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 The past, this leitmotif keeps on reminding us, is a bad place and has nothing to teach us except that it is ‘outdated’ and we should pay no attention to it.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all sycophantically falling over each other to demand the very changes that she has said she wants: “modernising” an “outdated” subject-based curriculum, making it less “Western-centric”, introducing yet more “diversity” and “inclusion”, ensuring that everything is more immediately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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Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Let’s wait for the “reporting restrictions” on a certain couple of trials starting (or at least planned to) in the next few weeks… Will we even find out details after the case?
In the event of (in my opinion very possible) run on the pound will that be “misinformation” and prohibited?
If we ever manage to get rid of this wholly anti British so-called government vengeance must be wrecked. For all members of the Cabinet, serving and ex the sentence must be life. For Kneel and his clique something worse as befits traitors.
Leftism is like a cancer and we all know the best way of dealing with that.
But… it’s not just Starmer. There are plenty of sanctimonious pecksniffs that would jump on the opportunity to demonstrate their self-righteousness with allegations of harassment.
Starmer should take care… there will be plenty of people willing to take on even Labour luminaries for a careless remark.
Finally, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has said she wants to lower the threshold for the recording of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs)
Tories are the same. Have the same policies.
Thinking will be a crime.
Oh wait, it already is, if you think, or say a silent prayer outside the baby-murder clinic. One of the icons of ‘health care’ and beloved by all.
PC Fascism. All part of the plan.
It can and will.
There are more of us than them and they’re terrified we might understand that fact.
The wokusts have to abolish free-speech because reality refuses to conform to their deranged fantasies. But our problem is not only the formal abolition of free-speech which our anti-white government is carrying out – just as dangerous is the anti-white government’s imposition of Orwellian lies. For example:
Anti-whitism is called “anti-racism”
Conformity to the anti-white agenda is called “diversity”
Exclusion of truth-tellers is called “inclusion”
These lies are framed within the wokusts’ over-arching lie of “equality” – which is a thing that simply doesn’t exist.
For a moment I thought you were reading the Kings Speech!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2KyAUSqqmZY
Nigel Farage’s New Year message filmed at Blenheim Palace. Calm, considered, thoughtful.
Nice place that, went there as a youth.
I wonder if the current Duke of Marlborough was aware that Nigel would be recording his NY message there?
Depends if he was in the public part of the building i suppose.
Thinking about the banter police business in pubs.
Yes some places may become dystopia but only the places you wouldn’t normally go anyway, like airports and chain hotels.
In most decent pubs I suspect the reaction would simply be not to employ the kind of woke twats that could be offended.
“Pubs will have to employ ‘banter bouncers’ to police the conversations of customers to make sure no one is saying anything risqué that could be overheard by a member of staff.”
They really are tying to create a Stasi 2.0 but I would like to see how that works in reality, not that I go to pubs much these days but this can include any public place.
I doubt they can afford them after the Rachel from Accounts budget.
The way to get around this is to defy all of the above. Keep saying are you blind etc and see if they can control our speech.
“ The answer is that Labour wants to criminalise parents and health professionals who deviate in any way from the ‘gender-affirming care’ approach,”
You mean deviate to the Cass Report, that long awaited report, a bit like that Danish study on masks in 2020 that the media didn’t shut up about, until that is the report came out that went against their narrative. After that, radio silence as if they just all forgot to report on its findings. Very convenient.
‘all reasonable steps’
Define reasonable. Defining things is not the forte of the Student Union government. Women? Pass. Working People? Pass.
Never mind, we’ll loath him and his party even more.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/nigel-farage-addresses-the-nation-from-blenheim-palace/
A short precis of Nigel Farage’s New Year speech from Blenheim Palance. The full film of the speech is embedded.
Strong, polite, thoughtful and considered.
“Let’s make Britain Great Again.”
“Pubs will have to employ ‘banter bouncers’ to police the conversations of customers to make sure no one is saying anything risqué that could be overheard by a member of staff….”
The problem here is that the bouncers will also be employees of someone so should also be protected by bouncers who should also be ………..!