It was George Orwell who once wrote,

‘The most effective way to destroy people is to obliterate their own understanding of their history’

And that is exactly what hard-left Liberals have spent the last six decades doing in the UK.

It started in the 1960’s when they began a slow creep take-over of third level education and now we can see the outcome. Where once the United Kingdom’s universities reflected the history and values of its people, it’s now hard-left ‘Social-Justice’. The UK tradition of free thought, free speech and the freedom to be different has been challenged by an anti-intellectual hard-left mind-virus called ‘cancel culture’; and many of our towns and cities no longer buzz with university graduate led civic pride, having long ago fallen into the misery of Soviet style decay.

The 1960’s were bad for history, but the real damage was done in the 1990’s when Tony Blair’s Labour government introduced the ‘common curriculum’ to all publicly funded schools. Overnight school history ceased to be a debate and a new hard-left ideological truth was born; and because it rhymed with that taught to trainee teachers in the 1960’s, most were happy to go along with it.

In Northern Ireland the Unionist narrative as good as disappeared from the curriculum and it was replaced by the hard-left story. As a result few of our children learn anything about our first Prime Minister James Craig, who was as passionate about individual rights as he was dismissive of hard-left collectivism. Nor do they hear about the 30th March 1922 Craig-Collins pact that was negotiated in London and agreed between Prime Minister Craig and IRA leader Michael Collins; and this means that they would also not know that the pact itself was the product of work put in by Irish Parliamentary Party MP Joseph Devlin and a group of Belfast based catholic business men. They envisaged:

• Special police in mixed areas to be composed half Catholic and half Protestant.
• A Catholic advisory committee to select recruits.
• Expelled persons to be allowed to return to their homes.
• Mutual release of prisoners in Northern Ireland and the newly formed Irish Free State.
• £500,000 to be provided by the British government for relief work.
  And
• Provision for future meetings to discuss all-Ireland issues, including the viability of unity.

But perhaps worst of all, those same young people do not discover that within six months of the agreement Michael Collins was assassinated by hard-left Nationalists; and they did it because he agreed to a model of governance that would be repeated in both the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement and the 1998 Belfast Agreement.

In place of this positive Unionist history pupils in Northern Ireland learn the 6red and dusty hard-left narratives, and this is how they obliterate our understanding of our own history. It starts in 1916 when Irish Republicans declared their history to be the totality of ‘Irish history’ and they did it through the collectivist Proclamation of the Irish Republic. It effectively declares non-Republican history to be the product of ‘differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past’ and that left the Unionist identity outside the history of the land they stood on.

Fast forward to the present day and our children are told that Northern Irish Civil Rights activists in the 1960’s were inspired to action by black Civil Rights protestors in North America. How the experience of black America related to Nationalist Northern Ireland is never fully explained and the curriculum never mentions one key difference. In Northern Ireland education was funded 100% equal irrespective of background and that is why it has some world class Catholic Grammar Schools whose alumni have enriched universities near and far; but irrespective of that, our children are now taught a Bolshevik inspired myth that says spontaneous street protest swept Ulster in the 1960’s.

This could not be further from the truth because the protesters were really just a bunch of well-fed, scholarship afflicted University lefties bitching their oppression. The problem for Northern Ireland was that the flames of Irish history are easily provoked and what started out as irresponsible Bolsheviks doing what irresponsible Bolsheviks do, quickly mutated into what we call ‘the troubles’; and true to form, the hard-left has never taken its share of responsibility for what happened 1968-98?

Now I’ll bet there aren’t many people who have read or heard that interpretation of Northern Ireland and its history. It refuses to play victim; it refuses to let others play victim; it refuses to comply with the Bolshevik mind-virus; and thus the Trotskyite left will airbrush it from history.

And it’s the same across the United Kingdom.

Bolshevik annals now dominate and the hard-left is protected by their cherished ‘Liberal privilege’; and true to form they play the race card every time. Nowadays it is not unusual for British school children to be taught that irrespective of economic background the majority are the beneficiaries of ‘white privilege’ and then the hard-left gender bigots often weigh in to label the boys as ‘toxic’. As a result disturbing evidence of Bolshevik bullies forcing children to the knee where they are expected to disown their history and apologise to people they’ve never met and do not know, began to emerge. In any other age this might be called the abuse of children, but as I said we now live in the age of ‘Liberal privilege’ and that means those children who fail the skin colour or gender test can be name called and bullied with no consequence to their Bolshevik oppressors. It should not be this way and this writer never imagined I would write the next sentence about education in the United Kingdom, but our children deserve better.

