Britain’s great culture war continues to become simultaneously
more totalitarian and more ridiculous.
A recent development is that the Plymouth Council for Racial
Equality, funded by the Government’s Commission for Racial
Equality, the main power-house of Britain’s Race Relations Industry
(one of the country’s major growth industries at present), is
attacking the fact that a nearby pub has been named after the
Elizabethan sea dog Sir John Hawkins, a companion of Sir Francis
Drake and one of the chief British Admirals who defended England
against the Spanish Armada.
The pub is located close to Hawkins’s birth-place, commemorated
by a plaque, and the town already has a Sir John Hawkins
Square.
He was one of the great figures of one of the most daring and
rambunctious phases of British history, credited not only with
harassing Spain mightily, but also with introducing potatoes to
England and making major improvements in ship-design. Hawkins
played a major role in creating the more powerful and seaworthy
English ships which beat the cumbersome Spanish galleons.
In 1590 Drake and Hawkins founded a charity for the relief of
sick and elderly mariners. This was followed by a hospital in 1592
and another in 1594, the Sir John Hawkins’ Hospital. The charity
continues today.
Hawkins’s name is synonymous with British sea-faring. When
Robert Louis Stevenson named the cabin-boy in Treasure Island Jim
Hawkins, everyone knew that he was going to be the hero. The name
was carried proudly in World War II by a Royal Navy heavy
cruiser.
THE CAUSE OF THE complaint is that Hawkins was also involved in
slave-trading and wrote a book on the subject. He is often, though
falsely, said to have begun the British slave-trade to America in
1562 (It actually began years earlier).
Opinions may differ about Hawkins. His defenders claim, on the
slavery issue, that he was a creature of his times: even 89 years
later, in 1631, the Irish village of Baltimore was sacked by
Muslims from Algiers and almost the whole population carried away
to slavery. Further, at least in other ways Hawkins did heroic
things.
However, critics claim slavery was always an abomination and
there was no excuse for Hawkins then or now, especially as he
claimed to be a Christian. One of his descendents recently
apologized on his behalf.
Kipling must have had the likes of Hawkins in mind when he
wrote, in “The Last Chantey” of sailormen on Judgment Day, which
set daring and defiance against “red iniquity”:
Then sang the souls of the gentlemen-adventurers
—
Fettered wrist to bar all for red iniquity;
“Ho, we revel in our chains
O’er the sorrow that was Spain’s,
Heave or sink it, leave or drink it, we were masters of the
sea!”
Yet how black or red old Sir John should be painted is nor really
the point. The point is that this incident illustrates how deeply
and completely it is coming to be accepted that there is some
right, in the interests of re-writing history, to both put forward
a politically-correct point of view, and to prohibit not merely
other points of view, but other modes of thought and perceptions of
culture and national identity, and that somewhat nebulous,
unelected, quasi-political bodies have either the moral or,
increasingly, the legal, right to change individual and national
consciousness.
The Plymouth Council for Racial Equality claims on its website
to “value diversity,” but only, it appears, up to a point.
Ultra-liberalism expressed in political correctness in the end eats
its tail and becomes perfect intolerance.
IT IS HARD TO know where this is going to stop: Oliver Cromwell
committed racist-religious genocide in Ireland, but for the present
at least there seems to be no move to prevent pubs being called the
“Oliver Cromwell.” There is even a famous Oliver Cromwell jazz
festival which would probably have made Cromwell turn in his grave
if he had one. (At the Restoration the English dug up his remains
and destroyed them with curses.)
If there is a free market in ideas the landlord who names his
pub after a controversial figure surely takes his chances that, if
the name is so unpopular that people actually care, they will go
elsewhere. And, after all, the members of the Council for Racial
Equality don’t actually have to go to the Hawkins pub themselves.
Behind a quasi-official body opposing naming a pub after Hawkins it
is assumed, of course, that there is no free market in ideas.
Further, this complaint indicates the particular direction of
the culture war: it is aimed against things with associations in
British history of patriotism and daring. There is not much danger
that Britain will start slave-trading to America again, but it
possibly does need to be reminded of the patriotic and daring men
in what a poet called its “rough island story.”
The Plymouth Council for Racial Equality claims on its own
website, in words I can hardly better apart from their Newspeak
clumsiness: “Culture could be defined as the total of the inherited
ideas, beliefs, and knowledge, which constitute the shared bases of
social action or the total range of activities and ideas of a
community.”
THE ATTACK ON Hawkins seems to be part of an attack on the whole
concept of Britain’s historic identity, on a par with the decision
by authorities at Winchester to down-grade its associations with
Alfred the Great. Eloise Appleby of the Winchester Tourist Board
was quoted as saying: “King Alfred represents the past. His image
is not forward-looking enough for today’s cut-throat commercial
market place. Winchester is a town with many creative artists and
new buildings and Alfred doesn’t tell the whole story.”
In fact, many people came to Winchester precisely and solely
because of its associations with Alfred, Arthur, and other figures
of high and heroic chivalry and romance. That wouldn’t do, so King
Alfred’s College, Winchester, adopted the colorless lackluster name
“University College, Winchester,” in 2004, later changed again to
Winchester University.
The work proceeds apace: a recent survey of 1,400 British
school-children indicated one third of them believed that Winston
Churchill was a fictional character.
A few months earlier a poll of adults revealed that a quarter of
those questioned also thought Churchill never existed. They
believed he had more to do with the TV advert for Churchill
insurance — which features a nodding dog of the same name.
Previously, the BBC’s Radio Times had claimed in a program
note:
History may regard Winston Churchill as the architect
of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, or the maker of xenophobic
speeches, but tonight we consider him, in philanthropic old age, as
Churchill the European.
This was reportedly written not by an office-boy from a
sink-comprehensive school or printed at the dictation of the
Gauleiter of an occupying enemy power, but by a professional
journalist, Sue Gaisford.
There are countless other instances of similar things. In
Malvern, Worcestershire, the Elgar Hall, named after Sir Edward
Elgar, who composed the music of “Land of Hope and Glory,” was
renamed “New Space.”
In 2004 the Anglican Bishop of Hulme, the Rt. Rev. Stephen Lowe,
banned the hymn “I vow to thee, my country,” in his diocese,
claiming its popularity was a symptom of a dangerous increase in
English nationalism which paralleled the rise of Nazism. The bishop
claimed it was dangerous to suggest British culture was somehow
superior.
It all points to something very odd happening in that
aforementioned “rough island story.” For the first time in nearly a
thousand years, England is being run, at an important level, by
people who hate it.
