Nick Hubble

@thehubble101

Aberystwyth-based writer, researcher & critic. Author: Culture Wars in Britain (May, 2026). Columnist at Vector. Incoming editor of Foundation. Nonbinary (they/them)🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️.

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Nick Hubble@thehubble101· 12d

One offer closes and another one opens.. Emerald Publishing are offering 40% off all social sciences titles, including Culture Wars in Britain, at Emerald Bookstore throughout August. Apply code AUGUST40 at checkout. Link and further details in the quoted thread. #Sociology #AcademicSky #CultureWars

promotional slide for Nick Hubble's Culture wars in Britain from Emerald Publishing.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· 18d

Haltung ist hot. CSD Berlin Pride today.

Front of Berlin Pride today. Banner says 'Haltung ist hot' (Taking a political stand is hot).

Sunlight through bubbles at Berlin Pride today.

Very wide, very long street full of people at Berlin Pride.

Looking in the other direction towards Die Siegessäule.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· 26d

My book Culture Wars in Britain is currently reduced again on Amazon to £14.19 (slightly cheaper on Kindle) until 29 July 2026. It doesn't just contextualise the events of the last decade but provides a longer history of culture wars in Britain since before WW1 and explains why we are where we are.

Cover of Culture Wars in Britain by Nick Hubble in the Society Now series of Emerald Publications.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Jul 1

Cool to see Decades volumes on the @bloomsburylit.bsky.social stall at BAMS/MSA #WeirdModernisms.

Bloomsbury Academic stall at the BAMS/MSA Weird Modernisms conference at Loughborough. Front left are The 1920s, The 1930s, and The 1940s.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Jun 28

Morning, Womble! It's 28 June and so I'm reading Iain Banks's Walking on Glass, which centres on that day. I bought it when it first came out in paperback in 1986, forty years ago.

1986 Futura paperback edition of Walking on Glass by Iain Banks. Black lettering on white cover with slightly embossed abstract patterning.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Jun 20

I have seen copies of my books in Waterstones before but never on a display table with a 'signed by the author' sticker. Nice to find Culture Wars in Britain sitting under a quote by Margaret Atwood. Also especially cool because Finding Refuge by @andreahammel.bsky.social is on a nearby shelf.

Book stand at Waterstones Aberystwyth. In the middle of table, the red book with white circle is my Culture Wars in Britain with a 'signed by the author sticker'. The serendipitous quote on the stand is Margaret Atwood: 'Science and fiction both begin with similar questions. What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.'

Shelf in Waterstones Aberystwyth. On the second shelf down, the third book from the left is Andrea Hammel's Finding Refuge: Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Fled to Wales to Escape the Nazis.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Jun 9

Agreed. I have three copies of Tom Nairn's The Break-Up of Britain with interesting cover variants. Very much the story of my life (and everyone else in Britain) and ongoing. Essential for understanding what happened in the Senedd elections last month and more generally what is happening in the UK.

Three copies of Tom Nairn's The Break-Up of Britain. L to R: 1981 Verso paperback expanded edition of the book first published in 1977; 2015 Common Ground reissue of their 2003 edition; 2021 Verso third edition.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· May 29

In the article, McTague draws on Disraeli's framing of the 'Irish question' as 'England is the cause of all the misery in Ireland'and therefore 'revolution' would be the answer. This leads McTague to write this paragraph applying Disraeli's logic to the current moment and considering (2/-)

What of the Disraelian remedy: revolution? Are we able to successfully revolt in Britain today? We have tried, it seems, for the past decade, without much effect. For Anthony Barnett, Tom Nairn and the modern-day Chartists, the answer is obvious: it is no longer Ireland’s connection to England, but England’s connection to Britain, that anachronistic prison-state for independent nations in need of liberation from the hubris of caring about the Donbas, Washington or Beijing. Without England the UK would fall apart, freeing Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland too – so goes the argument. I see the merit in it, but why is Britain different in this regard to Spain or France or Germany or Italy? The crisis is simpler and more profound. It is not the UK which is in the odious position of immiserating the people of this country, but the British state managing its affairs.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· May 28

The direct link between anti-trans ideology and English nationalism is evident from this @bylinetimes.bsky.social report of James Orr, now Reform head of policy, on Charlie Kirk's show. Orr: “If anyone can become a woman, what is a woman? If anyone can become an Englishman, what is an Englishman?”

