meats.

People who are higher income, younger and live in the suburbs are most likely to have tried plant-based meat substitutes, Gallup polling shows. A rural Mississippi corner store probably wont sell Impossible sausages, but an urban California Whole Foods probably will.

In some cases, conservatives have attached even more meaning to plant-based meat substitutes. Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, for example, produced a documentary in 2022 featuring the Raw Egg Nationalist, a prominent far-right influencer, who said that Impossible, Beyond and other plant-based companies are part of a soy globalist conspiracy to criminalize meat consumption and weaken citizens through poisoned food. The Raw Egg Nationalist also wrote in 2022 that plant-based meat substitutes and eggs are perverted products pushed by elites to bring civilization to the brink of madness.

Foods political symbolism is not new. Depicting East Asian men as effeminate rice eaters was used as a justification for European colonial rule in Asia in the 1800s and for later stoking anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. And during the Iraq War in the mid-2000s, some U.S. restaurants renamed french fries as freedom fries to protest Frances refusal to join the war.

More recently, some people have derisively called men who consume soy-based proteins soy boys. In response to calls for meat reduction, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst has proposed banning the trend of Meatless Mondays to combat the Lefts War on Meat.

Impossibles appeal to the political right likely wont be solved with a quick repackage. Thats because their issue is related to a deep-seated conspiratorial ideology embraced by some people in far-right political circles.

Sure, some studies in consumer psychology suggest that brand color impacts consumer preferences. For plant-based meats in particular, consumers perceptions of the products eco-friendliness and tastiness is somewhat affected by packaging color in this case, typically green. A color shift may nudge a wayward carnivore to take a taste of an Impossible brat, but thats a bandage, not a solution.

The symbolic connection between consuming the right foods and U.S. political identity is strong.

During the 2012 election, political analyst Dave Wasserman argued that who controls the Senate would come down to Cracker Barrel diners, who tend to favor options like chicken and dumplings, country fried steak and meatloaf, versus Whole Foods shoppers.

He correctly noted that electoral districts that are also home to a Whole Foods were more likely to vote blue, while districts with Cracker Barrels were more likely to vote red. Ten years later, in the summer of 2022, social media went wild when Cracker Barrel offered an Impossible sausage patty on its menu.

Some people then posted on Cracker Barrels Facebook page, lambasting the restaurant chain. As one person wrote, We dont eat in an old country store for woke burgers.

Plant-based meat substitutes are often used by conservative commentators as a symbolic stand-in for Big Government and are seen as a threat to individual liberty.

At the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz declared his wish to see PETA supporting the Republican Party now that the Democrats want to kill all the cows. At a 2020 rally in Des Moines, Iowa, then-President Donald Trump cast the anti-meat conspiracy in even more nefarious and illogical terms, saying that they want to kill our cows! You know why, right? That means youre next.

In 2021, a survey found that 44% of Republicans actively believe that there is a movement in the U.S. to ban red meat.

These fears overlap with the populist right-wing conspiracy theory of The Great Reset, meaning the belief that wealthy elites are weakening citizens particularly white men to subject them to tyrannical control and subjugation.

A 2023 article in The American Conservative argued that Impossible was at the forefront of a collective vegan madness that has seized our media and political classes not to convince people but to compel them. In the online backlash to Cracker Barrels new Impossible sausage item, some commentators similarly suggested that Cracker Barrels 5G sausages were controlled by Bill Gates.

Psychology and gender scholarship has found that traditional forms of masculinity associated with right-wing ideologies correlate with high meat consumption. Right-wing males consume red meats at higher volumes and with greater frequency than other demographics.

As communication scholars, were confident that what Impossible cant do is repackage in a way that will attract right-wing carnivores. The Meat Culture Wars wont end because of red wrappers or meaty descriptors. Theyll only end when, collectively, other items become perceived as an identity threat and globalist conspiracy and people forget about fake meat.

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Plant-based meat alternatives are trying to exit the culture wars an impossible task? - The Conversation

A western Sydney community rejected discrimination when its council overturned a library ban on a kids' book discussing same-sex parenting, advocates say.

Ahead of Friday, which marks the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia, Equality Australia praised Cumberland City Council for rejecting "American-style culture wars" and reversing the recently imposed ban.

