Glories Told and Untold

More than eighty per cent of Britons are unaware of the extent and consequences of colonialism and the slave trade, although the woke mind virus has established itself sufficiently for most to be in favour of a formal apology from the Government and for a substantial and growing minority to be in favour of formal reparations. Doubtless the causes and morality of such widespread ignorance will prove a mystery fit for decades of pained liberal wonderment; certainly school history during my own education began with the Normans and broke off with the Tudors, to resume in the late nineteenth century with the build-up to Mr Churchill's saving of the world for democracy. For his own part Mr Churchill, who famously opined that forced labour for brown people could be called slavery only at some risk of terminological inexactitude, and who sniggered heartily at the idea of one Hottentot one vote, remains safely ensconced along with various other white people upon a grateful nation's banknotes.