The ‘snowflakes’ are those who want to deny Britain’s imperial sins, historian argues – The Irish Times

Twelve years ago, one billion people around the world watched the London Olympics opening ceremony, which applauded the United Kingdom’s past and present, joyfully celebrating its multicultural heritage.

Today, with the Paris Olympics in full swing, historian Prof Alan Lester believes Danny Boyle’s masterpiece, “in which everyone in the UK could see themselves”, was seen “as a threat” by some.

“Yes, it was a wake-up call for some, they hated this sense of belonging, this sense of a new cosmopolitan Britishness,” says the University of Sussex historian and editor of The Truth About Empire, Real Histories of British Colonialism.

The “they” in this conversation includes, in his view, the conservative politicians who have “weaponized” the culture wars, the right-wing London press, aging academics who he says now unfairly attack younger colleagues, and Britons who yearn for the past.

He notes the determination of Labour’s new culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, that the worst of the UK’s “culture wars” – those that have consumed much of the public debate over the past decade – are behind us.

“Unfortunately, it’s not in your power to see that,” says Lester, fearing the actions of a confluence of conservative lawmakers now in opposition, always nervous about populist reformist lawmakers sharing close seats on the opposition benches.

Likewise, the often secretly funded but hugely influential group of right-wing think tanks called Tufton Street Nexus, named after the Westminster street where many of them are based, will not disappear.

Illustrating that the “war” is ongoing, Lester says the Daily Telegraph, which has been waging an “anti-woke” campaign for years, has started claiming that schools in England are now required to teach that the British Empire was the same as Nazi Germany.

The claim is its “latest blatant distortion of reality” but not the paper’s first, says Lester, noting that the latest guidance given to schools by London’s education department makes not a single reference to Hitler’s Germany.

Lester and his ilk are often criticised for extolling the sins of empire, or for trying, in the words of Margaret Thatcher biographer Charles Moore, to make the British “feel bad” about themselves and their history.

“What kind of Britain do they imagine? In many ways, the Britain that they cherish, the one that they value is the Britain, the imaginary Britain of the late 1940s and 1950s. And it is a predominantly white Britain,” he retorts.

“One that had some people of colour, but not in significant numbers. And it is a Britain where Nigel Farage’s apocryphal man in a pub could still wax lyrical, using derogatory, sexist and racist terms without anyone challenging him.

“And it is a Britain where Britain is still an imperial power – dominant imperial – and where subjects of colour who are black or brown still live in the countries of the empire as subjects, rather than here among us as Britons,” he says.

These racist, pro-empire views were never addressed in British society as the empire declined and largely disappeared, he argues: “Britain never had a moment of reckoning with its own past, that never happened here.”

Politicians such as the Conservative and later Ulster Unionist MP Enoch Powell “suddenly turned from imperialists into Little Englanders” when “hundreds of thousands of black and brown people” who were legal British citizens arrived in Britain.

( Enoch Powell, the original anti-immigrant, anti-Europe, pro-unionist conservativeOpens in new window )

“This was based on the notion that Britain is an island with satellites, and that the twain should never meet. And that colonized peoples did not belong at 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 from and accept the sins of the past, that “the harm was done”.

These sins are significant, he and others argue in the book. In her contribution, Australian historian Lyndall Ryan writes about the destruction of Tasmanian Aborigines in the Black War of 1828, where settlers were instructed to kill with impunity.

The subject became controversial again after Nigel Biggar’s defense of the British Empire in his book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, where he argues that was not “essentially racist, exploitative or unrestrainedly violent.”

Lester disagrees: “History is argument. But argument has to be based on facts,” he writes in the foreword to Truth and Empire. “It has become highly unfashionable to say so, but the work of experts counts.”

For years, Lester, highly respected in the field of British colonial history, worked in a world of peer-reviewed journals, where people argued with each other, but in a civilized way, or at least with limits. The wider world paid little attention.

In June 2020, Lester, undergoing cancer treatment and with time on his hands, watched in amazement from his hospital bed as controversy erupted after protesters in Bristol toppled a statue of the merchant and slave owner Edward Colston.

“I was in and out of hospital, unable to continue with my archival research, unable to continue with my teaching, my administration, all the pressures of the day job that keep academics essentially in their ivory towers. I was released from that.

“For a while, all I could do was stare at my laptop at this furious backlash against anti-racism protests and the kind of hysteria that had taken hold after Colston’s fall, and the claims that other statues were under threat, including Churchill’s,” he says.

“The one thing that anyone who has read a single sentence in a colonial government archive and read original documents knows beyond a shadow of a doubt is that race and racism were absolutely fundamental to the governance of the empire.

“The everyday distinctions made between civilized white Europeans and the uncivilized, dangerous and threatening people of color who had to be managed, with some exceptions, like the Indian elites to maintain British rule.”

The fact that “racism was the dominant ideology of the empire was simply taken for granted by academics” but became politically toxic in the wake of the Colston/Black Lives Matter protests, he argues. The accusation that Churchill was racist provoked outrage, even though it is a charge that is supported.

At the time, museums and heritage organisations such as the National Trust were being told not to “admit the things that I knew to be true about the empire and that other experts knew to be true. Not just not to admit them, but to deny them.”

( How Ireland served as a laboratory for the British EmpireOpens in new window )

Lester bristles at the charge that those who write about the British imperial past are “conscientious”, 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 the Restore Trust, a campaign group that was angered by the National Trust’s decision to reveal more about the colonial past of the palatial homes in its care.

Moore accuses colonial historians of wanting to rewrite history in an unscholarly way, of demonstrating bigotry in their attitudes towards the past, and of wanting to convince “young minds” that they should feel “guilty” about their country.

( Making Empire: An incisive study of Ireland’s complex role in the British EmpireOpens in new window )

“He’s not talking about history then, I think,” Lester says. “He’s talking about myth. He has every right to want to believe certain things and to hold comforting myths close to his heart. That doesn’t mean the rest of us should be deprived of 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 little plaque on a National Trust property saying this artefact was looted from India or whatever might make him feel uncomfortable. And yet he’s the same person who talks about the snowflake generation.

“There’s nothing more ‘snowflake’ than not wanting to be confronted by something that you feel a little bit uncomfortable about. So my answer really is, ‘It’s hard, that’s what happened, it’s the historians’ job to interpret what happened.’”