The ahistoricism of Labour’s leaders is worse than ignorant. It is deliberate
As Goldfinger observed: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action”. It is a good observational rule, not least to judge our political rulers by what they do rather than what they say.
Early in October 2024, Keir Starmer removed the portraits of Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh from 10 Downing Street. Both were painted in the late sixteenth century, a handful of years after the defeat of Spain’s Philip II and his Great Armada.
Both were old hat. After all, fighting for England’s religious and cultural survival is rather reactionary and potentially “far right” now that hoisting your country’s flag on a pole in your own country could earn you a police visit.
Starmer replaced the portraits of England’s saviours with the works of the experimental figurative painter Dame Paula Rego who is acclaimed for focussing “on strong and courageous women” (although not of those, like Elizabeth I, who rallied her country against invasion). Perhaps as a beneficiary of a patriarchal and hereditary system, she wasn’t courageous in the twenty-first century sense of the word.
A couple of weeks later, on the eve of Labour’s first budget, Rachel Reeves, in turn, removed the portrait of Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor, from her office at 11 Downing Street. In Lawson’s place now hangs a portrait of “Red” Ellen Wilkinson, one of the founding members of the Communist Party of Great Britain and a dedicated member of the Fabian Society — to which many fellow cabinet ministers and Labour backbenchers belong.
Further, only last week, David Lammy, the deputy prime minister, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, removed a portrait of the late Queen Elizabeth II. He replaced it with Ghanaian artist Larry Achiampong’s variations on the Pan-African flags, commissioned with the support of the taxpayer subsidised Arts Council.
Developed at great cost, the design of the Pan African flags, like those of the Pride ones, reject reality. After all, Africa is not one country, with one language and — despite the best efforts of Boko Haram — one religion. But, to David Lammy, history and current affairs are Terra Incognita situated on a flat earth, resting on the back of the Cosmic Turtle. We remember that in 2009 Lammy appeared on Celebrity Mastermind in a performance so hide-behind the sofa humiliating that it should have been career ending.
We are led by those whose instincts are borderless
In absolute astonishment at the then Higher Education minister’s inability to answer simple historical and current affairs questions — mistaking Marie Currie for Marie Antoinette, Versailles for La Bastille, Yugoslavia for Georgia whilst being under the impression that Henry VIII was succeeded by Henry VII — The Independent’s Matthew Norman pondered how a politician with “a master’s in law from Harvard” could “tend, to put it generously, towards the dim?” and asked, “how did it come to this? How did this country come to be governed by people whose knowledge of everything from fourth-form history to popular culture, sort and even cheese … verges on the non-existent?”
The trend of removing portraits of our ancestors — the erasure of our memory — is not happenstance or coincidence. It reveals something deeper, darker, and more fundamental. Lammy’s plans for the widespread removal of trial by jury in England and Wales under the auspices of “backlog clearing” expediency to be replaced with what will gradually become a form of trial by state-led ordeal, are purposefully ahistorical. Indeed, to the Labour MP Natalie Fleet, the case for removing ancient liberties is simply framed: “swifter justice” versus “men in suits clinging on to a Magna Carta myth…” Not only is Magna Carta the garbage of the past, it’s now reclassified as a “myth”.
Knowledge, truth and their pursuit require cautious discernment and love of the subject; their absence demands revolution. We are faced by the latter, while yearning for the former. Being ahistorical means never taking responsibility for the devastation your ideology and its many permutations have left and will leave behind. Such certainty requires ignorance. It is a totalitarian shield, enabling politicians to bray mendacious and accusatory slogans without shame and to which to acknowledge popular sentiments to “turn the clocks back” is anti-progressive and anathema.
Thus we are led by those whose instincts are borderless: those like the Attorney General, Lord Hermer, whose 2024 Bingham lecture extolled the supremacy of international law as “the ‘Rule of Law’ writ large” and by which “states must comply with their international obligations”. Schooled in the same outlook of disdain for custom and the concept of the realm, is the Prime Minister. Asked by Emily Maitlis before the last general election to choose between Davos or Westminster, Starmer instinctively and revealing replied “Davos”. The legislature of British democracy was, he said, merely “tribal”.
