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Since Niall Ferguson first published Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World almost two decades ago, there has been a remarkable resurgence of jingoistic Empire nostalgia in Britain, a trend that has gained renewed impetus with Brexit and as part of the current so-called culture-war.

Take for instance the controversy over the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford, which has become an unlikely rallying point for those of a more conservative persuasion. Rhodes modern-day supporters insist that was a great man whose memory should be honoured, and that removing his statue would be tantamount to the erasure of history.

Rhodes was furthermore no racist, we are told. Yet such a claim is difficult to reconcile with his deep commitment to white supremacy and lifelong dream of Anglo-Saxon world domination.

I contend that we are the finest race in the world, he famously wrote in his Confession of Faith while at Oxford, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at the present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence

This was no youthful folly, as has been claimed, but a guiding principle in Rhodes racist creed and one that he reasserted time and again throughout his life. In an 1894-speech before the Cape House Parliament, he stated that if the whites maintain their position as the supreme race, the day may come when we shall be thankful that we have the natives in their proper place.

Having built a personal fortune in South Africas diamond mines, Rhodes set up a private company to extend British control into Matabeleland, which was annexed after a brief but brutal war. The Maxim machine gun was here deployed for the first time and proved so deadly that its inventor, Sir Hiram Maxim, used eyewitness accounts as advertisement: We could see hundreds of niggers mowed down like wheat before a scythe.

When the Ndebele and Shona people later rebelled against Rhodes company in 1896, he waged a merciless war against the entire population, using dynamite from his mines to blow up caves where local civilians had taken refuge. One of his men described an instance when the women and children came out, and awful sights they were. The cave was evidently a small one and they had been thrown against the rocks and were all covered with blood and the dynamite had skinned them or burned the skin off their bodies.

The indiscriminate violence unleashed by Rhodes forces was not so far from that which the Germans resorted to less than a decade later during the first genocide of the 20th century in present-day Namibia.

Even during his own lifetime, Rhodes was a highly controversial figure, and he was obsessed about securing his own legacy, which is precisely why he donated so generously to places like Oxford and established the Rhodes Scholarship. When people today rally to the defence of his statue, they are accordingly doing exactly what Rhodes intended: celebrating him for his philanthropic work, while ignoring his record of racism, brutality and exploitation.

The inevitable argument is, of course, that we should not judge the past according to our modern standards and that despite any shortcomings, Rhodes did much good.

Yet the very notion of judging the past, as Priya Satia reminds us in her brilliant new book Times Monster, was always part and parcel of how the imperial project legitimised itself. Rather than being a critical endeavour, Satia shows how history as a discipline has, in the past as much as the present, been complicit in the imperial project by making it ethically thinkable and, ultimately, by providing a powerfully exculpatory narrative.

Times Monster is not only a sweeping account of the British Empire over the past three centuries, but also an ambitious intellectual history, touching on everything from the Mahabharata to Marx, and from Shakespeare to Said.

It begins with the gun-manufacturing Quaker Samuel Galton in the 18th century and ends with anti-Brexit protests in 2019. One of Satias key aims is to expose and dissect the hypocrisy that lies at the heart of liberal imperialism and the conceit of British exceptionalism: namely, that the Empire had as its primary function to uplift colonial subjects and spread the blessings of western civilisation to the far-flung corners of the world.

The racial hierarchies that underpinned the notion of The White Mans Burden, as Kipling described it, made it a moral obligation for the British to civilize those they considered as savages yet at the same time made it inconceivable that those savages could ever really catch up and be considered as equals, culturally or biologically.

At no point were the British actually going to declare civilising mission accomplished and simply hand back control to their colonial subjects. Which is why, when decolonisation eventually did take place, it was the result of anti-colonial resistance, economic concerns and changing global politics.

Indeed, the brutal and drawn-out conflicts in Kenya, Malaya or Ireland gives the lie to the prevalent myth of Britains peaceful retreat from Empire. The British ruled through coercion rather than consent, and the truth is that the benign rhetoric of paternalism and reform only ever served to provide a veneer of respectability on what was otherwise outright oppression and exploitation. So how is it that the British Empire can still be considered overwhelmingly a force for good in the world? How can someone like Cecil Rhodes still be celebrated as a great man in the 21st century?

The answer, Satia argues, may be found in the particular understanding of history and notion of progress that underpinned Empire. This ethical outlook was rooted in both classical and Enlightenment ideas of time as linear and history as an inherently moral force moving irresistibly forward.

Civilisations that failed to evolve were doomed to decay, while people deemed to be without any civilisation at all were simply left behind. This goes some way to explain the 19th-century British obsession with the fall of the Roman Empire, as reflected in Gibbons work, which was read as a cautionary tale but in the firm belief that they would succeed where others before them had failed.

This was essentially the idea of the survival of the fittest applied to the realm of human civilisation, and once race science gained prominence, hierarchies of biological difference were indeed easily mapped onto pre-existing dichotomies between civilised and uncivilised.

For great white men like Rhodes to rule over darker-skinned races was seen as a natural right and the way things were supposed to be. The unfolding of history was, in other words, considered a judgement in itself. At the high-point of Empire, historians in the Whig tradition could thus in teleological fashion argue that Britain was the culmination of civilisation and the measure by which progress was to be defined.

