Before he was elected UK prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer promised to “reset” the relationship between government and civic organisations. In particular, he singled out Conservative ministers’ attacks on the National Trust for having published a 2020 report, which I co-authored, detailing the colonial connections of properties in the organisation’s care.
Starmer said: “Instead of working with the National Trust so more people can learn about…our history, [ministers have] managed to demean [its] work.” And he saw this as part of the Tories’ politics of culture wars, which he has described as “finding enemies that don’t really exist, and then [having] a fight with them, which is exhausting and divisive”.
For a while, I became one of those enemies. Major newspapers denounced the trust’s report – an audit of research in reputable academic journals and databases – and government ministers joined in, even objecting to my Colonial Countryside project – a child-led history and writing initiative. Two parliamentary debates were held on the trust, and I received waves of hate mail and so many threats of violence that for a while I couldn’t walk anywhere unaccompanied.
I felt compelled to contact Hacked Off, the campaign for a free but accountable press, about my treatment, and I gave evidence to Parliament about hate speech and incitements to violence in unregulated, below-the-line reader comments on news articles. I have no idea what the effects of reading such comments about his own mother might have had on my young son, who looked them up.
Nor was mine an isolated case. Relentless press and political attacks have plagued all organisations that have attempted to address colonial history. When Historic England brought out its 2021 audit of public buildings and monuments with slavery connections, Conservative MP Sir John Hayes said the report should be “shredded”. The arm’s-length principle for such publicly funded bodies, designed to protect them from political interference, was for a time abandoned as government sympathisers were foisted upon them as trustees, with the aim of blocking activities or initiatives that attempted to address colonial history.
Meanwhile, London’s Museum of the Home and Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum have been among many more organisations subjected to a pitch of condemnation and misrepresentation that has left museum directors and trustees terrified of those journalists who seem to hound every new initiative.
In 2021, the historian David Olusoga wrote that broadcasters, universities and museums were all becoming “victims of political intolerance”. Referring to my own treatment, he said: “Attacking historians who dare to examine the role of slavery or imperialism in the creation of Britain’s national wealth and our culture conveniently creates new enemies who can be paraded before ‘the people’.”
Even school history teachers have had to worry about the threatened consequences of failing to teach “balanced” histories of empire, ahistorically defined by the government as taking in the “good” as well as the “bad” aspects.
My own troubles restarted a couple of months ago with the publication of my new book, Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain. Eight days before it was even available, it was condemned in The Daily Telegraph. “Her work is premised on the suffering of victims overseas,” a commentator contended, but “she overlooks another and much larger group of ‘victims’ in her story, the British agricultural labourers who, through centuries of toil, worked the land…for their weekly shillings.”
In fact, the link between British labour history and colonialism is the book’s main topic. Whole chapters are devoted to 18th-century enclosure and loss of the common land, copper mines, cotton mills and food riots – the bread and butter of working people’s lives. It appears that the Telegraph article was written without so much as picking up a copy. The same goes for a subsequent piece in The Spectator, whose completely misinformed attack was even repeated during an interview with me on the BBC’s Today programme.
In the new Parliament, the majority of MPs now support the part of the Online Security Bill that was designed to outlaw unregulated hate speech below online newspaper articles but was taken out before the bill was passed last October. Hacked Off additionally supports combating press intrusion and the political misuse of the press to intimidate or silence people. These measures were recommended some time ago by the Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking and other disreputable practices by news media organisations.
If Labour keeps its promise to implement those recommendations, it will bring some relief to many of us who are just doing our jobs as historians, museum directors, heritage professionals and teachers. It will also be very timely when Caribbean calls for slavery reparations – which would be a significant strain on the UK’s ailing economy – are gaining traction.
The UK cannot properly acknowledge our colonial history, let alone assess the justice of demands to compensate for it, if neither the public nor politicians know precisely what the transatlantic slavery system involved. Now, perhaps, the work of spreading that knowledge can recommence.
Corinne Fowler is professor of colonialism and heritage at the University of Leicester. Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain is published by Penguin Allen Lane.