In 2024 how can parents and the public in the United Kingdom protect our history and keep our children safe when a sizable section of the educational hoi-polloi believes the majority of pupils to be racially ‘privileged’ and therefore the source of other people’s problems?

The answer is to break the bonds of Bolshevik bigotry and return to the United Kingdom tradition of treating all children equally irrespective of skin colour or economic capacity. That means teaching children that their history, their community and their country is something they can be proud of and that would require a root and branch reform of the history curriculum. The outcome should reflect the industry, generosity and tolerance of people in the United Kingdom; and for years 9 and 10 (13-14 years old) the narrative could look something like this.

The United Kingdom is an entity that has ebbed and flowed through history starting with the Acts of Union between England and Scotland in 1707. When it was born Britain was a leading player in the slave trade and a century later, not long after Ireland joined in 1800, the United Kingdom Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act that abolished the trade in slaves in 1807; and this was followed by the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act that ended slavery across the whole of the British Empire. But before that in 1712 a clever chap called Thomas Newcomen developed an ‘atmospheric’ engine that could drain water out of deep mines and this led to James Watts’s steam engine that went into production after 1776.

Watt’s engine went on to power the early days of what history now calls the ‘Industrial Revolution’, and that was a time when the United Kingdom led the world into a new era.

As previously mentioned the ‘Industrial Revolution’ was initially powered by the steam engine and they needed coal to get the pistons pumping. The solution was to link the mines to the factories by building a network of canals across the United Kingdom, and that led to more demand which meant more canals. The Sankey Brook Navigation (later re-named the St Helen’s Canal) in North West England led the way when it opened in 1757 and it was quickly followed by the nearby Bridgewater Canal that opened in 1761. The economic and social boom that followed transformed the UK and part of that change was the construction of a national canal network that totalled close to 4000 miles by 1840.

With the mines booming and the factories buzzing the people of the United Kingdom expanded into the 19th century and they built our modern world in the process.

The towns and cities where many of us live today grew up around the mines, factories and mills that fuelled the growth; and the vast majority was funded by private money. In those days ‘laisse faire1’ economics ruled the roost and there was a long period between its implementation and the growth of organised labour, but here again the United Kingdom led the way.

Industrialisation is a process and it starts when someone puts their money where their mouth is and invests in an idea. In the beginning the balance between an investor’s profit and worker’s rights is 99% in favour of the investor, with labour only having the right not to take the job; but that shifts over-time; eventually an equilibrium is found and that’s when great things happen.

Over the course of the 19/20th centuries welsh miners went from being illiterate men and boys scrabbling for coal by hand, to the literate unionised hard-men who fronted up some of rugby union’s most renowned front rows; and up in Scotland the Lanarkshire pits produced football management greats in Bill Shankly (Liverpool 1959-74), Matt Busby (Manchester United 1945-69 & 1970-71) and Jock Stein (Celtic 1965-78 and Scotland 1978-85). This is not to under-estimate the tough experience that was and is the United Kingdom’s working class but theirs is not a story of victimhood.

The children who the race obsessed Liberals call ‘privileged’ are descendants of a multitude of local histories and diverse cultures all of whom are defined by hard work, determination and an ability to turn a tough situation good. They dug the canals, they worked in the factories, they manned the mills, they raised their children and they energised churches; and when they were done with that they, populated the pubs and built the infrastructure of what we now call the ‘modern world’; and that really took off in 1829 when another really clever chap called Robert Stephenson built what many consider to be the first railway locomotive. Stephenson called it the ‘rocket’ and history demonstrates that it blasted the United Kingdom’s ‘Industrial Revolution’ onto another level.

On the 15th September 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was opened and so was born the world’s first inter-city service. Then in what must be one of the United Kingdom’s finest achievements, a virtually complete national railway network was laid by 1850. Almost every town and village were linked into the system and some credit must go to Queen Victoria and her husband Albert Francis Charles Augustus Emmanuel of Saxa-Coburg-Gotha.

The couple had married in 1840 and Prince Albert was not shy about promoting innovation and industry in the United Kingdom. His finest hour was the Great Exhibition in 1851 when the world was invited to Hydepark London, where they could view the cutting edge of United Kingdom design, manufacturing and technology. The event was opened by Victoria on May Day and it was a rip-roaring success from the off; and that night Victoria recorded ‘Today is one of the greatest and glorious of our lives, with which to my pride and joy my dearly beloved Albert is forever associated’.