Orr closed his answer to Kirk by saying that the biblical model he offered for the integration of migrants is the Book of Ruth. “Even at the end of the book,” he said, “she’s still Ruth the Moabitess – her identity is still there. She’s incorporated into the people of Israel, but she remains a Moabitess.”

Ruth is incorporated but never becomes ‘an Israelite’. A few minutes later, Orr made the architecture explicit: “If anyone can become a woman, what is a woman? If anyone can become an Englishman, what is an Englishman?”

An Englishman, in the analogy he draws, is presumably a biological person; a thing you are at birth. The suggestion that is reasonable to infer from Orr’s comment is that the nation belongs to the Englishman as one of the white – native – race.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· May 13

Had a great evening launching and talking about my new book Culture Wars in Britain with @emmas.bsky.social at Waterstones in Aberystwyth. Lots of good questions and points to discuss.

Two people sitting in a bookshop behind a table covered with a cloth with a Waterstones symbol, with a pile of copies of Culture Wars in Britain on it.

Chatting while waiting before the beginning of the event at Waterstones tonight.

Author standing with Culture Wars in Britain in front of the window of Waterstones Aberystwyth, with a copy of the book visible in the window display.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· May 10

the future of the culture wars which have been a feature of British public life since at least the constitutional crisis of 1910, as I explain in Culture Wars in Britain.

Contents page of Culture Wars in Britain: I. Introduction: What are Culture Wars?. 2. Culture, War, Class and Gender. 3. The Break-Up of Normative Britain. 4. The Brexit Divide. 5. The Culture Wars in the 2020s. 6. The Future of the Culture Wars.

Nobody asked me about the future of the culture wars when I was writing this book, which illustrates the problem with prevailing scepticism concerning them in Britain. Because people really need to start thinking about the future of the culture wars. To address the way that public political discussion has been closed down by the new feeling rules that have emerged since Brexit there has been a call for ‘an emotionally literate approach to politics would begin with awareness of how these stories develop, circulate and impact on public understandings of feelings and their political legitimacy’ (Moss, Robinson & Watts, 2024: p. 187). Alongside this, there is also a need for informed understanding of what culture wars are, how they work, and how they have been a major part of British history since at least 1910. This book has set out an outline of that history and includes in the Introduction, a guide to the main theories concerning culture wars and how they have been written about in the USA and the UK. My aim in doing this was to encourage people in general to take culture wars seriously, but also to provide resources for future researchers to build on.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· May 7

Following Labour's election victory in 2024, new Secretary of State for Culture, Lisa Nandy, proclaimed that 'the culture wars were now over'. Today, they are finding out that they are not in part because they walked into every Tory culture-war trap set for them, as I explain in my new book.

If Labour hadn’t fallen into any of the Tory Party’s culture war traps, however, why over the subsequent twelve months did they find themselves presiding over record fines on universities, enforcing a Supreme Court proclamation that the legal definition of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ is rooted in biological sex, and committed to rebuilding a Britain centred on economic and national security, which has entailed a promise to spend five per cent of GDP on defence by 2035 (Adu, 2025). It turns out that trying to outmanoeuvre your opponents by adopting more extreme versions of their own positions is a bit like the sorcerer’s apprentice invoking a spell that he can’t stop or control but must live with the consequences of forever.

Viewed in retrospect, therefore, it looks as though rather than avoiding the Tories’ culture war traps – not just with respect to gender, but also concerning issues such as the future of the British union, immigration and the right to protest – Labour walked right into them. As a result, they have boxed themselves into a situation in which politics is governed by the logic of culture wars that they don’t understand and repeatedly try to publicly disassociate themselves from. While we are caught in this stasis, the same patterns of self-reflexivity and schismogenesis which have driven cultural and social change over the past century, as analyzed in this book, continue to flow through ever-changing dynamic encounters and configurations. In the Introduction, I outlined the three possible outcomes that [Gregory] Bateson thought could arise from such processes: fusion, elimination or dynamic equilibrium.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Apr 28

Migration is normal. Historical timeline of migration into Cymru/Wales - currently on display at Aberystwyth Arts Centre. #Cymru

The History of Migration in Wales. Timeline. 31,000 BCE - the 2010s. From Neolithic farmers from Anatolia, through the Romans, Irish settlers, the Normans, Flemish refugees, Ango-Norman conquest of Edward I of England, prisoners from Napoleonic wars, industrial revolution, Belgian and Basque refugees, kindertransport and other refugees from Nazi Europe, postwar and up to Syrian & Ukrainian refugees.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Apr 25

Walking behind the two flags today at Aberystwyth Pride.

