A pattern, like a leitmotif or theme in a piece of music, is emerging from the actions of the Labour Government. Now you hear it, now you don’t, but the more you hear it the more recognisable it becomes and the louder it sounds in your ears.
The leitmotif I am talking about is Labour’s distaste for the past and its obsession with change at the expense of continuity. The past, this leitmotif keeps on reminding us, is a bad place and has nothing to teach us except that it is ‘outdated’ and we should pay no attention to it. The present, by contrast, is Year Zero after which all things will be better, as promised on earlier occasions by Jacobins and Bolsheviks. It involves what Frank Furedi has called a “war against the past” one of whose chief characteristics is the rewriting of history in the light of radical progressive ideologies in support of present-day objectives.
One only needs to look at Bridget Phillipson’s consultation on England’s school curriculum – the epicentre of Labour’s rejection of the past – to see what all this means. Teaching unions, exam boards and learned societies are all sycophantically falling over each other to demand the very changes that she has said she wants: “modernising” an “outdated” subject-based curriculum, making it less “Western-centric”, introducing yet more “diversity” and “inclusion”, ensuring that everything is more immediately relevant to children’s own lives, and as a result doubtlessly smoothing the path for yet more mass indoctrination of children into a negative view of their country’s past.
We do not yet have detailed proposals for the revised curriculum but Phillipson’s cancellation of funding for the Latin Excellence Project and removal of curricular freedoms from academies are indications that maintaining continuity with past educational achievements is likely to be the very last of her objectives.
We should have realised long before July 4th 2024 that a war against the past was to be expected from a Labour Government. Labour has serious form in this area from its time in office in 1997-2010: devolution measures that have put us on a path towards federalism and weakened the effectiveness of a highly successful 300-year old multinational unitary British state; legislation on human rights, equality and climate that has given the judiciary and unelected bodies powers to thwart the aims of the executive and legislature, seriously undermining features of a democracy that was once the envy of the world; and a policy of encouraging mass immigration that in 25 years has turned a high trust and largely homogeneous country into a low trust plurally monocultural one.
Some of the effects of these measures were intentional, like Labour’s wish through encouraging immigration “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity“. Others were the result of an elite throwing aside, for ideological or short-term political reasons, elements of the past whose significance it had failed to understand. Its worst legacy from those years was to have convinced its Conservative successors in 2010-24 that Labour’s main measures had been ‘on the right side of history’. As a result, none were overturned and in the cases of mass immigration and targets for carbon emissions the Conservatives doubled down on what Labour had initiated. Ironically it was Labour’s success in passing on its own deeply unconservative narratives to the Conservative Party that in the end made the latter so deservedly loathed that the electorate last year, in desperation but without enthusiasm, handed back the reins to Labour – only to realise within days that things would get even worse.
The first sign that the new Labour Government was keen on a Year Zero start to its rule was the removal of paintings from Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street. In some ways this was a small matter – new holders of important jobs must be free to fiddle with their office furniture – but highly revealing of attitudes. Among those removed from No. 10 were portraits of Sir Walter Raleigh, who saved us from the Spanish Armada, and William Gladstone, arguably our greatest 19th-century Prime Minister. We do not know whether Raleigh’s relegation was because of an association with early colonialism and Gladstone’s because of his family’s earlier links with slavery, but given Keir Starmer’s support for initiatives involving ‘decolonisation’ it looks likely. The simultaneous decision by Rachel Reeves to remove all portraits of men from her meeting room and replace them with paintings of or by women, cancelling at a stroke any reminder of the 128 male Chancellors who had preceded her, looks like a pale imitation of the leader of a conquering army removing all symbols of the previous regime after taking a city during a civil war.
Distaste for the past has also characterised everything Labour has done in relation to farming and the countryside over the last six months. Ed Miliband and the Climate Change Committee have been relatively quiet about the contribution of cattle and sheep and our traditional meat-eating habits to global warming, but we know this is only the lull before the storm. Elsewhere, doubling onshore wind turbines, tripling solar panels and building long lines of massive pylons as part of renewable energy infrastructure, all by 2030, will transform parts of our most beautiful rural counties beyond recognition, damaging a crucial part of England’s heritage and sense of identity. If there were a genuine emergency one might understand why this had to happen, but done to meet targets that are highly contested, look set to destroy what is left of our manufacturing industry and, even if achieved, would have nil effect on global warming, makes it sheer vandalism.
The countryside is in Labour’s sights for two other reasons. Its election manifesto promised to ban trail hunting by foxhounds, delivering a final blow to a country tradition immortalised in the 19th-century novels of R.S. Surtees. Attracting even more outrage, and the arrival of protesting tractors in Westminster, have been the changes to inheritance tax which threaten to make it impossible for many heirs to take over their family’s farm. Anyone familiar with village life will appreciate what a blow it would be for farms owned for generations by the same family to pass out of their hands. These are often families with a long tradition of supporting village life, chairing parish councils, serving as churchwardens and organising summer fetes. It would be the whole community, not just a few individuals, and a traditional way of life which would suffer.
