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In order to reverse the rise of “woke history”, pupils in England will, under a Reform government, have to study a radically new curriculum — or rather, a radically old one.
Under plans put forward by the party’s education spokesperson, Suella Braverman, pupils would have to cover the signing of the Magna Carta, the Wars of the Roses, the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, the Act of Union, the Enlightenment and Victorian Britain in a syllabus which would be at least 60 per cent devoted to “British” history. I take the view that there are no boring bits of history, and therefore no “wrong” answers on the curriculum. But I am baffled as to why only two out of three of England’s civil wars have made the cut, and indeed why it is that learning about them is meant to make you feel more patriotic afterwards. There are passages of history where we come out well, but Charles I’s wars of choice, or the republican experiments that followed him, are not among them.
Reform’s proposed history curriculum raises any number of questions, not least why “winning the second world war” is not higher up the list of worked examples of the UK’s patriotic history. Is it because Reform politicians or those in their orbit often seem to be agnostic about whether that one was an unalloyed good?
What is more striking, though, is that what Reform is proposing is more or less the history curriculum that was taught when those historians and teachers the party now decries as woke or unpatriotic were themselves at school. It is also, to be blunt, not all that different from what is taught in schools in England today. Eighty-seven per cent of English secondary schools teach the Magna Carta in years seven to nine, the last years at which history is a compulsory subject.
The problem for Reform is twofold. First is the challenge facing anyone wanting to use the history curriculum as a tool of political indoctrination: all real history involves people behaving monstrously and heroically — often, unhelpfully, the same people. And any half-decent history teacher will teach the skills of free inquiry and source interrogation that lead to awkward questions such as “what exactly happened in Ireland during the Glorious Revolution?” or, on the progressive side of the ledger, “so what about the Victorians’ contributions to human liberty?” Historians do not agree about what the “lessons” of the past are, or even if there are any.
Reform’s second difficulty reflects a broader confusion among modern parties of the far right: just whose values do they represent anyway?
The greatest hits of history in Braverman’s curriculum are a series of staging posts — but staging posts in the development of British liberalism, an ideological movement that Reform seems largely to oppose. Some of this has to do with the strategic ambiguity that serves parties like France’s Rassemblement National well: leave people guessing just how much you have actually moderated and how you would govern once in office, the better to win over the votes of mainstream conservatives and at the same time hold on to your core support.
But the confusion here also reflects genuine uncertainty within these movements about what they actually stand for. At times this can result in moments of unintentional irony. For instance, much of the European far right takes the position that freedom of religion and expression is a key value and a principle so important that it can’t be extended to Muslims. Their American cousins, meanwhile, think that Europe has so let down the promises of the liberal enlightenment that they are better served by building alliances of shared values with Vladimir Putin or the Gulf autocracies. Back in the UK, Reform leader Nigel Farage welcomes the support of Bonnie Blue, an adult entertainment star, while Danny Kruger, a Reform MP, decries a “totally unregulated sexual economy”.
Ambiguity about their own intentions can help rightwing populists electorally. But it comes with risks. The first, as we are seeing with the Trump administration in the US, is that sloppy thinking about what you want leads to disarray in office. The second, in Reform’s case, is that instead of being seen as a party that faces both ways — a party both of porn stars and Puritans — its electoral coalition turns out to comprise the rather smaller group of people who dislike Muslims, but whose own social policy preferences are uncomfortably close to the Taliban’s.
A muddled attempt to use the history curriculum to instil British patriotism, therefore, shows the ambiguity and uncertainty that might mean Reform, currently leading in the polls, could yet end up as a historical footnote.
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