How Britain became ashamed of its past

While the King faces fresh demands for slavery reparations at the Commonwealth summit, back home a crisis of confidence divides our nation

At some point during the Commonwealth summit in Samoa next week things will get a little awkward. A bloc of 15 Caribbean nations will raise the issue of slavery reparations with British officials and possibly even the head of the Commonwealth, King Charles. Sir Keir Starmer’s government has sought to head this off by stating bluntly: “Just to be clear, reparations are not on the agenda… we do not pay reparations.” Yet the threat of a divisive and embarrassing stand-off remains – not least because before he became Foreign Secretary, David Lammy came out publicly in favour of paybacks. For the King, a skilled diplomat who leans towards empathy and conciliation, placating all sides will be a thankless task.
With cash estimates for reparations to address the legacy of Caribbean slavery alone ranging wildly from £200bn to £13tn, Britain finds itself in retreat again over the negative narrative of its own history – a bleak version of our national story ever more dominant abroad. Having faced similarly tricky situations on trips to Canada, Ghana and Kenya and with a visit to republic-hungry Australia followed by the Commonwealth heads of government meeting, the King could be forgiven for thinking he is the star of his own global apology tour.
Yet increasingly this is a narrative that is taking hold at home too. Last year, the British Attitudes Survey found a sharp drop in respondents who were “proud” or “very proud” of Britain’s history, from 86 per cent in 2013 to 64 per cent – a fall of just under a quarter in a decade. 
This is a profound – and recent – shift. In 2002 Sir Winston Churchill emerged triumphant in a BBC poll for its 100 Greatest Britons series. Only a few years later his statue in Westminster was being repeatedly vandalised by a succession of anti-racism protests. Of the top 10 from that series, Oliver Cromwell, Admiral Nelson and Elizabeth I are now also on the naughty step thanks to the increasing focus on the evils of colonialism in British public life. This week it was revealed that celebrated paintings of Sir Walter Raleigh and Elizabeth I, who have both faced criticism for their links to the slave trade, have been removed from Sir Keir Starmer’s No 10. It can seem at times as if the whole country is wearing a hairshirt.
“If we are so critical of our own history it reflects a lack of confidence in our own nation and our own identity,” says Dr Rakib Ehsan, senior advisor at Policy Exchange and co-author of the new report A Portrait of Modern Britain. “It’s got to the stage where some of this has gone into self-flagellation. The most confident nations are the ones that own up to the mistakes of the past but are also confident about the positive contributions they’ve made. I’d like to see Britain in that space.”
The struggle to define and judge Britain’s past is a struggle to define its future. What and who we value from our history will decide our identity and sense of national purpose for years to come. The King – who does not deny his ancestors benefited from slavery – is facing demands for redress wherever he goes. In this as so much else, the monarch is the avatar of his country. It is becoming increasingly common among Britain’s institutions to adopt browbeaten perspectives of our past – so how did it all become so toxic? 
“I don’t think anyone’s ever said Britain did nothing wrong, but if you have an overly negative interpretation of British history that could be alienating,” says Ehsan. “That applies to anyone who feels patriotic but also to minorities who might feel detachment because of the presentation of Britain as a belligerent colonial power that is uniquely guilty of all kinds of crimes. Especially if you stress that our institutions exist in their current form because of slavery and colonialism.”
From academia to schools and from art galleries to Downing Street, it seems there now exists a crisis of confidence and suspicion over our history, with contrasting perceptions of slavery and colonialism exposing sharp identity divides in British society. 
Last year, the author, theologian and now retired Oxford professor Nigel Biggar published Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, a book that drew both praise and criticism for its reappraisal of the British Empire. It linked how we view colonialism and slavery with what we value, or don’t, today. 
“British involvement in slave trading and slavery was lamentable, but it’s been taken out of historical context,” Biggar says today. “Slavery was universal and although there is no denying the awful transportation and conditions of slaves, you can find many other cases of enslavement. That’s one sense in which the British ‘sin’ is abstracted. Those who talk of reparations consistently ignore that Africans had been enslaving other Africans and selling them to Romans and then Arabs before the Europeans came along.
