In Britain, we might watch the American political horror show with our heads in our hands, but as Right-Wing Watch readers will know all too well, the UK right has been following the same playbook as their American counterparts for some time. The goal is the same – to control the narrative, limit access to critical thinking and suppress any awkward truths.
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past,” wrote George Orwell in 1984.
Disturbingly, the rewriting of history to serve a specific agenda is unfolding before our eyes.
Amid his flood of deeply aggressive executive orders targeting immigration, employment, education, justice reform, and other civil rights in the US, one stood out as particularly dark and sinister. Last week, Trump signed an executive order misleadingly titled ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.’ The document states:
“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”
But as David Corn, Mother Jones’ Washington bureau chief and analyst for MSNBC, explains, Trump’s order targets long-standing efforts to explore the dark chapters of American history, including racism, sexism, genocide, and other troubling aspects, that have been essential in understanding the nation’s history.
“The order essentially declared that Trump is the ultimate arbiter of US history and had the right to police thought,” writes Corn.
But this attempt to alter US history to fit their vision is not unique to Trump’s second term in office.
In Florida, under the right-wing leadership of Governor Ron DeSantis, it has become, as the Washington Postdescribed, “increasingly difficult to say what Black history means.”
In just a few years, DeSantis has overseen a rapid re-evaluation of Black history education, pushing laws that restrict the teaching of race. Most disturbingly, Florida introduced a set of history standards that even suggest enslaved people benefited from slavery. A 2022 law mandates that students cannot be made to “feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” when reflecting on the harmful actions of their ancestors. Under new curriculum standards released in 2023, Florida students are required to learn that enslaved people “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit,” a statement that was condemned by historians.
But this reworking of history to manipulate thought and discourse goes back much further. A propagandist version of history has long been a tool of authoritarian regimes. The Stalinists and Nazis believed that free thought cannot coexist with authoritarianism. To prevent debate and dominate societal discourse, they dictated history.
As Corn notes, shortly after Hitler became Chancellor in April 1933, his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, declared that “the year 1789” would be “expunged from history,” meaning the ideas of liberty, civic equality, and human rights that emerged from the French Revolution would be crushed. Under Hitler’s rule, Germany’s history conveniently ignored recent European history.
Similarly, the Soviets regularly erased disfavoured officials from official accounts, literally deleting inconvenient parts of history. Most notoriously, even Trotsky was expunged from photographs of the revolution.
So, where does Britain stand on seeking to shape the past to control the narrative of the present and to fit a right-wing agenda?
The attacks on the 2012 opening ceremony of the London Olympics provides an exemplar of the UK right’s narrow and very particular view of what should be celebrated in history.
From the Industrial Revolution to wartime Britain, a nod to the Beatles, an appearance by Dizzee Rascal, and, of course, the Queen parachuting into the Olympic Stadium with James Bond, Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony was a spectacular celebration of Britain’s rich and unique history, culture, and humour. And of course, it was a brave attempt to redefine patriotism which was really got up the collective noses of some on the right.
Conservative MP Aidan Burley, who was sacked as a ministerial aide for attending a Nazi-themed stag party, blasted it on Twitter as “multicultural crap” and “the most leftie opening ceremony I have ever seen”.
Burley’s outburst fuelled suspicion that some members of the Conservative party fail to recognise the vital contribution to society made by black and minority ethnic Britons. Boyle’s ceremony, with a scene dedicated to MV Empire Windrush, the ship which brought many passengers from Jamaica to start a new life in Britain, was a direct challenge to such outdated views.
The then education secretary Michael Gove was also reported to have voiced concerns, giving the ceremony “four out of 10”.
In 2013, Gove went further, escalating his revisionism with his own version of British and world history with a new history curriculum. Gove’s curriculum was widely condemned by historians, including the Royal Historical Society, senior members of the British Academy, the higher education group History UK and the Historical Association. They blasted it as overly Anglocentric, highly proscriptive, dull and failing to recognise that learning about the past of other cultures away from our shores is “as vital as knowledge of foreign languages to enable British citizens to understand the full variety and diversity of human life”. Children will be deprived of knowledge of the “vast bulk” of the precious past by its narrow horizons, they said.
In a letter to the Observer, Oxford University history teacher David Priestland, noted how the Chinese Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898 hadn’t made it onto Michael Gove’s “depressingly narrow history syllabus”.
“In Gove, we have our own empress dowager,” Priestland wrote, adding: “… the focus is resolutely insular, as we would expect from our nationalistic education secretary – a real departure from the current syllabus, which shows an interest in parts of the world beyond Britain and introduces children to critical thinking.”
Interestingly China has become something of a litmus test when it comes to the right’s interventions into the history curriculum. Thatcher famously intervened into the writing of the National Curriculum history syllabus, insisting on more ‘facts’ and more British history. As a consequence, China disappeared and with it one-fifth of the world’s population and its longest enduring political entity.
Of course there are historians who welcome such political interventions. Conservative TV historian and author David Starkey, welcomed Gove’s controversial decision to have topics taught in chronological order, saying it had “long been needed”.
