The legacy of empire still shapes the world. But Kemi Badenoch’s plan will ensure that ignorance reigns over this
If the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge need some comfort reading after their awkward Caribbean tour, they could do worse than turn to Tony Blair’s autobiography. In 1997, Britain’s new prime minister travelled to Hong Kong to oversee its handover to China. Years later, Blair described how he had struggled through a conversation with the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, on a subject of UK-China history, because, in his own words, Blair had “only a fairly dim and sketchy understanding of what that past was”. The history being discussed was the opium wars, the very reason why Hong Kong had become British in the first place. Yet here was a boarding school and Oxbridge-educated prime minister who had next to no knowledge of the history that produced the very event he had travelled to oversee.
The impression many ministers give today is that students in British classrooms are being bludgeoned with never-ending tales of Britain’s imperial crimes. This is why the government is now looking to rebalance the scales with a new curriculum that highlights the “benefits” of the British empire, as well as its negatives. Building on last year’s controversial Sewell report, the plans promoted by the equalities minister Kemi Badenoch are part of a wider campaign to move the teaching of empire away from what the government fears is a culture of victimisation and identity politics in schools, instead framing the legacy of empire as a debate of pros and cons. Was the empire wrong? Was it right? Which bits of the empire were naughty or nice?