“There is a complete failure to use our historical imagination. Things that are obvious to us just weren’t obvious to people in the past. It’s obvious to us that slavery is morally wrong. That wasn’t obvious to most of humanity up to 1800. We are only enlightened because of what we learnt from our forebears and in the future people will look back on us and judge us for having failed to reach their levels of enlightenment. So there is an arrogance to the prevailing approach to British history and a self-satisfaction to the present moralising that I find objectionable.”
One of Biggar’s most vocal opponents has been Professor Alan Lester of Sussex University, who sees the increasing awareness and acceptance of the evils of colonialism as part of a constructive dialogue to redefine British identity. If the two men represent different “sides” of the debate, there is an irony in that they both want the same thing: greater awareness of the past. It’s just that they are coming from different ideological positions and stress different outcomes.
“Over the past 20 years two parallel things have been occurring, both related to what I would call ‘historical literacy’,” says Lester. “Up until the 1990s historians were writing unproblematic histories of the British Empire – even specialists were avoiding some questions. More recently, there is an appreciation that the legacies of Empire persist in the present, particularly in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. The figure of Atlantic slave trader Edward Colston and his statue in Bristol [torn down and dumped in the harbour by protestors] perfectly symbolised the connections about how we can understand history and how his links to slavery had been airbrushed out for so long.”
What Lester calls the “backlash” against this more critical evaluation of the British Empire has been growing, with groups such as History Reclaimed highlighting what it sees as a Left-wing hijack of institutions that corrodes Britain’s sense of itself – with far reaching consequences for society at home and the country’s future role in global politics. 
“We’ve turned history into a morality play in which there is only good and bad and that the purpose of studying history is to find these moral categories as they apply to our lives today,” says Professor Lawrence Goldman of History Reclaimed. “This is a social pathology.”
The reaction to Starmer’s removal of paintings of Sir Walter Raleigh, Elizabeth I and four-time Victorian prime minister Sir William Gladstone from Number 10 encapsulates this sense of collective anxiety – both the terror of even tangentially “endorsing” slavery (though Gladstone never enslaved anyone, for example, his father did) and, on the other side, the fear that such a scorched earth policy towards icons of British history is a sign we are vandalising our own identity.
“It’s as if Starmer has no historical sense at all,” says Biggar. “He doesn’t seem to recognise that he is standing on the shoulders of giants. There should be humility about the past – we have the world we have now because of what our forebears built. Whatever Gladstone’s relationship to slavery was, he was one of the great European liberals of the 19th century who shaped this country. Elizabeth I’s role in shaping this country was extraordinary. It’s almost obscene that a man of such little stature should have the presumption to remove the portraits of these giants. The lack of gratitude is really striking.”
“For Keir Starmer to take down a portrait of Elizabeth I is very telling,” says Goldman. “I doubt he understands what he’s done or the significance of the Elizabethan age for our language, culture, music and our place in the world. If he did understand it he wouldn’t do that. And that is depressing.” For its part, a No 10 spokesman said the change of artwork was “long planned” and “timed to mark 125 years of the Government Art Collection.”
Other touchstones of the national story have been under ever greater scrutiny for the same reasons. The big question, experts say, is where the line is drawn between celebrating their achievements and recognising their failings – and to what extent we are in a position to judge our forebears who lived in such different circumstances with such different moral contexts.
“A lot of the figures we talk about are very complicated human beings as you would expect,” says Ehsan. “A person has to be considered in the round and the current debate can be too binary.
“Nelson was the naval commander we needed to defeat the threat of Napoleon but we can also say he was wrong for trying to resist the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade,” says Lester. “Churchill is the classic because we can still rate him very highly and find pride in the way he withstood Nazism at a critical moment for the world, but then he was an avowed racist. It’s legitimate to look at complicated people like that – what I object to is refusing to see both sides.”
