No marvel nationwide delight is fading when the Left re-writes historical past

Ask 100 people what it means to be British, and you’ll get 100 different answers. For some, it will be cream teas and cricket. For others, the Beatles, the NHS or the Rule of Law.

And yet, whatever these superficial differences, there was once a time when the vast majority of people could agree that they were proud of our country and its contributions through history.

Sadly, that is no longer the case. The annual survey of British Social Attitudes, ­conducted by the National Centre for Social Research and published this week, has found that pride in our nation’s history has plummeted over the past decade.

In 2013, 86 per cent of respondents were proud of Britain’s history. Now that figure stands at an underwhelming 64 per cent – far too low for comfort.

Other questions posed by the study produced similar results, with just 49 per cent of people saying they would rather be British than a ­citizen of another country — down from 62 per cent in 2013. Over the same period, pride in our democracy has fallen from 69 per cent to just 53 per cent.

One poll is rarely a bellweather of national mood, but these findings point to a rot that has been apparent for years. The confidence we once had in our shared island story is being eaten away by an insidious and paralysing national guilt. This is not only misplaced, but highly dangerous to our collective future.

How have we got here?

The self-esteem the ­country felt in hosting a ­successful ­Olympic Games in 2012 gave way to the polarising Brexit vote in 2016, which chipped away at the ­country’s sense of communality. But if Brexit opened a wound, something else caused the fatal infection.

Within months of the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020, critical race theory — which simplistically blames all social ills on ­racism — had become a trans-Atlantic religion.

Everything from the arts to employment rights were viewed through the unbending prism of race, and the most profound effect of this bleary-eyed vision has been on history. Universities led the headlong rush to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum, in a systematic reappraisal of the past five centuries.

Seemingly overnight, our history went from being a source of pride to an unspeakable evil inseparable from violence, racism and exploitation. Why? Because a powerful alliance of so-called progressive activists told us so – and anyone who suggested otherwise risked being hounded out of public and professional life.

In a self-righteous, Orwellian frenzy, statues were defaced or pulled down. Libraries rushed to remove or edit books that might run contrary to the new creed. Academics from the West Indies somehow came to the preposterous conclusion that Britain owed £18.6trillion in slavery reparations.

And even Oxford University’s Mathematics department embarked on a bizarre project to question ‘Western-­centric ideas of objectivity’.

Earlier this summer, it was revealed that school support organisation The Key had offered resources to more than 100,000 heads suggesting that the British Empire should be taught as being akin to Nazi Germany.

In an ‘anti-racism curriculum review’, The Key ordered teachers to ‘avoid presenting the British Empire as an equal balance of good and bad’.

Teachers were further exhorted not to ‘ignore the racism of historical figures such as Winston Churchill,’ but to ‘be upfront about their problematic views’.

The British Empire was not without fault. But this new approach is void of nuance, ignoring the myriad positives that came from British ­influence overseas.

Even the Industrial Revolution, built on the ­ingenuity of British ­inventors and the sweat of its workers, and which went on to free billions of people from millennia of poverty, is now claimed by some to have been an enterprise in racist exploitation.

Real history has to tell the whole story. We shouldn’t be afraid of it. It was the British, lest we forget, who ended peacetime famine in India through the development of nationwide railways.

It was our Empire that brought medical ­treatment to undeveloped countries, oversaw the building of schools and universities around the globe, and which discovered and saved priceless world heritage.

And, it was the British Empire after Abolition in 1833 that was the main force in ending the global slave trade.

We should remember with respect the sailors, missionaries and ­officials who risked, and gave, their lives in fighting slavery and ­other forms of violence, including female genital mutilation, human sacrifice and tribal warfare.

Following Abolition, the British government used 40 per cent of its national budget — £20 million — to buy the freedom of slaves across the Empire. The sum was so large that the debt wasn’t paid off until 2015.

Will students today learn a shred of this uplifting and fascinating episode? Not when the re-writing of history has presaged a shocking cultural and intellectual amnesia. And it’s no wonder, when our institutions have been spouting the evils of Britain on loop, that so many feel ashamed of our past.

The great irony is that it’s recent immigrants to this island who are among the most proud to be British. Those who have come to Britain over the past ­decades have typically done so because of their admiration for the UK. To a family fleeing persecution and poverty in the ­Middle East, for ­example, Britain is a bastion of morality, fairness and opportunity.

It’s not immigration that is dissolving our national pride, it’s the hand-wringing, fist-clenching progressives of the Left who see talking the country down as a form of moral and intellectual snobbery, a means of looking down on working people and proclaiming their superior virtue.

They are not only wrong in what they do — but appalling in their motivation. They poison the well of history from which the young — be they from immigrant families or not — are drinking.

But why does this matter? Who cares if fewer people think that Britain was one of history’s good guys? The answer is that national ­identity is the foundation upon which a functioning society is built.

In order for the country to thrive, there must be an underlying social cohesion borne out of a shared belief in the value and ­integrity of Britain itself. We have to think that there is something worth protecting to keep us together in increasingly difficult and dangerous times.

Our navel gazing over the past distracts us from the dangers of the present. It makes us look weak and divided in the eyes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, who reason that the West is losing faith in itself and its values, and that when the likes of China and Russia break international law, we shall have no appetite to defend it.

History is our shared story. Today, the story has been edited, shorn of its nuance and re-imagined to cast ­Britain as chief villain, dragging our pride to a lamentable low,

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher declared: ‘We shall have to learn again to be one nation, or one day we shall be no nation.’ Sadly, if this dark and dangerous course is not corrected, the future the Iron Lady warned of could be closer than we think.

• Robert Tombs is Professor Emeritus of French History and fellow of St John’s ­College, Cambridge.