Stop telling Britons to feel guilty about the past

It has come to light that civil servants working for His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) took part in an hour-long seminar last week on the ‘guilt of being British’. The seminar offered staff the chance to explore ‘the emotional weight of colonial history’, as well as ‘the emotional complexity of being South Asian and British’.

Organised by the HMRC Race Network, the first session was held online last Wednesday morning. Following a public outcry, HMRC has now decided that further sessions on the theme will not go ahead.

Sections of the media called this a ‘victory over woke’, but this is wishful thinking. As a HMRC spokesman said, ‘This event has rightly been cancelled, with our full focus being on serving customers day in and day out’. In other words, HMRC didn’t reject the content of the seminar. It merely implied that it shouldn’t have been held during work hours.

The British-guilt seminar was hardly an aberration either. Indeed, in recent years the civil service has run many seminars, talks and training sessions for staff that are designed to make its staff feel ashamed of their own nation.

As I argue in The War Against the Past, this attempt to demonise Britain’s history plays a fundamental role in the culture war. Take activists’ efforts to ‘decolonise’ the education system. At the annual conference of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) in 2021, former president Michelle Codrington-Rogers proposed a motion urging schools to decolonise every single subject in the school curriculum. In the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, she claimed that successive governments had prioritised the ‘classics’ for far too long. There needed to be an increasing effort to ‘ensure black visibility’ in all subjects, she said.

‘Decolonising the curriculum’ is never about simply broadening young people’s reading material. It is about teaching them that their nation’s history is uniquely deplorable. This aim was made explicit in anti-racism guidance issued by the Scottish government to teachers in 2021. The introduction declared that: ‘If you are socialised as white, you grew up in a world where you were consistently told / fed by the culture around you that your way of life is the right, sophisticated, enlightened way to be.’ It goes on to state that this worldview must be challenged, despite the ‘defensive reaction’ of those who resent their national culture being denigrated. The message here is clear: if you want to be seen as a good person, you are obliged to feel guilty about the life into which you were born.

For those Brits who manage to escape the education system unaffected by years of decolonial brainwashing, there is an army of experts ready to ‘correct’ them as adults. Kehinde Andrews, a professor of black studies at Birmingham City University, recently appeared on a supposedly educational YouTube video called ‘Britain is a colonial, wicked nation – why I refuse to call myself British!’. He argues that too many Brits suffer from the ‘psychosis of whiteness’, and refuse to accept that Britain is indeed a ‘wicked nation’.

The likes of Andrews and others want to make us feel guilty. They try to portray the West and Britain’s historic and traditional values as irrelevant at best, and toxic at worst. They want to instill something like national shame.

But what these shamers don’t understand is that guilt loses all moral content when it refers to people who aren’t culpable. Encouraging people to feel personally at fault for what happened several hundred years ago is a Freudian displacement activity. Indeed, those most devoted to national guilt-tripping avoid reckoning with the very real challenges of our time.

What we need now is an approach to history that respects the distinction between past and present – one that neither reads history backwards, nor rolls it forward into the present. The British people have been fed far too long on a diet of self-loathing. The vast majority have now had enough.

Frank Furedi is the executive director of the think-tank, MCC-Brussels.