Face up to the past – just like Germany, says Jenni Murray
Presenter criticised after calling on Britons to dial down nostalgia and accept ‘shame’ of colonial history
DAME JENNI MURRAY has called for Britain to “dampen down the nostalgia” for our history and confront it as Germany has done with the Nazis.
The former BBC Woman’s Hour presenter said Britons have been “taught to be proud of the achievements of the British empire” often without questioning its negative side.
Dame Jenni, who retired from the Radio 4 show last year, said the UK had “a lot to learn from the Germans ” in confronting its past. “The debate around [British] colonialism must be had in full – the good and the bad,” she said.
“We sang Rule, Britannia! with gusto and never thought to question how some of the revered local heroes whose statues stood in our towns and cities had made their money,” she added.
Dame Jenni admired the approach of Germany, which has put up educational posters next to Nazi monuments and taught cadets about the history of policing in the Third Reich.
“We have a lot to learn from the Germans,” she wrote in Saga Magazine. “They have an impossibly long word, vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, which means ‘coming to terms with the past’. In recent decades, they have addressed Nazism and the Holocaust in art, theatre, television and cinema.
“Nazi monuments have been put in context, and commemorative ‘stumbling stones’ – small brass plates inscribed with the names of victims of the regime – have been installed in pavements in 1,200 locations. Police cadets are taught the history of Nazi policing and visit a concentration camp.
“It’s time now for us to dampen down the nostalgia and look to our future as a multicultural society with shame understood and acknowledged by everyone, never to be repeated.”
Dr Zareer Masani, a historian who was born in Bombay, said the comparison of the British Empire with Nazi Germany is “completely historically illiterate. It is an outrageous comparison. I don’t think anyone who makes that comparison has any knowledge of history. It is a fashion in some parts of the liberal Left to equate the two things as part of a post-colonial guilt syndrome that they suffer from. But I think it is quite insulting to people like me who grew up under the empire and have a very positive experience of it.”
Dame Jenni also used her column to express dislike of the word “woke”, a brand of politics seeking to address perceived social injustice. “How I hate the word ‘woke’,” she wrote, “lacking any sense of English grammar and suggesting the rest of us have no shame about racism and the history of slavery. Of course, we do”.
While she encouraged Britons to face up to the colonial past, she questioned estioned
‘It is time to look to the future as a multicultural ral society with shame acknowledged by everyone’ yone’
the approach of activists who toppled the statue of Edward Colston, the he slave trader, in Bristol last summer, and nd those who are calling for the national curriculum to be decolonised.
“Is the destruction of the symbols mbols of the darker side of colonialism sm the answer?” she asked, concluding ng that Robert Jenrick, the Communities es Secretary, has taken the “right steps” ” to prevent more statues being pulled down.
“To me, the choice should never ver be to ‘remain or remove’,” she wrote. “Placing some in museums may be an option tion or a tablet explaining the controversy sy might suffice. History lessons must not be decolonised. Historical figures s should be not be wiped out and forgotten, ten, but set in the context of their time.”
In 2011, Murray said she considered nsidered not accepting her damehood due ue to its links with Britain’s colonial past. t.
“Was I making a terrible mistake?,” stake?,” she wrote in Radio Times. “Had I become a traitor to my class by rushing headlong into the bosom of the e Establishment? Should I, like the poet t Benjamin Zephaniah, be repulsed sed by anything that had the word Empire pire in it and which, for him at least, recalled alled the days of colonialism and slavery?” ?”