Polarised politics and imperial past

Sarah Vine said she fears the UK has become infected with the same sickness that has been tearing America apart for the last decade or so.

“The battles that have been raging on US campuses and streets have firmly invaded our shores,” she said. “Complex questions of politics, race and identity have become sharply polarised, stripped of all nuance, simplified beyond all reason and presented as moral imperatives, a simple case of good versus evil, love versus hate, and yes, black versus white.”

She said the killing of George Floydw as an abomination but she is disturbed by the way the tragedy has been used to fan the flames of hatred.

“In particular, the notion that all white people need to apologise for their very existence (exemplified by one little girl, aged maybe six or seven, whose mother posted a picture of her holding up a sign proclaiming her ‘white privilege’) — and the idea we are all racists,” she added. “To assume so — as many appear to — is as wrongheaded as the assumption that a young black male hanging out in the park is a drug dealer. It is simply not true.”

She said chants of ‘racist scum’ being chanted at police officers failed to take into account that the vast majority are not racist in the least and are doing their best to protect the public.

“Yet those who’ve tried to make that point, who have tried to calm the fervour of the seething crowds, have been turned upon, typecast as not much better than the men who killed Floyd,” she said. “Any deviation from the narrative of extreme political correctness, of ‘woke’ revisionism, is interpreted as a thought crime, a perversion, and shut down accordingly.

“It has been a very long time since freedom of thought felt so fragile — or so risky.”

The Guardian

Daniel Crilling, author of Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe and Bloody Nasty People: the Rise of Britain’s Far Right,said that by forcing the UK to confront racism at home, the Black Lives Matter protesters are placing the empire and its legacy centre stage.

“Yet they are met with an infantile and increasingly toxic political discourse,” he said. “Debate is frequently derailed into arguments over whether Churchill was personally “a racist”, rather than the ideas and structures that shaped the behaviour of the British ruling class.”

Other arguments range over whether taking down the statue of Edward Colston is “rewriting history”, rather than why Bristol taxpayers were still paying compensation to the descendants of slaveowners as late as 2015, he added.

“Likewise, the right tends to respond to demands that Britain acknowledge the truth about empire as if this were primarily about blaming people alive today, or about protecting the hurt feelings of minority groups,” he said. “A better understanding of our history, including the crimes committed in Britain’s name, is essential for understanding the country we live in today, and the only way to defuse the claim that England is divided into two rival camps.Until Britain finds a way to reckon with its imperial past, this culture war will continue to burn.”

The Daily Express

Ann Widdicombe argued that history is ‘not merely a procession of people in fancy dress fighting wars. It is crucially the story of man’s evolution from grunting cave dweller to serious thinker.’

She said that Edward Colston - whose statue was torn down in Bristol - lived 200 years before slavery was abolished.

“A hundred years before the birth of Colston Henry VIII was boiling traitors in oil,” she added. “Hanging, drawing and quartering was still going on for many years after Colston’s death.That was the society in which he lived and the values upheld by its law. Yet he was miles ahead of his time in philanthropy, spending his vast fortune on schools, almshouses, hospitals and churches.”

She argued that it was as logical to tear down his statue as it would be to burn the diaries of Samuel Pepys.

“History [covers the progression] from cruelly retributive law to merciful law, from casual barbarism to care and compassion,” she added. “The fools who vandalised statues last weekend have no more grasp of that than the ISIS barbarians who vandalised historic sites in Syria.”