SARAH VINE: I fear for Britain’s future if we erase the past (good and bad) 

Well, I don’t know about you, but events over the past few days have left me feeling very depressed.

I think it’s a combination of things: revisiting the Madeleine McCann case; the shaming Prince Andrew saga; the spiralling cost — both human and economic — of coronavirus; the fact that our children’s education is being thrown under a bus.

Everywhere I look, the world seems to be on fire, and I can’t see a way of putting it out.

But the thing I find most troubling, the thought that has brought me to the verge of tears, is the way Britain — one of the most tolerant, fair and least prejudiced nations in the world — appears to have been infected by the same sickness that, for the past decade or so, has been tearing America apart.

People talk about ‘culture wars’, often without really knowing what that means. And until recently the notion seemed a fairly abstract concept, the sort of term bandied about by Newsnight presenters and academics, but largely irrelevant to ordinary people.

But that is no longer true. The battles that have been raging on U.S. campuses and streets have firmly invaded our shores.

Complex questions of politics, race and identity have become sharply polarised, stripped of all nuance, simplified beyond all reason and presented as moral imperatives, a simple case of good versus evil, love versus hate, and yes, black versus white.

Virtually nowhere is it possible to have an open, constructive debate about the pros and cons of any given issue. 

Reason has been replaced by insult, intellect by raw emotion, curiosity by preconception.

Narrow sets of agendas now dominate public discourse, and in almost every instance the outcome has already been decided. 

We are living in the court of Alice In Wonderland’s Queen: Sentence first, verdict afterwards.

And the consequences, as we have seen over the past few days, are spilling out onto our streets. The killing of George Floyd was an abomination. 

But the way his and his family’s tragedy has been used — on both sides of the Atlantic — to fan the flames of hatred and fuel divisions is devastating.

There is so much that I have found deeply saddening about the scenes in recent days. The sight of horses being rammed with bicycles; the defacing of monuments dedicated to those who fought to protect our freedoms; the sheer ignorance that seems to underpin the views of some protesters.

In particular, the notion that all white people need to apologise for their very existence (exemplified by one little girl, aged maybe six or seven, whose mother posted a picture of her holding up a sign proclaiming her ‘white privilege’) — and the idea we are all racists.

To assume so — as many appear to — is as wrongheaded as the assumption that a young black male hanging out in the park is a drug dealer. It is simply not true.

Just as it is not true that the police are ‘all bastards’ or ‘racist scum’, as the chanting protesters who daubed slogans all over London and Bristol would have it.

Some may well be — there are bad eggs in every walk of life; but the majority do an important job, mopping up the fringes of society where most of us would never dare to tread.

And yet those who’ve tried to make that point, who have tried to calm the fervour of the seething crowds, have been turned upon, typecast as not much better than the men who killed Floyd.

The truth doesn’t matter, because the truth doesn’t interest the self-righteous social warriors invading our streets. 

All they care about is reinforcing their view of the world as they see it, not as it really is.

It is this I find so depressing. This idea that such misconceptions have not only taken hold — but to push back against them is not only futile, it is also dangerous.

Because, in the current climate of cultural intolerance, to disagree is almost impossible.

Any deviation from the narrative of extreme political correctness, of ‘woke’ revisionism, is interpreted as a thought crime, a perversion, and shut down accordingly.

It has been a very long time since freedom of thought felt so fragile — or so risky. As to a situation of such intolerance supposedly arising from a desire for more tolerance — well, the irony hardly needs explaining.

And so, by necessity, and because — let’s face it — it’s very hard and very frightening to stand up to the mob, people capitulate.

The police ‘take a knee’, betrayed by politicians such as Sadiq Khan who take the path of least resistance, playing to the gallery and promising, as he did yesterday, to revise London’s landmarks according to the new rules of historical revisionism.

University students are ‘shamed’ into complying with the political demands of their unions, ‘called out’ for not participating in endless boycotts, fearful that if they refuse or dissent they will be ‘cancelled’ and their lives made a misery. 

Celebrities indulge in empty virtue-signalling, deluding themselves they are using their influence to ‘make a difference’ when all they are doing is pandering to their own desires to be liked by a generation of overgrown toddlers who refuse to listen to reason.

That is how you end up with statues being pushed into rivers by baying mobs.

For what it’s worth, I think Bristol is a better place without the Edward Colston statue.

But I disagree with the method of removing it because it represents a mindset I find deeply sinister.

No doubt, for example, the fervent ISIS jihadis who torched the library at Mosul, or flattened the Temple of Baal in Palmyra, felt they were pursuing righteous justice in eliminating the evidence of past regimes they despised.

In reality, they were, like that mob in Bristol, merely indulging in cultural vandalism.

The world has, at innumerable points in history, been a savage and cruel place. For some — all too many — it still is. 

But you cannot and should not whitewash history, however much elements of it may repulse you.

Indeed, I would argue that this is especially true of humanity’s greatest injustices, of which slavery is one.

For as long as Auschwitz remains standing, for example, we will never forget the genocide of World War II, and rightly so. Slavery is in that same category. 

The best way to honour its victims is to preserve their memory with dignity and respect — and never lose sight of the evil done to them, however much it offends our sensibilities.

But it’s not just around questions of race that this intransigence exists. It extends into all aspects of our existence — something exemplified by actor Daniel Radcliffe yesterday when he took it upon himself to apologise for supposedly ‘transphobic’ comments the author J.K. Rowling had made on her Twitter feed.

What she actually did was make a bit of a joke about the absurdity of an article entitled ‘Creating a more equal post-Covid-19 world for people who menstruate’.

‘People who menstruate,’ she wrote. ‘I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?’

Now, if there is one thing your average culture warrior cannot abide it’s a sense of humour, and so predictably she was set upon by the armies of the woke, who railed at her insensitivity.

But she was also making a broader point, about how the rights of one group — transgender people — appear to have subsumed those of another: women.

The only people capable of menstruation are those born as biological females. But because of the hyper-sensibility surrounding the trans issue, we are no longer allowed to say so.

And so women are denied a vital aspect of their identity — all in the name of identity politics. Once again, the irony is beyond parody.

The fact that Radcliffe felt the need to apologise on her behalf not only demonstrates his lack of courage in standing up to this lunacy — after all, he owes Rowling his career and wealth — it also betrays the kind of patriarchal condescension that might have sat well around the Victorian dining table, but which, in a supposedly post-feminist world, smacks of a very old-fashioned kind of sexism.

Where this will end I do not know. As I write, Labour-led councils across Britain are threatening the future of any statues deemed to be offensive to the new cultural commissars.

But if, as a nation, we don’t find the courage to push back against the madness, to make the case for Britain as a democracy which, while not always blameless, is nevertheless one of the most civilised and tolerant places on the planet, I can see a not-too-distant future where it’s not the likes of Colston being torn down, but Winston Churchill who’s being evicted from Parliament Square.

Then, essentially, we would have a Britain whose past — both good and bad — had been wiped away.

And that would make me fear for its future.