That success was built on Albert’s ability to persuade the Queen to embrace modernity and he had well used that influence to persuade her to take her first train journey from Slough to Paddington in 1842. After that she was bitten and a few years later, her first train trip to Balmoral castle in Scotland did nothing to dampen her enthusiasm. Private companies sprang up all over the United Kingdom and with royal support in the bag, no-one questioned the railway boom. So next time you take one of the United Kingdom’s many trains, spare a thought for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert because without their patronage, it probably would never have happened.

Of course the railway boom sent the canal business into decline but even that has a silver lining. Nowadays many of the United Kingdom’s historic canals have been converted to leisure and that means that trendy lefties are often seen cruising the waterways on a relaxing break from their tweed jacket and elbow patch lifestyle.

Meanwhile back in the 1850’s the United Kingdom began to take its technology to the world.

Some people think that the British Empire which spanned a third of the world at its peak, was a desperate business. Others think it was the vehicle for technological growth around the planet and they say it was top notch. For myself I tend towards the positive view because without it the world would have taken far longer to develop, primarily because it is easier to get things done if you have a central authority.

Under United Kingdom direction the railway systems of the Indian sub-continent, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were constructed in the second half of the nineteenth century and the result was economic growth across the empire. Rubber from Malaysia, coffee from South America, grains from Canada and livestock from Australia and New Zealand were able to enter the international market because they were transported on railways built under the empire; and even if the hard-left doesn’t approve of the reason they can’t deny the long-term benefit and there is a great example to prove the point.

In the 1890’s county Kerry native Major General Horatio Herbert Kitchener was directed to capture an African town called Dongola which is now the capital of Northern State in Sudan. To achieve his goal Kitchener directed his troops to build a railway as they advanced out of Egypt into Sudan, and he did it because he believed this was the best way to ensure effective movement of troops and supplies after territory was captured. Kitchener was proven right when his troops captured Dongola in September 1896 and a couple of years later ‘Kitchener’s Desert Railway’ stretched 220 miles and it is still the main rail link between the Sudanese capital Khartoum and Egypt. Nowadays some might disapprove of the reason and the method, but they can’t deny the long-term benefit of Kitchener’s railway through the desert.

Meanwhile back in the United Kingdom the 20th century dawned and the future in 1900 was looking good. The United Kingdom commanded an empire that spanned the globe, industry was booming, commerce thrived and Britannia ruled the waves. Her majesty Queen Victoria passed away on 22nd January 1901 and her eldest son Edward VII stepped up to the plate; and his would prove to be a short but immensely successful reign, when change and modernity once again dominated the royal agenda.

Edward came to the throne with the reputation of a naughty chap willing to indulge in some arguably enjoyable but morally questionable high jinks, most especially with the ladies; and this had led some to question his ability to fulfil his royal duties. But their fears were unproven because Edward was very much his father’s son and like Albert, he appreciated technology, design and innovation; and he complimented the lot with a keen interest in international relations and diplomacy.

The Second Boer War was raging in South Africa when Edward came to the throne in 1901, but it was over and done with by the end of May 1902 and that enabled a period of economic prosperity and peace. The Conservatives who had ruled from the 1890’s were never averse to bit of a scrap round the empire, but they were losing steam by the middle of the decade and that opened the door to a really convincing Liberal Party victory in 1906; and the Foreign Secretary Edward Grey wasted no time in changing UK policy.

Grey was an old school Liberal and unlike the modern hard-left version he was opposed to all wars, most especially military alliances that could lead the UK into conflict; and best of all he had the support of the King. Edward worked the royal courts of Europe and Grey managed the Commons and between them they produced what some historians call the ‘Gilded Age’, a time when social divisions were as strict as the finances that produced them, but the economic and social tides were turning.

Fans of the ITV classic ‘Downton Abbey’ are well versed in the strict social and economic barriers of the time, and credit to the programme makers that the viewers are also aware of the social upheavals that came with them.

The ‘Edwardian Age’ saw social protest by suffragettes looking the vote and workers after a fair deal, but none of them were hard-left. The early Labour Party had no problem with free markets and the suffragettes were never going to vote themselves into a Bolshevik utopia, so both chose to champion their constituencies within the system as opposed to try and wreck it. Whilst the suffragette movement would die out after women got the vote, the ‘Labour Representation Committee’ was formed in 1900 and it didn’t take long to make a mark.

