The Spectator - The attacks on Britain’s history have backfired

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The attacks on Britain’s history have backfired

Gareth Roberts7 May 2024, 11:10am

Students call on Oxford University to decolonise (Getty Images)

UK university courses on race and colonialism are facing the axe due to cuts. ‘There’s not very much about race and colonialism on the curriculum to start with,’ fumed Professor Hakim Adi at the report, which revealed that Kent university’s anthropology course and a music programme at Oxford Brookes is under threat. Adi, a former leader of Chichester university’s history of Africa programme, told the Observer: ‘It sends a signal from those in power that these types of subjects are not desired…they just won’t be taught in higher education, if this trend continues’.

This empire obsession is very strange and unfair

To which one is tempted to reply, in the words of Sergeant Major Williams from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, ‘Oh dear, how sad, never mind’. I’m surprised at Professor Adi’s assertion on race and colonialism being sidelined: it often seems as if we talk about little else, particularly in the universities, where ‘decolonisation’ is the starter, main course and pudding of the discourse.

This empire obsession is very strange and unfair; it revives the long-gone imperial and colonial past and views it through only one tiny lens, as if it was in any way directly relevant – indeed central – to modern British society. I’m all for studying history, but this way of studying the past is flawed: it’s as if someone was to dredge up the wars of the Spanish succession every time there is a discussion on low traffic neighbourhoods. Isn’t it strange how people only yack on about history when they can find a way to use it to charge up their own contemporary grievance and resentment?

Wouldn’t it it better – certainly better for the individual – to forget what happened in the past? My own ancestors, beyond three or four generations, are totally lost to history. Some tentative investigations have only confirmed the handed-down stories that they were an unbroken lineage of agricultural peasants or indentured servants going back indistinguishably into the mists. I’m pretty sure they led impoverished existences of backbreaking toil and powerless misery. But would it be worth my time, or anybody else’s, obsessing about them and their sorry lot?

Surely it’s preferable to let these things fade. We have our own lives to muck up, after all. The Norman Conquest must have been a shocking and seismic event in the eleventh century, but it wasn’t too long before everyone forgot about it and muddled together. People certainly remembered it, of course, but it didn’t matter any more.

Younger readers may be surprised to hear that, not so very long ago, most of us preferred to live in this way – to look forwards rather than backwards. Yes, we were interested in the past. But most of my generation gleaned all we knew of colonisation from bank holiday afternoon screenings of Zulu and Carry On Up The Khyber, or sitcoms like the aforementioned It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, which portrayed the British abroad as blithering posh idiots and daft squaddies, neither of which wanted to be there. We lived, after all, in the world of The Specials, Soul II Soul and Desmond’s. The idea of real nostalgia for colonial days would’ve been laughable. I vividly recall during my first term at university in 1989 a fellow student (who was not an idiot) asking the lecturer ‘Sorry, but what’s the “British Empire”?’

It isn’t only dull academics who can’t stop banging on about the Empire. The lost tribe of the Remainers have it as a permanent gripe, with their bizarre characterisation of Leave voters as nostalgists for the days of Sanders Of The River and Gunga Din.

I grew up in what was then a rock-solid Conservative constituency. I was surrounded by Tories and ardent Eurosceptics – and I never, not once, encountered this view of the Empire. Many other things occurred, yes, some of them rather unpleasant, but never this. We kids were encouraged towards racial and cultural harmony, in what was also a highly racially mixed area for its time, with the standard liberal regret for the incomprehensible past. I remember a very Tory teacher steering me gently away from the works of  Sax Rohmer, as they were really unpleasantly jingoistic and racist. And that was 45 years ago!  Certainly a desire to strap on the old pith helmet, go subjugating to the ends of the earth and fructify on the dusty veldt never cropped up. These people were much more bothered about Arthur Scargill.

They were right to focus on the ills of today. Indeed even those who don’t like the Empire much should realise that talking about it so much has backfired. This peculiar phenomenon – where the people who bang on about imperialism and colonialism are the only ones to give it more than a moment’s thought – has given rise to a peculiar Streisand Effect. The obsession with atoning for Britain’s past has given me, and certain others if the satirical online meme of Anglo-futurism (AI art of London full of spaceships flying Union Jacks etc) is anything to go by, a renewed interest in formerly naff tales of pioneering pluck. It also made me read up on the actual history – the slavery-destroying British Navy (the West Africa Squadron is a forgotten story that really needs telling), and the huge public appetite for the emancipation movement in Victorian Britain. Neither of which you’ll hear anything about from the mavens of ‘decolonisation’.

So forgive me if I don’t shed a tear at the loss of uni courses on the subject. Okay, we shouldn’t totally forget. But we should remember in a different way – and not feel guilty for Britain’s wonderful history.