But the council decision only came after fiery protests outside the chambers, while religious leaders and local families were among those packing the public gallery inside.

Equality Australia's legal director Ghassan Kassisieh said the council had reached a unifying verdict.

"The message sent last night was our communities are united, we don't want to be divided, books are there for everyone to read and they represent all of our families," he said on Thursday.

"I'm a gay man who grew up in western Sydney and I know what it felt like when many of our community had a very difficult conversation about marriage equality.

"(Wednesday) night to me was that moment where we could open that conversation again."

The council, which covers a population of about 240,000 people living near Parramatta, narrowly voted earlier in May to "take immediate action to rid same-sex parents books/materials in council's library service".

Mayor Lisa Lake, who evicted multiple unruly attendees during the meeting, apologised for the hurt caused by the debate following the initial motion, which she did not support.

"Cumberland council is actually quite an inclusive place and very welcoming, one of Sydney's largest multicultural communities where we all manage to live together pretty harmoniously," she said.

"It was a very divisive and unnecessary debate about a little book that had been in our libraries for five years with no complaints."

Only two councillors - Steve Christou and Eddy Sarkis - voted to keep the ban, despite six councillors having voted to implement it just a fortnight ago.

Five copies of the book A Focus On: Same Sex Parents had been in the council's libraries since 2019.

It forms part of a series that aims to inform children about "difficult realities" and "healthy ways for children to process and understand them".

Cr Christou, the former mayor who first suggested the ban, maintained the community wanted the book gone from its libraries.

"It was important that myself, as an elected representative, represented the views of our local community, and that was proven when thousands of people turned up to actively protest," he said.

"There's plenty of time for two-, three-, four- and five-year-olds to ask questions and explore their sexuality and same-sex parenting later on in life."

The book had only been borrowed once since being installed in the council libraries and Cr Christou previously admitted he had not read it before calling for the ban.

Rainbow Families executive officer Ashley Scott said the vote sent a "clear and powerful" message that every family mattered.

"Our job as parents is to help children understand the world around them and reading plays a pivotal role in this, as does seeing their families reflected in the books on their library shelves," she said.

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Same-sex book ban reversal 'a rejection of culture war' - Yahoo News Australia

The coming general election, whenever it is called, will be the most crucial yet when it comes to climate change. The time to act is running out. The choice is between Conservative climate delayers and deniers and a Labour government which can deliver the biggest investment in home-grown clean energy in British history. Labours aim is to cut energy bills for good and make our country energy-secure, all while supporting good jobs, restoring nature and making sure Britain becomes a climate leader at home and abroad.

Fourteen years of failed energy policy from the Tories, set against a backdrop of low growth, high taxes and crumbling public services, has left us beholden to dictators like Vladimir Putin for our energy needs, and exposed us to sky-high bills. It is shocking but unsurprising that at the start of this year 3.1 million households found themselves in fuel poverty.

Labour has been clear that tackling the climate crisis is the best route to tackling the energy bills crisis, because it is our reliance on fossil fuels that is driving both. This means, as one of Keir Starmers five missions, we are committed to clean power by 2030, which would make the UK the first major economy in the world to decarbonise its energy grid.

Our green prosperity plan promises green growth, energy independence, enhanced biodiversity, average savings of up to 300 on annual household energy bills, and over 650,000 new jobs in our industrial heartlands and coastal communities. It will include a warm home plan to upgrade cold, draughty homes and cut energy bills; a National Wealth Fund to invest in British industries such as electric vehicle production, ports, clean steel, hydrogen, and carbon capture and storage; and a plan to rewire Britain, unlocking billions of private investment by reforming the planning system and the grid, accelerating stalled energy projects and expediting grid connections for industry.

We already have publicly-owned energy in the UK its just not owned by the UK. According to the Common Wealth think tank, 44 per cent of our offshore wind assets are owned by state-led companies, from countries such as Denmark and Norway. Labour plans to switch on Great British Energy, a publicly-owned energy company that will invest in clean homegrown power, capitalised with 8.3bn. With our local power plan we will support community-owned and community-led energy projects: a place-based approach that puts real power back in the hands of local people.