A similarly cavalier attitude towards the past can be seen in even more important issues than these. The country is currently experiencing a radical social and cultural transformation like at no other time in its history, with immigration in 2023 reaching 1.2 million, much of it from countries with cultures quite different from our own. It is a transformation people did not ask for and that is turning their lives upside down in ways both practical and spiritual. If Labour had any sense of the seriousness of this situation and its place within the trajectory of the country’s past history it would make this its number one priority.
What did Keir Starmer say about immigration when on December 5th he made six pledges to the nation on which he said he wanted to be judged? Not a single word. There were targets for house-building and cutting hospital waiting lists, but no understanding that these would be pie in the sky if he hadn’t managed to bring immigration down first. Once again a complete lack of historical consciousness is evident, on top of a complete lack of political nous.
Why, in one case after another, is this Government failing to see things in their historical context? It is partly the pervasive sense that change is so rapid that everything is quickly ‘outdated’. Bridget Phillipson says she wants to change the school curriculum for this reason, despite it being only 10 years old and not yet fully experienced by a whole cohort of children. More fundamentally Labour’s aversion to the past draws on the theories of the progressive elites who dominate our educational and cultural worlds. In the eyes of these people history is one long story of oppression and victimhood. Against such views the argument for maintaining continuity with the past in any area of activity is bound to have difficulty holding its own.
Options to stick with what has been inherited and works well are also being overruled by ideology and spite. Both these motives are behind the decisions to impose VAT on private school fees in the middle of the school year and to evict the last remaining hereditary peers from the House of Lords at the end of this Parliamentary session. There are pragmatic continuity as well as ‘fairness to individuals’ arguments against both decisions, based on the benefits of allowing parents to have a wider choice of schools for their children and of keeping a few hereditary peers alongside hundreds of peers put there through patronage, but if the past is seen as a dark place arguments from previous arrangements will hold no water.
We are only six months into this Government. The first skirmishes in Labour’s ‘war against the past’ have been fought and the Government’s opponents have lost. We look set to face many more, beginning with the proposed legalisation of assisted suicide, contrary to millennia-old religious teachings, which most Labour MPs support. We should brace ourselves for a long war.
Dr. Nicholas Tate was Chief Executive of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (1994-7) and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (1997-2000). He is the author of What is Education for? and The Conservative Case for Education.
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Stop the War on our History
The leitmotif I am talking about is Labour’s distaste for the past
Only the past of white people. According to the madleft, whites are world poisoners, and, furthermore, in order to “save the world” whites must disappear from the Earth. This is why the current government has no objection to the mass rape of our children – mass rape being, of course, a prelude to genocide.
I think that’s mostly a scam intended to justify taking ever more money and ressources from us despite we get nothing in return. As we’re members of the accursed race, that’s just what we deserve. Say the anti-racists.
As a longstanding work colleague used to say in face of the latest managerial leadership initiative send down the corporate food chain to us lower-ranking erks, “Progress means change but change does not always mean progress.”
Wer keine Vergangenheit hat, hat keine Zukunft.
[Michael Ende, Momo]
He who has no past doesn’t have a future.
This is also the situation of the people of 1984: They’re stuck in an eternal present which keeps changing in unpredictable ways and is neither coming from somewhere nor going anywhere. Big Brother has always ruled and will always rule. And we’ve always been at war with Eastasia and will always be at war with it.
Eurasia.
We’ve always been at war with Eastasia until we’ve always been at war with Eurasia until we’ve always been at war with Eastasia. Maintaining that truth exists independent of what the party has always told and will always tell is bound to get you into trouble, son. Heed my words before it will always have been too late.
They say those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat it.
Perhaps they are waging war on the past because they know that anyone who studied it would realise that we are on the Wrong Path.
Some of those that study History appear to want to repeat it, exactly!
For example, some politicians have wanted to be Churchill.
He who controls the past controls the present. He who controls the present controls the future. – Orwell
The left has always wanted to rewrite history.
In order to implement utopia, the perfect society, heaven on earth, all memories of the past must be erased and replaced with the official version. The past has to be bad so that the present (which is, in fact in many ways much worse) can appear better.
“To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.”
Aleksandr Solzenhytsin (1918-2008)
The aim is that we are all to be “Global Citizens”, and that which distinguishes us from others and gives us a national identity requires to be erased.
This is the prelude to and the preparation for Global Government, as is the Collectivist aim.
It would be heartbreaking if these socialist worker party fanboys were just destroying the student union where they belong.
To see them in charge in England, historically the greatest country in the world is devastating.
I hesitate to advocate political violence on lord Young’s website, but if Henry II were around he might be wondering aloud who would rid of these troublesome cunning stunts.
Meanwhile…foxes are ace.
https://x.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1876918847959134640
And all this is different to what was going on under the Tories…how exactly?
This isn’t Labour. This is the entire British establishment and its vast bureaucracy all of which is essentially in the hands of elitist socialists.
This is going to change by voting the Conservatives back in? Yeah right. By voting in Reform? I doubt it. Musk has in a way exposed their feebleness.
This changes when a hitherto demoralised and flacid public get fed up and start actually getting visibly angry in large enough numbers that can’t be arrested and thrown in jail.
I know “told you so” might seem a bit much but I have been warning about the destruction of our history for the past four years. At least now it is appearing as a subject worthy of discussion ATL.