“Erasure”

Last summer, Britain’s political and cultural elites were confronted with an alarming situation. A dangerous social contagion was spreading across the country, seemingly out of nowhere.

The debate over how we teach the British Empire has become one of the most polarising arguments in modern British education. Some insist the empire was a force for progress – ushering in parliamentary institutions, the rule of law, global trade and modernity. Others emphasise its violence, exploitation and the long shadow it casts over current-day inequalities.

Leslie Poles Hartley famously dubbed the past “a foreign country.” This summer, for the first time, I sensed that the present can be one too. My annual visit to the land of my childhood and youth exposed me to a culture very different from the one that nurtured me. Growing up as a grammar schoolboy in 1970s and ’80s England, I absorbed the importance of personal restraint; emotional self-control in public; privacy; acting with honesty and fairness, even to one’s own hurt; and respecting others regardless of their social status or opinions. At the level of society, such personal values promoted freedoms—of speech, of religion, of expression. All of that is gone, at least from the class that presumes to define the country’s mores and morals.