In the 1900 UK General Election two ‘Labour Representation Committee’ candidates were elected to Parliament, and this rose to twenty-nine MPs after the 1906 election. Then on 15th February 1906 in an historic moment, they formally became the ‘Labour Party’ and elected a white skinned, heterosexual, Scottish father of four to be their first leader; and his name was Keir Hardie.

Hardie was the son of a domestic servant and he had grown up well aware of the two tier class system that viewed his mother as lesser than those whom she served; and that’s what drove his one tier conviction when it came to equality of respect for every person he met. As one tier Kier Hardie he started his MPs on a path that would see them support the Liberal government when it introduced the ‘People’s Budget’ in 1909; and that created National Insurance, the early welfare state and a minimum wage. These were major social changes and throughout the King had made it clear that he would flood the Lords with new Liberal piers if the Conservatives blocked the reforms; and in the end they didn’t.

King Edward would pass away on 6th May 1910 and whilst he himself was gone the era he led would continue until World War One broke out on 28th July 1914. During his short reign the UK had seen social and technical progress across the board and some achievements deserve special mention. They are:

• A decline in the number of people working as domestic servants.
• The growth of the newspaper industry.
• The birth of organised sports, best signalled by the Olympic Games which took place in the newly constructed White City Stadium in 1908.
• The arrival of electricity and the first automobiles.
• An explosion in UK literature, most notably from writers like P. G. Wodehouse, G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan-Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, A. A. Milne and George Bernard Shaw. And
• Aeroplanes which became so popular that the UK got its first flight club in 1910; and it was called the ‘Royal Aero Club’.

Either way in August 1914 the UK public had their illusion of economic security and peace well and truly shattered, and it happened after an unsavoury chap called Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franc Ferdinand who was the heir to the historic central European Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Turns out Princip was a member of a secret society called the ‘Black Hand’, and they wanted Bosnia to break free from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He mortally wounded the Archduke and his wife when he fired a few shots into their convertible car and whilst he was sentenced to twenty years, he didn’t make it past 1918.

The consequence of the assassination was a domino effect amongst the major European powers and one by one they fell into war. The Austro-Hungarian Empire decided Serbia was to blame and declared war. Russia stepped in to defend the Serbs and that led France to join with the Russians, and the Germans stood with their Austro-Hungarian neighbours. At the time, the United Kingdom was party to the ‘Entente Cordial’ with France but this did not obligate it 2 to join the war. That honour fell to the 1839 Treaty of London under which the UK promised to defend Belgium if it was invaded. On 4th August 1914 the German army entered Belgium and as a result the UK found itself involved in what would eventually be called the First World War.

The First World War would last until 11am on the 11th November 1918 and whilst the history books are filled with tales of daring and courage, it has always been a war whose purpose is hard to define. The European protagonists were all dominated by their respective royal houses and thus for most ordinary people the worst that could have happened was to fall under a different monarch. On the other hand and with the exception of the United Kingdom’s monarchy, the European elite knew the war was a battle for survival: and for a few it didn’t go well. By 11th November 1918 nearly 40 million lay dead and the elite European class was a shadow of its former self; and the main casualties were:

• The Russian monarchy, which fell to the Bolsheviks in October 1917.
• The Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Habsburg dynasty that ruled it, both of which began to fall in October 1918. And
• The German monarchy, which fell when Kaiser Wilhelm II legged it to the Netherlands on 10th November 1918.

Elsewhere the United Kingdom had faced rebellion in Ireland during the war and that mutated into what some call the ‘War of Independence’ after it. In the end the whole business caused the first departure from the United Kingdom and it happened when twenty-six of the Irish counties left to become the ‘Irish Free State’ in 1920. The six that remained became Northern Ireland and what was once ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’, had become ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’.

In what would later be known as the inter-war years (1918-39), the United Kingdom began to feel the impact of trying to manage an empire that was destined to end. The problem was that there were influential populations who did not want it to end, and they could not be easily ignored. The most significant groups were in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and parts of South Africa; and all were eventually mollified in one form or another by the introduction of the Commonwealth of Nations.

Whilst addressing a Canadian audience on the 1st July 1959 her majesty Queen Elizabeth II described the Commonwealth of Nations arrangement as a,

‘….free association of independent states which is now known as the Commonwealth of Nations’.

And those who had founded the institution, would have been pleased.