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These plans will be part-funded by a proper windfall tax on oil and gas giants, many of whom are currently earning record profits. With Labour, economic prosperity will also mean prosperity for the environment as we improve the well-being of people and the planet. Our green prosperity plan embodies this idea, integrating economic growth with environmental sustainability, an industrial strategy with social equity.

Ive been incredibly disappointed by the Conservatives decision to opt for culture wars over climate consensus. Cross-party collaboration is crucial, as the Conservatives net zero tsar Chris Skidmore noted when he resigned as an MP in January: We should be taking the long-term decisions for the future of our country that protect our citizens, our economy and our planet, not playing short-term politics with legislation that achieves so little but does so much to destroy the reputation of the UK as a climate leader, he wrote in his resignation letter.

Yet as we see a global commitment at Cop28 to transition away from fossil fuels, the UK government has doubled down, committing instead to drilling every last drop of oil in the North Sea, watering down climate targets and blocking the roll-out of home-grown solar and onshore wind projects: the cheapest, cleanest forms of new energy. What message does this send to countries looking to the UK for leadership? This government has consistently talked down Britain in an effort to minimise or absolve our responsibility on the world stage. Its time to change that. We want to make London the green finance capital of the world and Britain a clean energy superpower, and to work with the most vulnerable and the most ambitious nations to pressure the most polluting countries to act.

This is the message Labour has been sending to communities, to businesses and to other nations around the world Labour is ready to work with you to support you on your journey to net zero. This is the thinking behind our ambition to establish a Clean Power Alliance: a global alliance of countries at the forefront of climate ambition.

Any discussion on net zero is incomplete without mentioning the natural environment. My colleagues in the shadow environment, food and rural affairs team have been setting out Labours plans to protect and enhance nature for future generations: whether that involves clearing up after the governments sewage scandal, or targeting a zero-waste economy by 2050 that will end the scourge of plastic pollution and the depletion of our precious natural resources. Together we are looking at nature-based solutions to climate change. Our peatlands, wetlands and woodlands are crucial carbon sinks, but also part of helping us combat domestic climate consequences such as flooding and food insecurity, and providing essential habitats for flora and fauna.

Ive been an MP for 19 years now but have never been so excited by an opportunity such as the one we have before us to put climate and nature at the heart of government. Never have I been so enthused by the potential social, economic and climate benefits that this scale of green investment in clean energy could deliver. The world is at a critical juncture and the time for complacency has long passed. Labour is ready to deliver change, and its time we got the chance to do it.

This article first appeared in a Spotlight print report on Sustainability, published on 10 May 2024.Read it in full here.

[Read more: Chris Skidmore The Conservatives no longer conserve]

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The Conservatives have chosen culture wars over climate consensus - The New Statesman

I have a Polish gay friend who is a second-class citizen. This kind of a statement if said between 2015 and 2023, west of the Oder-Neisse line (Polands Western frontier), would have been understood as little more than an anodyne boutade. But deployed around the countrys last legislative race, in October 2023, to score outrage points against the social conservatism of the defeated Law and Justice (PiS) government, it attains all the persuasive power of a five-year-olds temper tantrum. If indeed homosexuality is a category against which PiS has discriminated in its eight years in office, then that second-class citizenship should correlate with the entire demographic being targeted. If true, this would turn any individual testimony, on either side, into a statistical irrelevanceone that hinders, not aids, the rhetorical frame into which that statistic is slotted.

The statement shifts focus away from the legal rudiments of the discrimination being alleged (an omission which insinuates it may not be as blatantly evident as suggested) and redirects it towards one loneand potentially impartialwitness, whose anonymity need not be mendacious, but suggests at least some degree of self-perception. This is supported by a cursory survey of Polands long-brewing culture wars over sexual mores, which long predate Law and Justices (PiS) legislative victory over the liberal-centrist Civic Platform (PO) in 2015, and which are unlikely to be decisively won by either side. This glance reveals, unsurprisingly, that a substantial segment of the Polish LGTB community is at odds with the countrys conservative majority in a tug-of-war whose battlelines dont always track with partisan cleavages.

