Pride or shame? British history is too complex to be seen in such glib terms

‘Britain’s long and proud history has been trashed by the self-hating left.” “British history is not being taught and people are hugely ignorant of our past.” “We have lost that sense of what was at stake, with a consequent decline of pride in the sacrifices endured.” “Generations are growing up hearing nothing but bad things about their country.”
The latest chapter from this year’s British Social Attitudes (BSA) report, published last week, has created apoplexy within certain circles. Written by John Curtis and Alex Scholes, it explores changing conceptions of Britishness. One finding in particular drew the ire of conservative critics: that pride in British history has fallen sharply over the past decade. Almost two-thirds of people still feel “proud” of Britain’s history, but that figure has dropped by 22 points since 2013.
To understand better both that statistic about falling pride and the furious response to it, we need to explore the broader story Curtis and Scholes tell. Perhaps their most significant finding is that people’s sense of Britishness is becoming more “civic” and less “ethnic”.
Only a minority now thinks that to be “truly British” you must possess British ancestry. Most people, about 80%, regard “respecting British political institutions and laws”, “having British citizenship” and “feeling British” as the most important measures in defining national belonging.
Curtis and Scholes show that Britons have become prouder of the nation’s cultural and sporting achievements but less so of its political or economic record – or its history. They are also less likely to support “jingoistic expressions of national pride”. Fewer people would “rather be a citizen of Britain than of any other country in the world” or would “support their country even if the country is in the wrong”. Those with ethnic conceptions of nationhood are more likely to feel pride in the nation’s history and to insist “Britain, right or wrong”.
These shifts are part of a wider trend of social liberalisation that the BSA has tracked over decades. Changing conceptions of Britishness, Curtis and Scholes suggest, reveal a nation “more reflective about itself and about its relationship with the rest of the world”.
For the naysayers, though, it is a picture not of a more reflective, but of a more ignorant public, and one that has been brainwashed by “woke” attacks on Britain’s past. Certainly, Britain’s history, especially its role as an imperial power and in the transatlantic slave trade, has come under more critical scrutiny in recent years. There have been campaigns to tear down statues and other symbols of slavery or colonialism and attempts to reassess the reputations of historical figures, from Thomas Huxley to Winston Churchill.
Such campaigns can eschew moral complexities and present history in a cartoonish fashion. But many also pose important and necessary challenges to accepted narratives that have often whitewashed the bleaker aspects of British history. Conservative critics too often view such questioning as an affront, as “rewriting history” and as “corroding faith in the west”. In so doing, they reveal both their desire to maintain the old historical narratives, including the old apologias for colonialism, and that their real concern is not with the past but with the present.
“What is at stake,” as Oxford theologian Nigel Biggar puts it in his book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, is “the self-perception and self-confidence of the British today.” In the service of shoring up their vision of the present, such critics promote a self-serving vision of the past.
At the same time, the claim that “woke denigration of empire” has led to public antipathy towards British history is questionable. According to a YouGov poll taken just before the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in 2020, pride in the empire had already almost halved between 2014 and 2020. An Ipsos Mori poll after those demonstrations showed that half the population supported the protests. It also showed that twice as many people were proud of the British empire as ashamed of it.
There is a more profound question, too, posed by this debate: does it make sense to think of history in simple terms as something that should engender pride or shame?
History does not come as a single package all nicely wrapped up, but consists of many threads, some admirable, others despicable, yet others a mixture of the two. Why should I, or anyone else, be proud of the Peterloo massacre of 1819, when cavalrymen, sabres drawn, charged into a crowd of 60,000 working-class protesters on St Peter’s Field, Manchester, who were demanding greater democracy, killing at least 18 and injuring several hundred? Or of the brutal suppression of the so-called Indian mutiny – in reality an early nationalist uprising – when prisoners were tied to cannons and their bodies ripped apart? Or of Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists, supported by friends in high places, such as Viscount Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, which in 1934 published a notorious editorial titled “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!”? Or of the police brutality meted out to miners, and mining communities, during the 1984-85 strike?
On the other hand, I have immense admiration – call it pride if you will – for the working-class pioneers of the modern suffrage movement and the suffragettes who took up the torch a century later.
Equally so for the Chartists who supported Indians fighting British rule because, as the People’s Paper insisted in 1857, the Indian struggle was no different to struggles for freedom by European peoples, and support for “democracy must be consistent”. And for the East Enders who, in 1936, confronted Mosley and the Blackshirts at the battle of Cable Street. And for the miners who stood up to the Thatcher government and the brutality of state violence.
Each of these events, and myriad others, challenges us to define the kind of Britain we want. British history is one of conflict and contestation and Britishness shaped by the struggle over the values we seek to uphold. The fact that more people are less admiring of colonialism, more willing to question aspects of British history, and less disposed to see Britishness in ethnic terms, is something to be welcomed, not denounced.
It is not so much the fall in pride in British history about which we should worry as the insistence that there is only one way to understand the nation’s past or the meaning of Britishness today.
Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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