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The Daily Telegraph’s Disinformation Campaign About the British Empire Laid Bare

The newspaper has waged a culture war on anyone spreading awareness of verifiable truths about the British Empire and its legacies

The Daily Telegraph newspaper and website. Photo: Arterra Picture Library / Alamy
The Daily Telegraph newspaper and website. Photo: Arterra Picture Library / Alamy

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If the culture wars are over, someone had better tell the Daily Telegraph. Ever since the Black Lives Matter protests of June 2020, the paper has waged a culture war on anyone spreading awareness of verifiable truths about the British Empire and its legacies.

The newspaper allied itself immediately with the populist culture warriors who formed the Common Sense group of MPs in the previous government to lead the backlash against the antiracist protests.

Chaired by Sir John Hayes and formed in part of ‘red wall’ MPs, it described Black Lives Matter as “an extreme cultural and political group … fuelled by ignorance and an arrogant determination to erase the past and dictate the future”, with “an intolerant woke dogma”. One of the group’s first targets, though, was an academic. 

Protesters dragging the statue of Edward Colston to Bristol harbourside during a Black Lives Matter protest. Photo: PA Images / Alamy

Professor Corinne Fowler had co-authored a report commissioned before the toppling of Colston’s statue and using peer reviewed research to identify National Trust properties’ connections with colonial activities of various kinds. It was released without much fuss. But in November 2020, Jacob Rees-Mogg condemned it in parliament. 

Members of the Common Sense group signed a letter to the Telegraph accusing the National Trust of being “coloured by cultural Marxist dogma, colloquially known as the woke agenda”. The Telegraph urged a referral to the Charity Commission on the grounds that the report was outside the National Trust’s charitable remit, a claim found to be without substance


A culture war that extended to scones – and History Reclaimed

Restore Trust was founded as a private limited company to continue the campaign. It has tried three times to get its candidates elected to the National Trust’s council, with the Telegraph lending a hand by accusing even National Trust scones of being “woke”

In August 2021, a group of right wing scholars including Robert Tombs, Andrew Roberts and Nigel Biggar, banded together to create History Reclaimed. It too has since registered as a private company.

The Telegraph now resorts to its members for articles on colonial historians’ work, and for outraged comment on its own writers’ culture war interventions on history and heritage.

Tombs, a retired specialist in French and English history and David Abulafia, formerly a specialist in the early modern Mediterranean, have supplied the paper with a barrage of articles, with titles such as ‘The Rewriting of History Has Taken a Sinister Turn’; ‘Time for Historians to Fight Back against the Ideologues Who Want to Tear Down the Past’, and ‘Woke Activists, Take Note: There Is No Public Appetite for Erasing British History’.

Perhaps the most telling of their headlines was ‘The “Antiracist” Mission to Destroy Britain Is Working—and We Have Surrendered’. It takes but a moment to appreciate the kind of Britain that would be destroyed by anti-racism. 

Fowler continues to be one of History Reclaimed and the Telegraph’s favourite targets. In yet another piece attacking her and colonial historians in general, History Reclaimed member Lawrence Goldman previewed her new book, Our Island Stories without having read a word of it. He got even the title wrong. 

The alliance between the newspaper and the lobbying groups is clearly undeterred by its loss of government backing. Its latest culture war salvo is particularly pernicious, spreading the entirely false implication that teaching guidelines equate the British Empire with Nazi Germany

The article caused outrage, provoking media discussion of the threat posed by the “woke” indoctrination of our children

Anyone involved in teaching about British colonialism and familiar with The Telegraph’s and History Reclaimed’s modus operandi understood immediately that this article was both malicious and untrue.


Unpicking the Misinformation

The article’s central claim is that Key’s guidelines “insist” that the “British empire must be presented like Nazi Germany.” Of course, they do not.

The guidelines attacked in the story mention Nazi Germany just once (The Telegraph does so seven times). They refer to it in passing, not as a comparator for the British empire, but in the more abstract context of the question of “balance” in history teaching.

The point being made in the relevant section of the guidelines is that complex historical phenomena like the empire or Nazi Germany should not be taught as simply a balance between good and bad.

Nazi Germany was given as an example of a topic on which no sensible person would advocate weighing atrocities against achievements. There was, of course, no suggestion that the British empire be taught as if it were a fascist and murderous regime bent on genocide, like Nazi Germany.

In fact, contrary to the imputation in The Telegraph’s headline, no comparative teaching was suggested at all. Thanks to The Telegraph’s distortion, even that single reference to Nazi Germany as a useful indicator of the pitfalls of teaching history as if it were a matter of balance was removed from the guidelines as soon as the story was published.


Robert Tombs’ Facile Comments

The misinformation about the Key’s teaching guidelines is bad enough, but as in most of the Telegraph’s recent culture war interventions, the article makes an appeal to the authority of a History Reclaimed member who seems like an expert. This time it is Robert Tombs who made himself available to confirm or issue at least three brainless statements:

1. The idea that the “teaching of colonialism as invading and exploiting” is shocking. 

The Oxford definition of colonialism is: “the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.” How on Earth are we supposed to teach it as anything other than “invading and exploiting”? It would be like teaching the Tudors without executions, WWII without battles, or indeed, Nazi Germany without antisemitism.

2. Tombs’ claim that it would be wrong for teachers to “celebrate” the Oba of Benin because he traded in enslaved people. 

First, the guidelines don’t say that the various Obas of Benin should be “celebrated”. They say that their “contributions and achievements” should be recognised. Those achievements include the Benin Bronzes, which must have some world historical value or History Reclaimed and Tombs would not be fighting to prevent their repatriation from the British Museum.

Tombs also appears momentarily to have forgotten who the biggest slave traders of all, for much of the eighteenth century, were. Britons. Following his logic, we had better not teach about their achievements either.

3. Perhaps most risibly of all, Tombs declares that describing Winston Churchill as a racist is “a baseless accusation”.

Sir Winston Churchill in the cabinet room at 10 Downing Street. Photo: PA Images / Alamy

He may also have been a great wartime leader, but throughout his whole adult life Churchill was unequivocally, unashamedly racist. Even Andrew Roberts once admitted that Churchill was a white supremacist, but that was before Roberts too became a member of History Reclaimed and had to disown that knowledge as “anti-British”.

In 1921 Churchill described East African Indians as “a vulgar class of coolies” who “could not yet be allowed the same political rights as white men”.

1922: “opinion would change soon as to the expediency of granting democratic institutions to backward races who had no capacity for self-government’” …

1942: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion”.

1952: “When you learn to think of a race as inferior beings it is difficult to get rid of that way of thinking”…

1954: “I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails” and he “did not really think that Black people were as capable or as efficient as white people”.

1955: “Keep Britain White would be a good slogan”.

But oh no, according to Tombs, he couldn’t possibly be described as a racist.

The Telegraph and History Reclaimed are now making fools of themselves by continuing to wage a silly culture war against the teaching of verifiable and important aspects of British history. It’s time they packed it in.


This article was edited on 13 August.

The original version claimed that there was no mention of Nazi Germany in the curriculum guidelines published by The Key at the time that The Telegraph targeted them. The author of this article had sought confirmation from The Key that the single reference to Nazi Germany in former guidelines had been removed in 2022, and had received this confirmation. However, The Key have since notified the author that they were mistaken. In fact, the guidelines current at the time of the Telegraph story did still mention Nazi Germany once, and this mention was removed only in response to the negative publicity generated by the misrepresentation of that mention in the story. This article is amended to reflect that.


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