We won’t allow Britain’s history to be cancelled

Iam proud of our nation’s heritage. I don’t say this just as Culture Secretary, but as someone who happily spends their weekends exploring every part of it. I’m not alone in this passion. Our heritage unites us as a country, and draws visitors to our islands by the millions. And as someone whose love of heritage was learned, not inherited, I am deeply committed to ensuring it is available to everyone.

So when coronavirus threatened to decimate the cultural landscape, I stepped in to make sure stately homes, churches and other heritage sites survived the worst crisis they have ever faced. Our £2 billion Cultural Recovery Fund is the biggest single intervention in UK arts and heritage ever – and further proof that it is the Conservatives who are the party of culture. But just as I’ve never hesitated to stand up for our cultural institutions and am working tirelessly to support them in their reopening tomorrow, I will not look on as people threaten to pull down statues or strip other parts of our rich historic environment. Confident nations face up to their history. They don’t airbrush it. Instead, they protect their heritage and use it to educate the public about the past. They “retain and explain,” rather than “remove or ignore”. They don’t do what Liverpool University did and remove William Gladstone’s name from an accommodation block because of his family’s links to slavery.

Of all the figures who have fallen victim to the culture wars in the past year, this seems like a particularly egregious case. Gladstone, prime minister four times and a hero of liberalism, never owned slaves and though his views evolved, he called slavery the “foulest crime” in our history. But those details were apparently too nuanced for the campus activists. His father owned slaves, and therefore Gladstone himself needed to be expunged from the record.

I don’t agree with that approach. Leading voices in our museums and heritage organisations don’t agree with it. And neither does the public. That includes the 84 per cent of black Britons who say they don’t want to see our heritage pulled down or hidden from view, according to a recent poll.

The tricky bit is putting “retain and explain” into practice. So last week a new Heritage Advisory Board met for the first time to draw up new guidelines for heritage organisations on how this should be done. Its members include the Museum of the Home’s Dr Samir Shah,

Trevor Phillips, former director of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, historian Robert Tombs and Dr Anna Keay, director of the Landmark Trust. They come from a range of backgrounds, but they are united by one common commitment: that as temporary custodians of our heritage, their duty is to preserve it, and use it to give a comprehensive, balanced account of the past.

To do that, museums and other bodies need to have genuine curatorial independence. But independence cuts both ways. Heritage organisations should be free from government meddling, but the people who run them also need the courage to stand up to the political fads and noisy movements of the moment. And as national institutions, heritage organisations should take into account the views of the entire nation: the people for whom they were set up, and whose taxes pay for them. That’s why I want to make sure the boards of these bodies are genuinely diverse and not solely governed by people from metropolitan bubbles. I want a grandparent in Hartlepool or Harwich to feel as represented by their decisions as a millennial in Islington.

None of this means preserving our history in aspic. History is a dynamic, living subject, and it’s right that we reassess and reinterpret events as our understanding evolves. But any account of the past should start from a commitment to telling a balanced, nuanced and academically rigorous story – one that doesn’t automatically start from a position of guilt and shame or the denigration of this country’s past.

One that acknowledges, for example, the evil of slavery, but acknowledges this isn’t a uniquely British crime, and that our nation led the world in eradicating it. One that is willing to grapple with the paradox that our predecessors could both gift us the advancements of the Enlightenment while tolerating things we would never tolerate today. One that doesn’t take the places that were built to unite us, and use them to drive a wedge between us. Our museums, churches and village halls are places where people get married, or go to enjoy a family day out. They were built for joy, celebration – not to divide us or fill us with shame.

I want to take not a Maoist but a “moreist approach” to our heritage: I want more statues erected; more chapters added to our national narrative and more understanding of it. In short, more history, not less. The point is to expand the conversation – not shut it down. The pressure on our heritage is part of a worrying trend – a cancel culture whereby a small but vocal group of people claim to have the monopoly on virtue, and seek to bully those who dare to disagree. But the world is too complicated for that kind of totalitarian moral certainty – and we must resist it at all costs.