A non-trivial segment of Polands LGBT votersto the extent a sexual orientation can be assimilated to an electoral blocfind a home within PiS, and even further to the Right. And some in the anti-PiS opposition are less amenable to the maximalist, sexually libertarian views prevalent in the West under the same LGBT rubric. Whereas the right to legal succor against homophobic hate crimes, same-sex unions, and adoption by gay couples features more prominently in the Polish agenda than in the Western European countries that have already turned these rights into law, one feature is common with the West. Other rights are being lumped into Polands ideological struggle, too, including the right to align school curricula with understandings of sexual education deemed outlandish by a majority of the electorate, the right to fly LGBT flags on public premises, the right to transgender bathrooms, and more.

There are several striking features about the quote which opens this article. It was made to a group of young professionals taking a Saturday morning class at a Catholic university in Madridan odd setting in which to import woke and socially unscientific tropes. The luncheon speaker was a young former entrepreneur, now a right-of-center member of the European Parliament (MEP), who proudly holds onto her pro-life legislative record even as her party gradually embraces abortion. This lawmakers parliamentary allies, Civic Platform (PO), are purporting to restore liberal democracy in Poland, which they allege had been suspended under PiS. It is worth noting that POs restoration of democracy is being carried out through the purging of civil servants deemed disloyal, the takeover of public media, and the storming of the presidential palace to detain and imprison two legally pardoned politicians.

Our guest MEP was naturally loath to find fault with her Polish allies so close to the June 2024 EU election cycle, even off-the-record. In the background, Spains socialist PM is staging his own coup against the rule of law through an unconstitutional amnesty for seditious Catalan politicians. In nominally opposing Snchezs coup, but not Civic Platforms, she thereby normalized the very double standard that her voters have sent her to Brussels to oppose. But whats more salient is that a self-hyped elitist of her sorta cognitive meritocrat who attended top schools and worked for the World Bankwould attempt to persuade a group of young Catholics that gays in Poland are persecuted because someone told her soand to hell with the facts. In choosing not to disclose this persons identity, I am not doing her party any favors, for her colleagues would all likely reason along the same dumbed-down lines.

It is possible to intuit that the inferior rights this speaker alleged are in part self-perceivedfueled by cultural battles unrelated to the legal possibilities of living a fully homosexual life. The conflation of LGBT rights with the right to legislate a whole-of-society agenda that is not even majoritarian among homosexuals is becoming the political norm in both Western and Central Europe. At an earlier session of the aforementioned forum, a prominent national leader of the same party, who had also been governor of a large Spanish region, took aim at the right-populist VOX party, which, in the lead-up to our July 23 general election, saw one alderman in a small village throw the rainbow flag off a balcony. This leader claimed the party had, then and there, revealed its homophobia. Naturally, she had nothing to say about the policy, decreed by that villages previous left-wing local government, to place the flag on par with Spains and the EUs.

It is not hard to see why. For this second oratoras likely for the firstthe rainbow flag snugly fills the representational space of sexual orientation, even if no other sexual orientation has waved a flag in the past, and even if breaking this millenarian pattern may open a Pandoras box of cultural conflict. She omitted that flags arent usually flown to symbolize feelings towards other human beings but instead to command loyalty and arouse political action. Theyre waved on behalf of nations, causes, lobbiesnot on behalf of pet lovers or poetry readers. She ignored arguments that, whereas the rainbow flag may appeal to the identitarian impulses of a substantial section of the homosexual community, it doesnt represent these individuals as homosexuals, but as members of a cause, a political lobby working to advance an agendaworthwhile though it may sometimes be.

By conflating homosexuality with the willpower to mold society, these two self-proclaimed liberal stalwarts blind themselves to the many tyrannical ways in which the LGBT lobby is already remodeling society. It not only crassly instrumentalizes the sexual orientation of millions of well-meaning citizens, but also risks turning their fabled homophobic stigmas into reality. If they do desire to pit society against itself over the many ways of feeling sexually attracted, they should keep treading their current path: depriving parents of the ability to teach their children sexual morality, aligning language with political correctness, and reputationally persecuting wrongthinkall while claiming its done in the name of homosexual freedoms. But even then, their disastrous endgame will be in vain, for the sleaziest campaigns of social engineering cannot bend the true meaning of freedom.

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When a Culture War Becomes a Truth War The European Conservative - The European Conservative