The organisation was founded at the Imperial Conference held in London between the 19th October and 23rd November 1926 and it was attended by the Prime Ministers of the Dominions of the British Empire. They sought to avoid unnecessary conflict as the imperial project receded and the term Commonwealth of Nations had been the brain child of future South African Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts, who had first used it at the 1917 Imperial Conference. It surprised many and maybe it was post World War One fatigue, but compromise was in the air when the United Kingdom agreed to,

‘…. autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown’.

Overnight the Westminster Parliament’s authority outside the territory of the United Kingdom ended and so began the slow transformation from empire to commonwealth.

No-one would claim that the transformation from an empire into a commonwealth is without its downside but as a means of ending an imperial project it has to be the best. The hard-left Soviet Union would transform into the Commonwealth of Independent States on 8th December 1991 and like the old British Empire independence within a ‘Commonwealth’ arrangement allowed each new country time and space to identify and determine their own futures.

For Westminster it focused minds on the domestic agenda and after two centuries as an imperial parliament, it did a decent job at accepting its new role. The rise of the Labour Party to 191 seats at the 1923 General Election helped the process because unlike the Conservative and Liberal parties, they had no imperial history; and this meant they usually shifted the debate towards the home front. This enabled some decent social progress, most noticeably 521700 newly constructed homes available at controlled rents, but the downside was the rise to power of a notorious German rabble rouser called Adolf Hitler.

Hitler was a World War One veteran and he carried a mighty chip on his shoulder about the 1919 Treaty of Versailles that had formally ended the conflict. Germany had been shouldered with the blame and reparations were levied as a result and Hitler, like many Germans was not one bit pleased. As a result when the economic bad times hit after the October 1929 Wall Street Crash, his National Socialist Party made progress.

In the United Kingdom, domestic economic difficulties encouraged successive governments to take a non-confrontational approach abroad and this policy later became known as appeasement. When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933 he cancelled reparation payments and like the rest of Europe, the United Kingdom appeased him and did nothing. When he staged a coup and took absolute power after the 1934 Reichstag fire, the United Kingdom like the rest of Europe appeased him and did nothing. And when he began to make territorial demands of his neighbours in the late 1930’s, the United Kingdom like the rest of Europe appeased him and did nothing.

The failure of appeasement is proven by the fact that the United Kingdom did eventually end up at war with Germany on 3rd September 1939 and over 70 million people would die in the conflict that raged until 1945. Whilst the United Kingdom endured six years of suffering, it emerged victorious and best of all having just played a vital role in stopping what turned out to be the most reprehensible regime in European history, the people were closer and stronger than they’d ever been.

From an educational perspective 1945 is a good place to end this suggested junior school history narrative because the Cold War that followed is a topic best covered at GCSE level. I have allowed for year 8 history (11 and 12 years old) to cover major events before the United Kingdom was born, and issues of difference such as the perspective of empire have been touched on as a means to mature debate in the senior school. But this suggested narrative allows young people a foundation of history that encourages them to see the United Kingdom in a positive light and that is how it should be. We want our young people to grow up and take our United Kingdom to even better places, but this will not happen if their understanding of their own history has been obliterated; and it’s not doing well under hard-left attack.

We need an urgent review of the school history curriculum in the United Kingdom and it needs to make our history great again. It’s the only way we can begin to address the damage that has been done by six decades of hard-left confidence sapping Marxist infiltration, but it’s a job that needs doing. My narrative is only a suggestion but we need to work together to articulate a pro-United Kingdom story; and here I will finish with one last thought.

The United Kingdom has faced difficult challenges many times and I think the most notable came when she stood alone against Hitler and the Nazis in 1940. Had we failed it would have been the end of our United Kingdom and whilst it may seem a mite melodramatic to say it, if we continue to obliterate our children’s understanding of our history, the outcome will be the same. Change is needed and one outcome might be that children learn some of the text of one of the United Kingdom’s great political speeches. It happened on the floor of the House of Commons on June 4th 1940 and at the time the United Kingdom had been lucky to evacuate the majority of its army from Dunkirk in Northern France; but the Nazis were still expected to invade.

Hitler wanted a deal but the United Kingdom’s new Prime Minister Winston Churchill was having none of it. When he got to his feet he knew it was our darkest hour, but he did not wilt and during his speech he made history. He famously said,

‘Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills…… we shall never surrender.’

Mr David Rose is a retired history teacher from Dundonald, Northern Ireland.