Pride march in Aberystwyth today. On the left is the progress pride flag next to the red Yes Cymru flag.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Apr 23

What's that tropical paradise you ask? Man, that's Aberystwyth in April. (I'm aware there is a downside to this too).

Looking down on the shallow sea in the sun. Rocks mid picture, and cliffs and coastline on the top right.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Apr 20

Quite. Someone on the Guardian mobile app enjoyed putting that headline on the rolling news thread.

Guardian mobile app headline: Starmer says it 'beggars belief' he wasn't told about Mandelson vetting failure as he faces down the Commons. Photo is of the rightwing UK Prime Minister.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Apr 19

On the #perch today with Jo Walton and Ada Palmer's Trace Elements. So far, I've only read the first chapter on the author-reader contract. This would have been useful over the many years I spent teaching popular/genre fiction. On a personal level, I always feel a slight anxiety that I'm not (1/-)

Copy of Jo Walton and Ada Palmer's Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy. - propped up against a fairly southerly garden wall in a sun trap reading spot in a Welsh garden.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Apr 14

I'm not supposed to sign up for anything or make decisions for at least 24 hours because I had day surgery under a general today (for something mundane I've been waiting since 2019 for), but I want to commit to weird future plans in public (what else is this site for?). I'll sleep on it...😇😴

Hand with hospital name tag around wrist (with most details erased) taken while on a day ward.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Apr 11

Got back home yesterday evening from my eastercon and BSA railtrip. The book haul doesn't sum up all my entusuasms but it covers quite a few of my bases.

From the bottom: Gregor Benton and Yang Yang, eds, The Longest Night: Three Generations of Chinese Trotskyists in Defeat, Jail, Exile, and Diaspora (Brill, vol 329 in the Historical Materialism series, 1215pp (!); Kate Macdonald's The Shetland Witch and Stories from the Shetland Witch; Ana Sun's Futures to Live By (NewCon Polestars vol 12); Christopher Priest's The Recollections (Briardene - I pre-ordered this and selected the 'pick up at con' option and I also went to the launch event at the con; Lyndsey Croal's Dark Crescent (Luna); Nick Hubble's Culture wars in Britain (advance copy of my own book from Emerald Publications); And Farah Mendlesohn's Considering the Female Man, Or, As the Bear Swore (also Luna - but their Academia Lunare imprint - technically, this arrived in the post before I left for the con but I took it with me and I did go to the launch event that took place there)

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Apr 8

Advance copy of MY NEW BOOK, Culture Wars in Britain, front and centre on the @emeraldpublishing.bsky.social stall at this year's @britsoci.bsky.social annual conference. Still exciting after all these years to see the actual book for the first time. #BritSoc26 #Sociology #AcademicSky

A large non binary person dresses in black is holding up a very vivid red book with the title, Culture Wars in Britain, in front of a publishers' stand for Emerald Publishing.

Emerald Publishing stand at the annual BSA Conference - standing up in the middle of the display is Nick's little red book.

Close up of Culture Wars in Britain on Emerald Stand. Appropriately placed between The 21st Century Ladz and Working-Class People in UK Higher Education.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Apr 2

Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ, Or, As the Bear Swore by @effjayem.bsky.social turned up in the post in time to start reading on the train. Great cover with Judith Clute's cover art from the 1980s UK Women's Press SF edition.

Open copy of Farah Mendlesohn's Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ sitting on a rucksack on a train seat next to window.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Apr 2

On way to Birmingham for @easterconuk.bsky.social. I'm on a few panels. Friday at 3pm SFF and Trans History (Pavilion).6pm Reviewing as a Conversation (Salisbury-Wellington). And then on Sunday at 6pm I'm talking about Microgenres (also in Salisbury-Wellington). See you there.

Screen shot of my schedule at Easyercon this weekend. All the information is in the body of the post.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Mar 13

Just bought a copy of Will Hayward's new book at the packed launch in Cardiff this evening. I told him I'd read his first two books and I'd let him know if this one was better, so might have to write a review. The Introduction doesn't pull its punches: 'Wales we need to talk. You are being screwed.'

Copyright page of Will Hayward's Who Cares About Wales? Inscribed 'Dear Nick, Thanks for the support. Will'.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Mar 2

Fantastic new @bsfa.bsky.social Vector on #Zoefuturism, guest edited by Yen Ooi and Stephen Oram. I don't think I've ever felt quite so connected to the other contributions to a publication. We've moved beyond the closed/open binary to reach the fluid cultures beyond. 'Always multiple, never one'.

