Presenting the past as another place
John Redwood
THE ABOLITION OF BRITAIN by Peter Hitchens Quartet, £15, pp. 354 Ipicked up Peter Hitchens's book with apprehension. Would I tire of those famil- iar arguments about the collapse of self- government? Three and a half hours later I put it down exhilarated. He has written with passion and flair. He has the same feelings about Britain, democracy and our future as many of us. His demand that Left and Right bury their differences to fight off the radical European threat to our nation- hood and liberty is one well made. As he says, what is the point of Right and Left arguing about tax levels or public spending if the country that could make the decision has been spirited away? I ended my recent book, The Death of Britain? by saying that now is the time for an alarm call to the British people to wake up whilst there is still time to save our tra- dition of liberty and freedom. Hitchens and I both conclude that the battle to save the Pound provides us all with an opportunity to halt the demise of our country and regis- ter our belief that Britain is worth keeping. The referendum on the single currency provides an opportunity to arrest a process which leads inevitably to the death of a great and honourable nation. We do need to make common cause whatever our other beliefs.
Peter Hitchens reaches his conclusion through 350 pages of insight, description and love of our country. He slams the Blair experience, linking it to the movements that have rewritten our history, debauched our language, made tawdry much of our music, dumbed down our papers and tele- vision, undermined many of our great national institutions and sold out many of our rights of self-government to Brussels.
He sees how the New Labour phe- nomenon is driven by the dictatorship of the focus group. Everything is done in the name of the people, but the people are being manipulated through the govern- ment's huge and unhealthy control over the press.
The spin doctors are out to make the past a foreign country. Everything and everyone who disagrees with their version of manic modernisation is to be uprooted, pensioned off or branded as an extremist. The hereditary peers are sent packing because they dare to vote against the gov- ernment occasionally. The House of Com- mons is marginalised because the opposition dares to disagree with the Pro- ject. The monarchy is undermined because there must be no distraction from the per- sonality of Mr Blair and the soap opera which is the government.
The death of a princess was used to get across a wider message, that the old establishment is no more: welcome to the new tyranny of the touchy-feely New Labourites. They will dictate to us what we should wear and what we should feel whilst trying to stop us debating how we wish to be governed.
Peter Hitchens is at his best exposing the way in which our educational system and cultural standards have been systematically undermined. Revolutionaries always burn the history books and insist on a single new way of viewing the past. Indeed they usual- ly try to obliterate the past by renaming streets and buildings, demolishing old sym- bols or converting old institutions to new uses. He goes to town showing how telling the story of Britain has been replaced by sporadic forays into social history, using sources to show the pupil a politically cor- rect version of events.
Always the past is presented as another place, a place where people were cruel, unfeeling, imperialist. We have to apolo- gise for what our ancestors were and did. There are no local heroes: the heroes are figures abroad who stood up against our disreputable progress. We apologise for the Irish potato famine: should we send a letter to the French asking their forgiveness for killing some of their people at the battle of Hastings?
Fortunately the British people are more resolute and less susceptible to this kind of bombardment than Peter Hitchens fears. Even New Labour knows that it would be a mistake to try to haul Horatio Nelson down from Trafalgar Square and put up Nelson Mandela instead. Many of us would remember how Nelson saved Britain from Napoleonic tyranny and would mind. We can show our appreciation of Mandela in another way. The same prime minister who sought to outmanoeuvre the monarchy over the death of Diana wanted to associ- ate himself with the Queen's popularity at the time of her 50th anniversary.
Many parents make a huge financial sac- rifice and send their children to private schools where more of the old curriculum and standards survive: other parents would be well advised to defend the remaining grammar schools and demand improve- ments in the quality of education in those comprehensives where learning is not flourishing.
My response to Peter Hitchens's plea is: I and my colleagues are with you. If we allow this group of triumphalist politicians to have their way neither Right nor Left will be able to govern this country in the future, because the country will have gone. The public will be denied the choice. Its power will be taken away. Liberties which took more than a thousand years to acquire will have been surrendered in a generation without a shot having been fired.
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