‘We won’t allow people to censor our past,’ Robert Jenrick, then communities secretary, said in January. ‘It is our privilege in this country to have inherited a deep, rich, fascinating and yes, often complex, past. We are mature enough as a society to understand that and to seek to pass it on, warts and all. To do otherwise would leave our history and future diminished.’ A month later, Oliver Dowden, then culture secretary and now co-chair of the Conservative Party, made a similar point: ‘Proud and confident nations face their past squarely; they do not seek to run from or airbrush the history upon which they are founded ... Purging uncomfortable elements of our past does nothing but damage our understanding of it.’
Jenrick and Dowden’s emphasis on the freedom of historians to carry out research into uncomfortable topics, and their recognition of the complexities and ambiguities that characterise Britain’s history, is salutary. No historian would disagree. But if we look closer, we find that Jenrick and Dowden’s statements are not quite what they seem. They rightly condemn any threat to erase significant parts of British history from the record, but this threat doesn’t originate from the ‘woke worthies’ and ‘the flash mob’ of the left, as Jenrick thinks, or the ‘cancel culture’ that Dowden condemned at the Conservative Party Conference in October, but from the Conservative government itself. As Dominic Dean, of the University of Sussex, put it in his blog in February, ‘the UK government is currently engaged in an open and multilayered campaign to control and change the nature and quality of historical research in Britain and, in particular, of its presentation to the public.’
It is a sad reflection on British politics that this is all the result of deepening research into Britain’s role in the slave trade. As part of this work, and spurred on by the Black Lives Matter movement, many institutions in Britain have been examining the extent to which they directly or indirectly profited from the trade before it was outlawed in 1807, and from plantations worked by enslaved people in British colonial possessions before the formal abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. One of these institutions is the National Trust, a public body responsible for managing many of England’s historic properties, including a large number of stately homes. In 2018 the trust launched a schools-focused project called Colonial Countryside, pointing out that
British country houses were influential centres of colonial wealth and bureaucracy. As historians take new approaches to British imperial history, utilising recent resources like the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership database, less familiar and often newly discovered colonial stories of our places are being uncovered ... The project’s legacy will be to ensure that colonial connections are integral to the stories that audiences discover during their visit.
Discovering and presenting to the public new knowledge about the English country house is an admirable way for the National Trust to deepen and broaden appreciation of the complex histories of the buildings in its care. But the project has attracted fierce criticism from Conservative politicians and journalists who clearly think it a subject best left in decent obscurity. In February, Marco Longhi, Tory MP for Dudley North, called for government funding to be withheld from such initiatives, run by people who ‘hate our history and seek to rewrite it’. The National Trust’s plans (as well as the National Maritime Museum’s scrutiny of Nelson’s involvement with slavery) were, Longhi alleged, ‘a form of Marxism applied to our cultural and heritage sector’ by people ‘who want to apply today’s standards to events and people of decades and hundreds of years ago’. It was entirely wrong, he said, to use taxpayers’ money ‘to effectively besmirch our heroes to suit their left-wing woke narrative’. In the
Telegraph, Charles Moore complained that the National Trust had been ‘rolled over by extremists’, and Andrew Brigden, another Tory MP, that it had been ‘overtaken by divisive Black Lives Matter supporters’. The
Telegraph, the
Express and the
Daily Mail all reported that displays at Jane Austen’s house in Chawton would carry out ‘historical interrogation’ of ‘Austen’s tea drinking’ and its links to slavery. This, the papers solemnly declared, was ‘woke madness’. In fact, Austen’s father was a trustee of an Antigua sugar plantation, worked by enslaved people. The museum responded: ‘We are increasingly asked questions about this by our visitors and it is therefore appropriate that we share the information and research that exists on [Austen’s] connections to slavery and its mention in her novels.’
One of those involved in Colonial Countryside is Corinne Fowler, a professor of postcolonial literature at Leicester University and co-author of a list of 93 National Trust properties built on money earned from plantations run by enslaved workers, or from slave ownership, or furnished with the lavish compensation paid to former slave owners after abolition. She feels that academics pursuing work like hers are being misrepresented, maligned and intimidated. ‘I think we should all be worried when academics are targeted in this way, when the evidence can’t be disputed.’ The National Trust’s director-general, Hilary McGrady, noted that complaints had only been received from 0.05 per cent of its 5.6 million members, and that a great many members had voiced their support of the Colonial Countryside project. There was no ‘revolt’ of the membership, as had been claimed in parts of the right-wing media. A 2020 survey found that more than three-quarters of the trust’s members thought it should do more to educate visitors on its properties’ colonial connections. The resignation in October of the trust’s chairman, Tim Parker, widely hyped in the same places as a victory against ‘wokeness’, was coincidental (his two-term tenure had come to an end, having been extended for a year because of the pandemic).
None of this made any difference to Dowden, who while still culture secretary said he would ban the use of public funds for Colonial Countryside. ‘Public funds should never be used for political purposes,’ he said, suggesting that the trust was violating the Charity Commission rule to this effect. And yet it was he who was disregarding the Haldane principle, which holds that decisions about the allocation of research funds should be made by researchers rather than politicians. This principle has been essential to the rise of British science and scholarship over the past hundred years and more. Where politicians have dictated research funding, as in Nazi Germany, the results have been catastrophic. German science has never recovered the eminence it enjoyed before 1933. Now, however, the British government has declared the Haldane principle obsolete. Dowden said so quite openly: ‘I would expect arm’s length bodies’ approach to issues of contested heritage to be consistent with the government’s position.’ No matter that if they follow this expectation, they will no longer be ‘arm’s length bodies’.
Dowden’s statements prompted the Royal Historical Society, the Historical Association (the national organisation of history teachers) and other academic bodies to register ‘concern’ about his ‘illegitimate’ interference in the funding of historical and heritage research. Referring to the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s support of Colonial Countryside, they pointed out that while the fund is not specifically protected by the Haldane principle, the Lottery Act does not make ministers responsible for funding decisions. In addition, the Charity Commission, which oversees the National Trust, had formally determined that Colonial Countryside wasn’t political. Political interference of the kind Dowden was attempting, the historians warned, ‘stifles the capacity of historians to do their work and exerts a wider chilling effect. It may deter – it may be intended to deter – historians from embarking on difficult or sensitive research.’ There is also evidence of interference in the museum sector, where trustees have apparently been threatened by the government with the non-renewal of their trusteeships if they endorse the ‘decolonisation’ of their institutions. When Mary Beard was put forward as a trustee of the British Museum, the government rejected her on the grounds that she was pro-EU (the museum appointed her anyway).
