The National Trust simply wanted to unpack and educate people on the history of it's properties. It seems so simple and harmless to type that, but they recieved a barrage of abuse, calling them "woke" for simply pointing out British history. A group of MPs deeming themselves to be the Common Sense Group have decided common sense means "getting angry with truth" and are using their political power to weigh down on charities.
Facts don’t care about your feelings. No matter how much it upsets you, the truth is that the British Empire murdered, raped and plundered it’s way across the world. No matter how much you want to deny it, the slave trade was not a good thing. And it is entirely right that museums and theatres tell these truthful stories.
As a poet and playwright, I have always thought carefully about the stories we need to tell, and whose voices we platform. Whole generations grew up on the daring do of Zulu, Bridge On The River Kwai, The Dirty Dozen and The Great Escape, or the stiff-upper-lip of Dad’s Army. These are fictional fodder, enjoyable for a Sunday afternoon viewing. But they are loose with the truth, constructed worlds of hyper-heroism and are not an accurate representation of our history.
The Conservative Party of the 1980s were a party of business. At the cost of millions of people’s livelihoods, they deregulated the market to introduce a wave of neoliberalism. The Party I saw come to power in 2010 boasted the Etonians-know-best rhetoric, arguing for ‘sensible’ economic policies which ultimately slashed the welfare state and plunged people into poverty. The current Conservative Party are neither business-minded, nor sensible. They pursued a Brexit-at-all-costs policy, fearing their voters would trickle away to Ukip or the Brexit Party. Now they have proudly adopted policies the BNP proposed in the 2000s. They are staunchly ‘anti-woke’, pandering to the nasty streak in British culture, and will legislate to keep their narrative dominant.
I have a small, tiny, unnourished feeling that maybe this will backfire on the Conservatives. As Brexit proves to have very few long-term positive impacts (or as Micheal Caine, a man with a net worth of £55 million said, we become “poor masters”) the public will be sick of a Party who hoard wealth at the top and whose ‘levelling up’ policies include a dribble of funding. And on the doorstep, when their campaigners rail against “wokeness” or “political correctness”, voters will be frustrated by their lack of answers to poverty.
Man standing to be MP: Have you seen the BBC want to hire more black actors? Bloody woke nonsense.
Voter: How can you make my life better?
Man standing to be MP: Have you seen you can’t use slurs to describe disabled people anymore? Bloody woke nonsense.
And yet, as the question “Should the UK leave the European Union” is so easily manipulated into a question of imagined sovereignty. Patriotism so easily, easily upsold into nationalism. I have seen calls to not play the Tories’ game, to not be angry at them calling us angry, not to become militant as they call us militant.
But they control a narrative, and we have to curate our own.
I never thought I’d die fighting side-by-side with the National Trust.