The struggle is playing out across public life. In 2020 the National Trust placed itself in the eye of the storm when it produced a report about the relationships of its properties with slavery and colonialism, generating praise for its honesty but opprobrium for overtly politicising its purpose.
Among many examples of social history being used to editorialise public art, in July curators at the National Gallery claimed Constable’s “The Hay Wain” was a “contested landscape” that conceals a dark secret – the absence of “poorer workers of the time, many of whom were suffering from hunger and poverty.” But this addition looked to many less like reasonable commentary and more like a ridiculous gesture. 
History Reclaimed has criticised the BBC over a number of TV documentaries featuring slavery on the grounds of factual and contextual omission or for presenting misleading or incomplete stories of Britain’s activities in west Africa. 
“We are living through a bout of national hysteria and it’s almost like American McCarthyism in the early 1950s – purging the culture of anything that questioned a conventional way of thinking,” says Goldman. “You can see this in our institutions, who’ve forgotten their purpose, which is to present British culture in all its varieties and to allow people to make up their own minds. Trying to enforce conformity on us is a threat to a democratic culture. It’s certainly a threat to freedom of speech from universities downwards.”
One crumb of comfort as British culture spirals further into self-loathing is that although slavery is the thing polls reveal we are most ashamed of, abolishing slavery is among the things we are most proud of. “People are honest about Britain’s participation in the slave trade,” says Ehsan. “So the British public have more nuanced views about our history than many within our elites.”
Polling reveals this disconnect. When a Policy Exchange survey asked if children who are raised in Britain should be taught to be proud of Britain and its history, nearly three in four of the general population believed that they should – 72 per cent, with only 14 per cent saying they should not be, providing a net figure of +58. This is actually slightly higher than the number of those who agree that, on balance, Britain has historically been a force for good in the world: 60 per cent, with 13 per cent disagreeing – a net figure of +47. Polling from ethnic minority respondents confirmed that all groups agreed Britain has been a net force for good. The cringing attitude of many institutions, then, is not reflected in that of the general public.
“The narrative I fear is prevailing in our cultural institutions and too many of our schools and universities is historically untenable because it is so biased and the bias has a political motive: it’s anti-Western,” says Biggar. “Britain was among the first states in history to abolish slavery and then we led the world for about 150 years in suppressing slavery. We are arrogant about our judgments, as if people in the past should behave like we do.
“Campaigns that Britain should cough up huge sums of money are part of a national narrative that has real-time consequences for Britain as one of the West’s leading pillars at a time when we are under threat from the likes of Russia, Iran and China. What’s most distressing is that so many of our institutional leaders appear ready to buy into it – it’s partly ignorance, it’s partly because they assume the West is guilty and it’s partly complacency. They think they can corrode the record of the West and our national morale and carry on enjoying the privileges they do as if all this has no effect on this country and its power and reputation around the world. It’s as if they are sawing off the branch they are sitting on.”
Education marks the frontline in this historical culture war: progressives tend to think Michael Gove’s changes to the history curriculum from 2013 made it too narrowly focused on Britain, while traditionalists often perceive history in schools as little more than anti-British propaganda infused by critical race theory. These latter critics of modern self-abasement fear a country that hates itself will fall into atrophy and succumb to further division. 
“I’ve been worried about how the current view of British history is affecting national identity,” says Biggar. “That’s one of the reasons I wrote my book. If you believe our history is primarily a litany of racism, oppression and exploitation then it is very demoralising. If that’s all we’ve been then I’m worried about the way it undermines national self confidence.”
Campaigners on both sides want the same thing: a more sophisticated understanding of history that makes the right value judgements possible today. But they differ sharply over what those values are. “Recognising our history and self-criticism is part of what makes the West better than authoritarian states,” argues Lester. 
All of which will be half a world away for the King as he flies off on the royal tour of the southern hemisphere. But while the cash stakes around the negotiating tables in Samoa will be astonishingly high, the reputational stakes at home, for Britain’s sense of self, may be even higher when he returns. The King, on his long trip to the other side of the world, will encounter many people angry about their nations’ past. But he will come home to a country desperately conflicted about its own.