Cover of Vector 302: Zoefuturism. Cover art featuring fossils in chalk from Botany Bay, Margate, is by Mika Tohmon.

Contents of Vector 302. Editorial by Phoenix Alexander. Guest editorial by Yen Ooi and Stephen Oram. Kincaid in Short by Paul Kincaid. The Resistance by Nick Hubble. 'Princess Donut Will See You Now': Inside the Crawl Making Waves in the LitRPG Genre. A Review of Dungeon Crawler Carl by Marta F. Suarez. Zoefuturism & the Nature of Life by Jesse Rowell. Revisiting Collaborative Imagination through a Zoefuturistic Lens by Joey Eshrich and Ed Finn. A Very British Genealogy of Zoefuturism by Christine According. The Natural History of the Future by Grant Wythoff. This Art Will Die by David Polfeldt. The Making of Asian Pirate Musical by Zhui Ning Chang. Zoetology, Vitalism and the Anthropocene Refugio in the Southern Reach Series by LYU Guangzhou. Relational Cosmology and the City of Mind by Jasper Kang. Relational Activism: Introducing the short story The God in the Box in relation to ZOEFUTURISM by Bette Adriaanse. Eternally Displace Persons? Territorial Bodies and The Ministry of Time.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Feb 21

I discuss the relationship between culture, war, class and gender and how this has shaped devolution, Brexit, the break-up of the two-party political system and what's happening now in the 2020s. And the future divisions to come. Intended for all readers. Publisher site link below #Sociology (2/3)

However, Brexit didn’t just represent a collective failure by politicians, it also exposed the limitations of the UK constitution. For example, it wasn’t normal for both the monarch and the UK Supreme Court to become involved in ongoing democratic processes, as they were when Boris Johnson, newly installed as Tory leader and Prime Minister, attempted to prorogue parliament for five weeks during the Autumn of 2019. Commentators were quick to claim that there were constitutional precedents for such an action and that it was not a ‘coup’ as some opponents were claiming. Nevertheless, people know when the rules are being changed on the hoof, and the result was public demonstrations. More than 2000 people marched against ‘the coup’ in the town where I live. As in the years after 1910, public respect for government processes was destroyed by Brexit. While the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic functioned like the outbreak of the First World War to halt further protest and possible unrest, it was already too late: on or about December 2019 human character had already changed.

By celebrating Brexit as a declaration of ‘parliamentary sovereignty’, authoritarian nationalists had moved Britain on to a different constitutional path from the one that could be traced back through late 1990s devolution all the way to the passing in succession of the Irish Home Rule Act in 1912, the Government of Scotland Act in 1913, and the Welsh Church Act 1914. As in 1910, this change in sovereignty is reconfiguring the symbolic order and changing subjectivity. One consequence of this is that ‘new feeling rules’ have developed, which are affecting public political discussion and even how people regard their own identity. However, Brexit was not just the result of a shift in attitudes towards the EU, it was also the product of preexisting political trends and culture wars. Before I discuss Brexit in terms of the ongoing territorial break-up of Britain, I first examine how it can be seen as anothe…

In the Introduction, I described how following the elections in 2024 of Keir Starmer in the UK and Donald Trump in the USA, the culture wars and politics of the two countries have converged. I cited the claim of the leading polling expert, John Curtice that culture wars are now the principal battleground of British politics. Consequently, it isn’t possible to discuss the culture wars in 2020s Britain without referring directly to what used to be thought of as party politics. Although the contest in the 2019 General Election appeared to be the traditional one between Labour and the Tories, the two parties were largely functioning as proxies for a culture-war divide driven by Brexit. As we’ve seen, the main political story of the 2020s so far is that the two-party system, which has been central to structuring British life since the formation of the modern state in the 1920s, has now completely collapsed. Its place has been taken by an asymmetric confrontation between, on the one hand, forces attempting to various degrees to repackage the superseded British warfare state of the twentieth century and its traditional cultural norms into a new type of authoritarian sovereign nationalism and, on the other hand, a more amorphous reaching out towards a new post-sovereign culture characterized by different possibilities of living.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Feb 19

Today is the publication day of the paperback editions of 3 volumes in the Decades series @bloomsburylit.bsky.social. These means that 9 of the 10 volumes are now in paperback, with only the recently published The 1920s still outstanding (and that will appear in due course). Further details below 1/

Cover of The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Nick Hubble, Luke Seaber and Elinor Taylor. One of 10 volumes in Bloomsbury's The Decades Series.

