Churchill is knocked off his pedestal in history poll

JUST a fifth of Britain’s young people view Sir Winston Churchill positively, new research has found.

Those aged 18 to 24 are a third less likely than the over-65s to say they admired the former prime minister, while 36 per cent of the public overall reported they think of him positively.

The poll, commissioned by the centreRight think tank Policy Exchange, appears to show the reputation of the Second World War leader is declining among the British public over time, with 47 per cent of respondents saying they admired him in a similar poll in 2018.

Respondents in the latest poll were asked whether they had a “largely positive” view of Churchill, where “the good things he did outweigh the bad”, or the reverse. Around 20 per cent of the public said they had a “mixed view”, while seven per cent viewed him negatively, six per cent preferred not to say, and 32 per cent said they did not know.

The poll was part of Policy Exchange’s History Matters project, which the group says is designed “to address widespread national concern about the growing trend to alter public history and heritage without due process”.

The research found voters’ opinions on history correlated with their political affiliation: 63 per cent of Conservative voters said they thought the British Empire did more good than harm, compared with 21 per cent of Labour voters.

At a national level, 42 per cent of the public believe Britain should be more proud of its role in ending the Atlantic slave trade than ashamed of its role in taking part in it, while 30 per cent believe the opposite.

Among Labour voters, 29 per cent felt proud of Britain’s role, compared with 64 per cent of Conservative voters.

On the British Empire, the largest group of respondents to the poll (26 per cent) said that on balance, it had done more good than harm, while 39 per cent of Conservative voters said the same.

Among Labour voters, 29 per cent of respondents said the empire had done “much more harm that good”.

The polling, which was conducted among a nationally representative sample of 1,260 members of the public earlier this month, comes after years of debate about the UK’s historical legacy and controversial political figures.

In a 2002 BBC poll, the British public voted Sir Winston “the greatest Briton of all time”. However in 2020, a statue of the former prime minister on Parliament Square was boarded up before a Black Lives Matter protest, after vandals spray-painted “Churchill was a racist” on the plinth beneath it.