Ask 100 people what it means to be British and you’ll get 100 different answers. For some it will be cream tea and crickets. For others it will be the Beatles, the NHS or the rule of law.
And yet, despite these superficial differences, there was once a time when the vast majority of people could agree that they were proud of our country and its contributions throughout history.
Sadly, that no longer exists. The annual British Social Attitudes survey, conducted by the National Centre for Social Research and published this week, found that pride has declined over the past decade in our nation’s history.
The country’s sense of pride in hosting a successful Olympic Games in 2012 gave way to the polarising Brexit vote in 2016. Pictured: Sir Chris Ho leads Team GB at the London 2012 Olympics
In 2013, 86 percent of respondents were proud of Britain’s history. Now that number is 64 percent, too low for comfort.
Other questions posed by the survey produced similar results: only 49 per cent of people said they would rather be British than citizens of another country, down from 62 per cent in 2013. Over the same period, pride in our democracy fell from 69 per cent to just 53 per cent.
A poll is no indicator of the national mood, but these results point to a rot that has been evident for years. The confidence we once had in the history of our shared island is being eaten away by an insidious and paralysing national guilt. This is not only misplaced, it is extremely dangerous for our collective future.
How did we get here?
The country’s pride in hosting a successful Olympics in 2012 gave way to the polarising Brexit vote in 2016, which ripped through the country’s sense of communalism. But if Brexit opened a wound, something else caused a serious infection.
In the months since George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020, critical race theory, which simply blames racism for all social ills, has become a transatlantic cult.
Everything from the arts to labor rights was viewed through the illiberal prism of race, and this blurred vision has had the most profound impact on history. Over the past five centuries of systemic reappraisal, universities have sought to “colonize” the curriculum.
Seemingly overnight, our history has gone from a source of pride to an unspeakable evil inextricable from violence, racism and exploitation. Why? Because a powerful coalition of so-called progressive activists has told us so, and anyone who suggests otherwise risks being banned from public and professional life.
In a moralistic and Orwellian frenzy, statues were defaced or torn down. Libraries rushed to remove or edit books that contradicted the new religion. West Indian scholars came to the somewhat absurd conclusion that Britain owed £18.6 billion in reparations for slavery.
In 1979, Margaret Thatcher declared: “We must learn to be a nation again, or one day we shall cease to be a nation at all.”
Even the mathematics department at Oxford University has launched an eccentric project to challenge the “Western-centric conception of matter.”
Earlier this summer, it was revealed that school support organisation The Key provided resources to more than 100,000 bosses suggesting the British Empire should be taught in a similar way to Nazi Germany.
In an “anti-apartheid curriculum review,” The Key instructed teachers to “avoid presenting the British Empire as an equal balance of good and evil.”
Teachers were also asked not to “ignore the racism of historical figures such as Winston Churchill” but to “be honest about their problematic views”.
The British Empire was not blameless. But this new approach lacks nuance and ignores the countless positive aspects that arise from British influence abroad.
Even the Industrial Revolution, built on the ingenuity of British inventors and the sweat of its workers, and which lifted billions of people out of poverty, is today regarded by some as a racist, exploitative enterprise.
Real history has to tell the whole story. We should not be afraid of it. It was the British, let us not forget, who ended the peacetime famine in India by developing a nationwide railway.
It was our empire that brought medicine to underdeveloped countries, oversaw the construction of schools and universities around the world, and discovered and preserved priceless global heritage.
And, after its abolition in 1833, the British Empire was the main force behind the end of the global slave trade.
We must honourably remember the sailors, missionaries and civil servants who risked and gave their lives in the fight against slavery and other forms of violence, including female genital mutilation, human sacrifice and tribal warfare.
After abolition, the British government used 40 percent of its national budget (£20 million) to buy the freedom of slaves across the empire. The sum was so large that the loan was not repaid until 2015.
Will today’s students learn anything from this fascinating and edifying episode? Not when the rewriting of history has produced a tragic cultural and intellectual amnesia. And it is no wonder that, as our institutions continue to plague Britain’s ills, many feel ashamed of our past.
The great irony is that it is recent immigrants to the island who are most proud to be British. Those who have come to Britain over the past few decades have generally done so out of admiration for the United Kingdom. For families fleeing persecution and poverty in the Middle East, for example, Britain is a bastion of morality, justice and opportunity.
It’s not immigration that’s eroding our national pride, it’s left-wing progressives who see discourse about the country as a form of moral and intellectual slime, a means of degrading working people and proclaiming their superior virtue.
Not only are they wrong in what they do, but they are also horrible in their motivations. They poison the well of history from which young people drink, whether or not they are from immigrant families.
But why does this matter? Who cares if fewer people think Britain was a good guy in history? The answer is that national identity is the foundation on which a functioning society is built.
For the country to prosper, there must be an underlying social cohesion born of a shared belief in the value and integrity of Britain. We need to think that there is something to protect to keep us together in increasingly difficult and dangerous times.
Our navel-gazing into the past distracts us from the dangers of the present. It makes us appear weak and divided in the eyes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, who argue that the West is losing faith in itself and its values, and when countries like China and Russia violate international law, we will have no appetite to protect it.
History is our shared history. Today, history has been edited, stripped of its nuances and reimagined to present Britten as the main villain, dragging our pride into the depths of pain.
In 1979, Margaret Thatcher declared: “We must learn to be a nation again, or one day we will be no nation at all.” Sadly, if this dark and dangerous path is not corrected, the future the Iron Lady warned about may be closer than we think.
- Robert Tombs is Emeritus Professor of French History and Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge.
