Stephen Glover

So you thought a Tory government with an 80-seat majority showed that the Corbynistas and Leftists were on the run? I’m afraid the extraordinary events of the past few days suggest otherwise.

Despite there being a Conservative Prime Minister in No 10, the Left continues its long march through our institutions. It sets the cultural agenda. The great evil of slavery is being used to mount an assault on Britain’s past, and subvert the sense of national identity of many people.

First we had the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol on Sunday by a well- orchestrated mob. Although I’m sure most of those who have taken part in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations are motivated by idealism, I suspect they are being manipulated by more calculating people.

The violent activities of some protesters in demonstrations in London — often minimised with irksome monotony by the BBC — have confirmed that the Hard Left can still get its supporters out on the streets.

What really made me shiver was the announcement that Sadiq Khan, the Labour Mayor of London, is setting up a new commission ‘for diversity in the public realm’, which will review the capital’s landmarks, including street names, to ensure they ‘suitably reflect its diversity’.

No less alarming was the news that 130 Labour councils in the country will examine the ‘appropriateness’ of monuments. Every statue will be scrutinised for links to slavery and plantation owners.

We can be certain that the cultural commissars engaged in this Sovietsounding exercise will be overwhelmingly of the Left — a mixture of Labour apparatchiks and radical historians who abominate all aspects of the British Empire.

Brace yourself for large- scale changes. They won’t be proposing more maypole dancing. Mr Khan says: ‘our capital’s diversity is our greatest strength, yet our statues, road names and public spaces reflect a bygone era.’

In other words, if the Left gets its way, the past will be reconfigured so that monuments and names reflecting Britain’s imperial past will be removed, and where possible replaced by more ‘relevant’ heroes of whom Mr Khan and his commissars approve.

My goodness, the process has already begun. The Labour Mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, declares that he favours renaming all roads and buildings linked to the slave trade.

rodney Street (named after Admiral George rodney, an alleged supporter of slavery) may be for the chop. For the moment, Mr Anderson opposes re- christening Penny Lane, which some claim was named after the slave ship owner James Penny.

Meanwhile, the university of Liverpool is redesignating a hall of residence dedicated to the great Liberal prime minister William Gladstone. The reason? until the abolition of slavery in 1833, Gladstone’s father was a slave owner. The irony is that Gladstone was the least imperialist of 19th-century leaders.

Thirty miles away in Manchester, the statue of the enlightened Tory reforming prime minister Sir robert Peel is being eyed up by iconoclasts. His crime is to have had a father who was a prominent advocate of slavery.

So we move on from slave traders such as Edward Colston and robert Milligan (whose statue was ripped from its home on West India Quay in London on Tuesday at the behest of the Labour Mayor of Tower Hamlets) to Peel and Gladstone, who were merely connected to slave owners.

Where will it end? To attract the ire of the mob, an association with slavery is no longer necessary. I heard a protester at Tuesday’s demonstration in oxford assert that Cecil rhodes used slaves, and read the same untruth in a newspaper. He was active in South Africa half a century after slavery had been abolished in the British Empire.

rapacious capitalist? Certainly. Misguided believer in racial segregation? Absolutely. Founder of a system of scholarships which has benefited thousands of students for more than a hundred years, and was embraced by the great Nelson Mandela? yes. But never a slave owner or trader.

Slavery is in the foothills of the ambitions of many on the Left. What they want is a wholesale rejection of Britain’s past, and of the British Empire in particular. Anti- colonialist academics queue up on the BBC to denounce it.

How monstrously unfair the Beeb can be! on Tuesday’s edition of BBC2’s Newsnight, it assembled Stephen Bush, the Leftist political editor of the New Statesman, and an oxford English literature professor called Ankhi Mukherjee, perhaps further to the Left, to debate these issues.

Bush stated that Britain had ‘plundered and impoverished’ countries, and Mukherjee looked pleased. Was this a fair-minded debate? No, it was a kangaroo court in which, as per usual on our national broadcaster, no one was invited to express a contrary view in partial defence of this country’s past.

That might go as follows. yes, Britain did bad things in India but also good things, such as creating universities for Indians and building many railways, as the anti-imperialist George orwell conceded. Suttee, the practice of burning widows alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands, was outlawed.

OF course slavery was a great sin, though we shouldn’t forget that some African tribes, such as the Ashanti in what later became Ghana, profited from it. Moreover, Britain abolished it earlier than America and other European empires.

Between 1808 and 1860, the royal Navy freed an estimated 150,000 slaves who were being shipped across the Atlantic. Possibly 20,000 sailors died in this noble endeavour. I wonder how many Black Lives Matter marchers know that.

The truth about the British Empire is more complex than its detractors would have us believe. Against the undeniable excesses and cruelties, we should weigh the introduction of parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, modern medicine and Christianity.

The past is seldom divided neatly into goodies and baddies. But that is exactly the version of history which the Left wants us to accept — with the British exclusively playing the role of baddies.

our heroes who defended this country against foreign powers are in danger of being brought down in ignominy. Toppling a monument is not chiefly a matter of destroying a physical object. Its real purpose is to ruin a reputation — and re-write history.

The statue of Sir Francis Drake — persecutor of the Spanish, great explorer, romantic icon of the 1588 Spanish Armada and all- round rogue — is being targeted in Plymouth because he sold slaves.

Horatio Nelson, who arguably saved this country from French invasion, and gave up his life, stands perilously on his column in Trafalgar Square. His crime is to have defended his slaveowning friends in Parliament some years before the trading of slaves was abolished in the British Empire in 1807. Not a good thing for him to have done. But he was still a hero.

If the Left has its way, we will be forced to renounce our past, and hang our heads in shame. New figures will be introduced for us to admire. our sense of national identity will be undermined. It has been done before, in other countries.

Does the decent silent majority want such an outcome? of course not. But although we have a Tory government in power — and a highly educated Prime Minister, perfectly aware of what is going on — almost no one is fighting back.