‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’ — George Orwell, 1984
Misguided Jingoism
Nigel Farage’s education policy isn’t about teaching young people the truth. It’s about teaching them what he thinks they should believe. Tangled up in vague calls of pride and British values is a deeply cynical attempt to rewrite our past — not to understand it, but to sanitise it. Farage isn’t challenging the so-called liberal establishment in schools. He’s trying to replace it with something far worse: a version of history where empire is glorious, oppression is excused, and truth is pushed to one side.
Zia Yusuf, a prominent figure within Reform UK, has said that the British Empire did ‘more good than bad, and Farage himself has repeatedly criticised the way British schools teach history, arguing that they are ‘ashamed‘ of the Empire and that children are being taught to ‘hate their country.’ But what sort of policy on education can come from such misguided jingoism? At best, this means Farage would happily gloss over the harm caused by the British Empire, and at worst, this rhetoric could usher in a policy of downright ignorance and denial. Denying what? you might ask. Denying the violence, exploitation, and racial hierarchy that underpinned imperial rule. That is not education. That is pure propaganda.
Indoctrinating Young Minds
Farage is waging this crusade on education in a desperate attempt to free young people (whose minds are ‘being poisoned‘) from the woke establishment in our schools. However, his approach and the end goal are so woefully misguided that they threaten to harm young people. At bottom, Farage wants to centre this flagship policy around ideology instead of the truth. Dragging our education into a manufactured culture war is how it becomes political indoctrination. Maybe it is Farage who needs to take a history lesson, one on Weimar Germany, perhaps?
But the heart of my argument is this: If History is supposed to equip young people with lessons from the past, what lesson, exactly, will be learnt from the teaching of Empire in a positive light? Where is the moral in a story entrenched with racism and white supremacy? And what good can come from glorifying exploitation and celebrating oppression? These are questions that Farage must answer.
I believe that the trajectory of historical education should aim towards uncovering truths. We shouldn’t be striking a ‘balance‘ (see page 11 of their manifesto) on our colonial history just for the sake of it. After all, we would not expect to be taught the pros as well as the cons of slavery or the holocaust. Such grave injustices ought to be taught just as that: horrific injustices. And when it comes to the British Empire, the same rule applies. So, let’s stop dressing up our dark history in euphemisms and instead teach what really happened so that students, and not Nigel Farage, can make up their own minds. For this approach to succeed, we should listen to such leading thinkers as Dr Shashi Tharoor. Tharoor exposes the ‘historical amnesia‘ that Britain enjoys and the fact that children who take A-Levels in our schools will not learn a line of colonial history.
An example of this would be the Mau Mau Uprising (1952-1960) — Kenya’s brutal struggle for independence from British colonial rule. During the uprising, tens of thousands of Kenyans were detained in British-run prison camps, with many subjected to torture, forced labour, starvation and execution. Documents later revealed that the British government destroyed or concealed thousands of colonial files to hide these abuses. The Mau Mau uprising is not a required part of the national curriculum for History in England and is very rarely covered in schools. Even Ofsted acknowledged that colonial history, particularly atrocities like the Mau Mau Uprising, is taught inconsistently across schools.
Leaving out events like the Kenyan struggle perpetuates the myth of a ‘benevolent Empire.’ It obscures the reality that British colonialism involved systemic violence and repression — not just railways and trade. This omission is precisely what makes Reform UK’s demand for a ‘proud’ retelling of the Empire so dangerous. We’re not over-teaching the dark side of Britain’s history; we’re barely teaching it at all. Contrary to what Mr Farage believes, I believe that we should be pursuing a more extensive and unabridged curriculum when it comes to our colonial past.
Reform UK may speak the language of ‘common sense’ and ‘restoring balance’ in education, but behind these sober slogans is an agenda that undermines critical thought and historical truth. If we are to raise a generation prepared to deal with the world’s challenges, we need more history, not less. And, crucially, we need it to be taught with honesty, nuance and courage.
Only by acknowledging the injustices of Empire, the legacies of colonialism, and the full complexity of our past can we move forward as a nation. The classroom should not be a battlefield in Farage’s culture war. It should be a space for truth.
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