A miserable attempt to rewrite the past

I USED to love museums. I prefer quiet to noise, and enjoy the way old things communicate the real nature of the past. As Thomas Hardy wrote in his marvellous poem Old Furniture: ‘I see the hands of the generations, that owned each shiny familiar thing.’ They were like huge attics. Nobody was trying to tell you anything. You could just dream a bit.

One of my favourites was the Ashmolean in Oxford, which displayed Guy Fawkes’s lantern, and the overpoweringly lovely Alfred Jewel, once owned by that great King. They’re still there, but modernisers are hard at work, turning this great collection into a politically correct nursery of equality and diversity.

A sad employee has sent me a miserable document, Ashmolean For All, which the museum tells me is genuine. It opens by saying it is ‘central to the Museum’s Strategic Plan 2018-23’ – and if that does not make your heart sink, it adds: ‘It is a new policy focused on equity and inclusion. It aims to improve the way the Ashmolean serves, represents and includes diverse communities and individuals.’ It must ‘evolve to remain relevant to all its potential audiences’. Oh, and it’s all ‘in response to a changing political landscape and awareness of new thinking about the current role of cultural organisations around the world’. There’ll be ‘decolonisation’ and searches for ‘coded racial harassment’ and ‘systemic racism’. Go soon, if I were you, before the project’s finished.

No old, beloved, established thing is now safe from the commissars of political correctness. We are in a slow-motion version of China’s cultural revolution, and at the end of it hardly anyone will remember who we used to be.