Cover of The 1950s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe & Nick Hubble. One of 10 volumes in Bloomsbury's The Decades Series.

Cover of The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Philip Tew, James Riley & Melanie Seddon. One of 10 volumes in Bloomsbury's The Decades Series.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Jan 15

Great list of contributors to the latest issue of ParSec, which also includes five reviews by me. What more could you want? Available from PS Publishing.

ParSec #15 Winter 2026. Stories from Lavie Tidhar, Liz Williams, R.B. Kelly, Gary Gibson, Priya Sharma, Donna Scott, Stark Holborn, David Gullen, Lisa Fransson and D.A. Xiaolin Spires

Contents of ParSec 15 and Reviews Index.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Jan 9

Amazingly, we made it to Berlin on our flight yesterday evening. We were a bit sceptical in advance due to the weather warnings. But we left Aberystwyth in the morning, dropped our son (going back to Bath uni) at Shrewsbury railway station and got to Manchester airport and flew with no difficulty.

View of snowy Berlin street from taxi - blurred coloured lights from signs and shop displays.

Snowy street corner in Berlin taken from taxi at red stop light. The advertising hoarding announces a 'Polar Experience'.

Snowy Berlin street. Someone is pulling a trolley case along the pavement. Reassuring graffiti to the left.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Jan 6

Back to reality: the snow has all melted, it's raining against the window, and I'm checking the proofs for my forthcoming book, Culture Wars in Britain. I was tempted to subtitle it, 'No Culture Wars Please, We're British' and that survives as a section head in the conclusion. #proofs #Sociology

Title page in proof: Culture Wars in Britain: The Myth of Exceptionalism and the Reality of Division. By Nick Hubble. Emerald Publishing (in the Society Now series).

Contents. Preface

List of Abbreviations

1. Introduction: What Are Culture Wars?

2. Culture, War, Class and Gender

3. The Break-up of Normative Britain

4. The Brexit Divide

5. The Culture Wars in the 2020s

6. The Future of the Culture Wars

Bibliography

Index

1: INTRODUCTION: WHAT ARE CULTURE WARS?

The most common response I have received from people on telling them I am writing this book is ‘what are culture wars?’ This is entirely understandable because the idea of culture wars is a very recent addition to British social and political discourse. According to researchers from Kings College London, UK press articles using the term rose from just 21 in 2015 to 534 in 2020 (Duffy et al, 2021). In part, this rapid conceptual shift was due to attempts to understand what had happened in 2016 with the EU referendum and the election of Donald Trump for a first presidential term in America. Since then, we have grown used to a diet of opinion columns and phone-in shows discussing issues such as cancel culture, 15-minute cities, 20 mph zones, free speech at universities, personal pronouns and gender-neutral toilets.

Nevertheless, there remains considerable skepticism in Britain as to the idea of culture wars and whether they are just an import from America that doesn’t really apply to the UK. It should be noted that maybe a quarter of those newspaper articles from 2020 took the position that culture wars are either overblown by the media or manufactured for political reasons. Even these skeptical articles were divided with the right-wing press seeing the left as having overstated the existence of culture wars in its obsession with ‘identity politics’, while the left-leaning press tended to depict the political right, especially the post-2019 Conservative government, as weaponizing culture wars to distract attention away from the hardship and inequality that their economic policies were causing.

Surely, however, it must be clear by now that the British approach to the culture wars since Brexit has led us deeper and deeper into crisis? Unfortunately, current trends at the time this manuscript was completed suggest otherwise.

NO CULTURE WARS PLEASE, WE’RE BRITISH

Following the mainstream acceptance of anti-identity politics, the received wisdom in the mid-2020s has become that the British public are no longer particularly bothered by culture war issues. It is this kind of thinking that makes it possible for Sunder Katwala of the British Future thinktank to claim, as quoted in Byline Times by Adam Bienkov, that ‘the median voter who backed leave in 2016 and the Conservatives in 2019 is actually now very moderate on most of these foundational identity issues’ (Bienkov, 2024: p. 22). The problem with this statement is that ‘moderate’ implies that there is some central ground and those occupying positions on either side of it are, by definition, immoderate or extreme. However, the fate of the current Labour government shows the limitations of acting as though culture war issues are not really important.

Nick Hubble@thehubble101· Jan 5

Also ... That's a lot of snow for us (we're about 300m from the sea).