In the name of anti-imperialism, Labour’s manifesto will try to colonise the past

The Labour Party manifesto, due to be published on Thursday, will reportedly include a far-reaching review of the “legacies” of the British Empire. There will be a heavy emphasis on the teaching of the evils of imperialism, public apologies for human rights abuses and the possibility of large-scale reparations for the countries affected.

Needless to say, history lessons in schools and universities already focus on such events as the Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century or Amritsar Massacre in India of 1919. But the Labour pledge will go far beyond modifying the curriculum to take account of recent research. Never before has a political party promised to impose its own ideological assumptions on the national collective memory. In future, children will hear only one version of our island story: an almost entirely negative one.

Those who doubt the implications of this far-Left rewriting of history should read Nigel Biggar’s account in TheArticle of what happened when he ran a series of seminars at Oxford University on “Ethics and Empire”. As Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, he tried to bring together scholars from various disciplines to explore his “modest view that ‘empire’ can mean a variety of things, is capable of good as well as evil, raises ethical questions worth thinking about, and requires sophisticated moral evaluation”.

Professor Biggar was immediately denounced by several fellow academics, one of whom described him on social media as a “racist”, a “bigot” and his scholarship as “supremacist shite”. The same Cambridge academic called on Oxford colleagues to stop the seminars taking place: “We need to SHUT THIS DOWN.” A formal complaint from Professor Biggar about this uncivil behaviour elicited nothing more from Cambridge than a defence of his accuser’s “freedom of speech”.

Such incidents should be seen in the wider context of institutional obeisance towards the most extreme interpretation of Britain’s imperial past. Instead of a balanced view that weighs up the costs and benefits of colonial rule, a Labour government would oblige teachers and academics to teach the next generation to be ashamed of their country.

Such an ideological rewriting of history motivated by a pathological self-loathing that finds expression in toxic forms of identity politics. It is also very often simply bad history, based on a lack of imagination or appreciation of the very different circumstances in which events took place centuries ago.

A good example is provided in another piece for TheArticle by Zareer Masani, offering a reappraisal of the man who acquired the largest part of the British Empire: Clive of India. Masani, a distinguished BBC broadcaster and scholar of the Indian subcontinent, tried to present the life and achievements of Robert Clive in their historical context, warts and all.

He concludes that Clive was innocent of most of the charges made against him, both in Parliament at the time and by anti-colonial historians ever since.

For Masani, Clive was not only a great general and empire-builder, but deserves to be remembered for his role in transforming the East India Company “from the preserve of private proprietors into the world’s first public-private partnership, administering Britain’s newly-acquired Asian possessions and accountable to the British Crown and Parliament”. How likely is it that such a nuanced view of imperial history will be permitted in Labour’s brave new world of historical self-flagellation?

One of the ironies of this ominous new chapter in the process of “cultural amnesia” (Clive James) is what it will do to millions of black and Asian Britons, whose families emigrated here from the Commonwealth. Deprived of any pride in their adoptive British heritage, these children will be left with a conflicted identity. Their forebears came to Britain as a free country whose cosmopolitan civilisation and respect for human rights they admired, just as the great colonial liberators of the past such as Gandhi and Nelson Mandela had done. Now these children will be taught a view of British history which implies that both immigrants and liberators were deluded.

Indeed, Labour’s entire project of national re-education is based on a Marxist notion of false consciousness. Hitherto, the British people has been uniquely fortunate in its heritage. No other nation on earth can claim to have bequeathed so many triumphs in the cause of liberty, democracy and prosperity. Now children will be indoctrinated in a hateful repudiation of the past. They will be taught to despise heroes such as Horatio Nelson and Winston Churchill as criminals, while achievements such as the abolition of the slave trade will be “deconstructed” as lies and myths.

This general election, like every election, will turn on issues of the here and now, not debates about the distant past. Yet voters should take into account just how dangerous this state-controlled revision of history might prove to be. It certainly won’t appeal to Labour’s traditional constituency of the working class. But it may have some appeal to students and other young people, easily manipulated by the politicised academics, activists and bureaucrats who now make up much of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The Conservatives will doubtless ignore the far-Left’s bid to colonise the past. That would be an egregious error, with grave consequences for the future.