This is the same Starkey who, in 2020, was dropped by the publisher HarperCollins, for remarks to the right-wing commentator Darren Grimes that “slavery was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain would there? You know, an awful lot of them survived.”
George Osborne’s attempts to rewrite history
In 2015, the then chancellor George Osborne came under fire for attempting to rewrite history. In a keynote speech at the Tories’ annual conference in Manchester, he took a moment to look back, saying the party should be proud of its reforming history – citing a list of so-called ‘achievements’ from the abolition of the slave trade to votes for women.
But Channel 4 quickly set the record straight, reminding that the slave trade was outlawed in the British Empire in 1807, decades before the modern Conservative party was founded in the 1830s.
Professor Emma Griffin from the University of East Anglia told Channel 4’s Fact Check that Osborne’s version of events was “not right at all… complete nonsense”.
Boris Johnson and the Troubles
And then there was Boris Johnson’s attempt to commission an ‘official history’ of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
In 2021, jaws dropped across Ireland when the UK government announced plans to commission an ‘official history’ of the Troubles. The Daily Telegraphrevealed that the move was driven by fears of “IRA supporters are rewriting history,” with the narrative set to focus on the British government and army’s role.
The plans caused outrage among historians, human rights groups, the bereaved families and hundreds of others waiting for the truth about the conflict in Northern Ireland. And of course, it is worth remembering that Johnson himself has form when it comes to history. The eminent historian, Richard Evans, described Johnson’s biography of Churchill as like being harangued by Bertie Wooster at the Drones Club.
Little wonder then that Colin Harvey, professor of human rights at Queens University Belfast, said: “The British were protagonists in the conflict …participants. And it seems like for the current British government, the truth hurts: they don’t like what’s emerging about the role of the British state”.
When asked by BBC Northern Ireland whether he would accept an invitation, if asked to participate in the ‘official history, Diarmaid Ferriter, professor of modern Irish history at University College, Dublin replied: “I think I’d say get stuffed”.
At the time, Declassified UK warned that the UK government was censoring numerous files showing the British army’s complicity in the deaths of civilians, thereby depriving bereaved families of access to the truth.
Statue removing
Of course, the right will have you believe that it’s us ‘lefties’ trying to rewrite history. The removal of statues honouring slave-owners and imperialist figures in the wake of the death of George Floyd in the US, including the dumping of Edward Colston into Bristol harbour by Black Lives Matter (BLM) protestors, triggered such outrage among the right.
In response to the boarding up of the Cenotaph in Whitehall and Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, the then prime minister Boris Johnson said the George Floyd protests had been ‘hijacked by extremists intent on violence.’
“We cannot now try to edit or censor our past,” he said, adding “to tear them down would be to lie about our history, and impoverish the education of generations to come.”
But this argument misses the point. Statues are not history; they are symbols of values. Removing a statue does not ‘cancel’ him (they’re nearly always a him) from historical record.
As historian Michel Taylor argues in an essay entitled The Gammoning of British History: “…if we should wish to remove the statue of a slave trader or exploitative imperialist, it means only that we no longer wish to celebrate historical figures whose values now clash irreconcilably with our own.”
He could have added that statues are often created years after the death of the celebrated subject precisely because they reflect contemporary rather than historical values.
Book banning
In contrast to the glorification of contentious male figures in history through statues, the banning of books actively silences the contributions of marginalised communities, effectively erasing vital chapters of history.
And things are getting much worse. In February, the Trump administration instructed the Department of Education to end their investigations into these bans, calling them a “hoax”.
PEN America, one of America’s largest non-profits dedicated to protecting free expression in literature and beyond, warns that the current barrage of book bans and the growing traction of the movement is dangerously reminiscent of authoritarian regimes throughout history.
“What we’re seeing right now mirrors elements of different historical periods, but this has never all happened at once,” said Jonathan Friedman, Sy Syms managing director for US free expression programs at PEN America.
We tend to believe (or hope) that the banning of books wouldn’t occur in more tolerant and informed Britain. But sadly, that’s not the case. In 2024, the Index on Censorship found that 28 of the 53 British school librarians they polled had been asked to remove books – many of which were LGBTQ+ titles – from their shelves.
In Britain, we might watch the American political horror show with our heads in our hands, but as Right-Wing Watch readers will know all too well, the UK right has been following the same playbook as their American counterparts for some time. The goal is the same – to control the narrative, limit access to critical thinking and suppress any awkward truths.
And what’s really frightening is that these conservative efforts to rewrite history and silence uncomfortable truths, means history becomes a weapon, not a lesson. Of course, as the famous historian AJP Taylor said, all history is written from the perspective of the present but that is not to say that it is just subjective opinion. There is a world of difference between history which is the outcome of critical debate and academic scrutiny over an extended period which makes the invisible visible, as I would say was the case with Black history and Feminist history, and the outpourings of some Trumpian state governor. One is history and the other – well as Henry Ford put it, just ‘bunk’.
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch
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