Twelve years ago, a billion people around the world watched the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, one that applauded the United Kingdom’s past and its present, joyously rejoicing in its multicultural heritage
Today, with the Paris Olympics in full swing, historian, Prof Alan Lester believes the Danny Boyle-created masterpiece, “one in which everyone in the UK could see themselves” was seen “as a threat” by some.
“Yes, that was a red flag for some, they hated that sense of belonging, that sense of a new cosmopolitan Britishness”, says the University of Sussex historian, and the editor of The Truth About Empire, Real Histories of British Colonialism.
The “they” in this conversation includes, in his view, Conservative politicians who “weaponised” the culture wars, London’s right-wing press, ageing academics who he believes now attack younger colleagues unfairly, and those British people who pine for the past.
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He notes the new Labour culture secretary Lisa Nandy’s determination that the worst of the UK’s “culture wars” – ones that have consumed so much of public debate over the last decade – recede into the past.
“Unfortunately, it isn’t in her gift to realise that,” Lester says, fearing the actions of a confluence of Conservative MPs now in opposition, ever nervous of populist Reform MPs sharing places nearby on the opposition benches.
Equally, the often secretly-funded but hugely influential group of right-leaning think tanks, the so-called Tufton Street nexus, named after the Westminster street where so many of them are based, will not go away.
Illustrating that the “war” goes on, Lester says the Daily Telegraph, which has waged a campaign “against woke” for years, has begun to claim that schools in England are now required to teach that the British empire was equal to Nazi Germany.
The claim is its “latest egregious distortion of reality”, but not the newspaper’s first, says Lester, pointing out that the latest guidance given to schools by the department ofeducation in London makes not a single reference to Hitler’s Germany.
Lester and his ilk of historians are frequently criticised for raising the sins of empire, or for trying in the words of the biographer of Margaret Thatcher, Charles Moore, to make the British “feel bad” about themselves and their history.
“What kind of Britain do they envisage? In many ways, the Britain that they cherish, the one that they value is the Britain, the imaginary Britain of the late 1940s and the 1950s. And it’s a Britain that’s predominantly white,” he retorts.
“One that had a few people of colour, but not in significant numbers. And it’s a Britain where Nigel Farage’s apocryphal man in a pub could still wax lyrical, using derogatory, sexist, racist terms with nobody challenging him.
“And it’s a Britain where Britain is still an imperial – dominant imperial – power, and where subjects of colour who are black or brown still live out in the countries of empire as subjects, rather than here among us as Britons,” he says.
Those pro-empire, racist views were never tackled in British society as the empire declined and largely disappeared, he argues: “Britain has never had a moment of reckoning with its own past, that’s never happened here.”
Politicians such as the Conservative and later Ulster Unionist MP Enoch Powell “suddenly converted from imperialists into little Englanders” once “hundreds of thousands of Black and Brown people” who were British citizens under law came to Britain.
[ Enoch Powell, the original anti-immigrant, anti-Europe, pro-unionist ToryOpens in new window ]
“This was based on the notion that Britain is an island with satellites, and that never the twain should meet. And that colonised people didn’t belong in the centre,” says the academic.
His latest book, which brings together 14 historians, including Saul Dubow, Robert Bickers and Bronwen Everill, condemns “imperial nostalgia” and urges readers to learn about, and to accept the sins of the past, that “evil was done”.
Those sins are significant, he and others argue in the book. In her contribution, the Australian historian Lyndall Ryan writes about the destruction of Tasmanian aboriginals in the Black War from 1828, where settlers were told to kill with impunity.
The subject has become controversial again following Nigel Biggar’s defence of the British empire in his book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, where he argues that it was not “essentially racist, exploitative or wantonly violent”.
Lester disagrees: “History is argument. But the argument has to be based on facts,” he writes in the foreword for Truth and Empire. “It has become highly unfashionable to say it, but the work of experts counts.”
For years, Lester, highly regarded in the field of British colonial history, laboured in a world of peer-reviewed journals where people argued with one another, but in a civilised way, or, at least, one with boundaries. The world at large took little notice.
By June 2020, Lester, being treated for cancer and with time on his hands, looked on with astonishment from his hospital bed as controversy raged after protesters in Bristol toppled the statue of merchant and slave-owner Edward Colston.
“I was in and out of hospital, unable to get on with my archival research, unable to get on with teaching, my administration, all the pressures of everyday work that keep academics essentially in their ivory towers. I was released from those.
“For a while all I could do was look at my laptop at this furious backlash against anti-racist protests and the kind of hysteria that took over after Colston’s toppling, and the claims that other statues were threatened, including Churchill’s,” he says.
“The one thing that anybody who has read a single sentence in an archive of colonial governments and read original documents knows beyond question is that race and racism were absolutely fundamental to the governance of empire.
“The everyday distinctions made between civilised white Europeans and the uncivilised, the dangerous, threatening people of colour who had to be managed, with a few exceptions, such as the Indian elites to maintain British rule.”
The fact “that racism was the dominant ideology of empire was simply taken for granted by academics”, but it became politically toxic in the wake of the Colston/Black Lives Matter protests, he argues. The accusation that Churchill was a racist provoked outrage, even though it is a charge backed up.
By then, museums and heritage organisations such as the National Trust were being told not “to admit the things which I knew were true about empire and that other specialists knew were true. Not only not to admit to it, but to deny it.”
[ How Ireland served as a laboratory for the British empireOpens in new window ]
Lester bridles at the charge that those who are writing about Britain’s empire past are “woke”, arguing that it is not they who are failing or refusing to deal with issues of the past that have consequences today, but their critics, such as Moore.
Like others, Moore is a member of a conservative group called Restore Trust, a campaign group that has been infuriated by the National Trust’s decision to tell more about the colonial past of the palatial homes under their charge.
Moore accuses colonial historians of wanting to rewrite history in a non-scholarly way, of displaying a fanaticism in their attitudes to the past and of wanting to convince “young minds” that they should feel “guilty” about their country.
[ Making Empire: Incisive study of Ireland’s complex role in the British empireOpens in new window ]
“He’s not talking then about history, I think,” says Lester, “He’s talking about myth. He’s perfectly entitled to want to believe in certain things and to hold comforting myths close to his heart. That does not mean that the rest of us should be denied a more accurate, holistic and realistic representation of the past.”
[ Legacy of Violence: A History of the British EmpireOpens in new window ]
“This idea that being confronted by a small sign in a National Trust property saying that this artefact was plundered from India or whatever might make him feel uncomfortable. And yet he’s the same person who goes on about the snowflake generation.
“You couldn’t get much more ‘snowflake’ than not wanting to be confronted by something that you feel slightly discomforting. So, my answer really is, ‘It’s tough, that’s what happened, it’s historians’ job to interpret what happened’.”