The more insidious implication of this logic was that wars, famines and massacres could be justified simply as collateral damage. Tragic yet unavoidable, and in some ways even necessary to ensure the onward march of civilisation. When the pretence of benign imperialism became increasingly unsustainable, the history of Empire was simply rewritten to account for any diversion from the path of progress.

A narrative of redemption thus became central to this history, as abolition was presented as making up for slavery, or the suppression of widow-burning in India cancelling out previous decades of greed and corruption by East India Company officials.

Thus the idea of the civilising mission was born, yet what mattered was the avowal of altruism and good intentions, rather than the actual outcome or practical implications of reformist policies (freed slaves were not simply set free, and widow-burning was a relatively rare occurrence, but one that made headlines etc).

If great men acting as agents of progress had made the Empire, their corollary the not-so-great men turned out to be equally important when corruption and massacres were undeniable and scandals unavoidable. Whether it was the impeachment of Warren Hastings in the late 18th century, the trial of Governor Eyre in the 19th, or the condemnation of General Dyer after the Amritsar massacre in 1919, public examples were thus made of individuals who were deemed to have let the side down and failed to live up to the moral standards expected of an Englishman.

This was quite explicit when Winston Churchill denounced Dyer in 1920, describing the massacre of hundreds of Indian civilians as a monstruous event which stands in singular and sinister isolation and as foreign to the British way of doing things. Dyer was singled out as a rotten apple and the violence explained away as an exception that proved the rule of liberal imperialism.

This focus on the individual has also meant that racism has all too often been presented merely as a personal characteristic, or regretful lapse of character. The real issue, however, is not whether General Dyer, for instance, personally hated Indians, but the indisputable fact that he was not unique in either outlook or action.

The figure of the rogue officer nevertheless allowed for the disavowal of violence and racism as incidental and episodic rather than intrinsic to imperialism itself. The ubiquity of racialised violence, from everyday beatings of servants to large-scale massacres, is thus deliberately downplayed or simply erased from the history of the Empire.

If British imperialism was a vehicle for progress, and progress is both inevitable and objectively good, then it follows that the Empire though it might suffer setbacks or momentarily lose its moral bearings always remained essentially a force for good. The idea of progress and historical providence sustained the imperial project, providing a powerful moral alibi that has never really lost its grip on the British imagination.

Satias engaging exploration of the historical thinking of Empire brings into focus something very important something all too often lost in the deliberate obfuscation of the confected culture wars of today. Current debates about the Empire and its legacies are not actually debates about historical facts or different interpretations of the past, which is after all the bread and butter of the historians craft.

Instead, they are the result of radically different, and largely incompatible, historical imaginaries. If you subscribe to the conventional narrative of history as progress, then any critique of the British Empire, or calls for decolonisation, reparations etc, are prima facie invalid. Demands for the return of looted artefacts to former colonies likewise makes no sense if Western museums is where you think they rightfully belong, simply by virtue of having ended up there.

This has, in fact, become a normative historical outlook, which means that critical scholarship exploring, for example, racialised violence, or revealing links to slavery, is all too often dismissed simply as biased or woke not because it is factually incorrect, but because it challenges the very worldview that so many take for granted.

Realising this also helps make sense of the oft-repeated line about railways and the Raj, which is patently nonsensical since the British did not conquer the Indian subcontinent in order to build railways, and the ones they did build were primarily for their own benefit.

The railway-network first established in the aftermath of the 1857 Uprising was first and foremost intended for the speedy transportation of troops, that is, for defensive purposes, which is why many train-stations were built as veritable fortifications.

Secondly, the railways were used to extract resources and increase British profits, while also enabling foodstuffs being shipped back to Britain at critical moments while Indians starved. The refrain, but what about the railways, however, does not actually refer to steam-powered locomotion but serves simply as a shorthand for progress and is thus considered self-evidently good.

This line of reasoning, it may be noted, merely regurgitates century-old talking points and with no questioning of who gets to decide what good means, or for whom these blessing of western civilisation were supposed to be an unalloyed good. The Empire is long gone, but Britain never underwent a process of decolonisation and now all that is left are the phantom-pains of former greatness and an outdated worldview.

The so-called balance-sheet approach is not, and never was, a genuine tool for historical analysis. Instead, it was always intended as a way to deflect critique and redeem the Empire. The flip-side to this narrative, namely the insistence that the Empire was simply bad rather than good, or that the British today should feel shame rather than pride, is by the same token not conducive to a deeper historical understanding either.

This critique simply tallies the balance-sheet differently, with imperialism coming up short, but does not ultimately challenge the basic premise of historical judgement. In order to move beyond this conceptual impasse, Satia argues, new ways of looking at history is required.

It is not only that the conventional narrative of great men and historical progress is ill-suited to adequately reflect the nuances and complexities of the past in a meaningful way. It actively hinders the consideration of other potential historical approaches and thus excludes different historical vantage points.

There has always been, as Satia reminds us, religious and philosophical traditions in which time is not considered linear but cyclical, and where mans own actions, rather than some abstract notion of providence, determines his fate. And as long as there have been apologists of Empire, there have been dissenting voices challenging the moral grounds on which conquest was justified, including radical visionary William Blake and founding member of the Arts and Craft movement, William Morris.

The British anti-imperialist tradition, recently explored in Priyamvada Gopals excellent book Insurgent Empire, in fact, remains a powerful antidote to the chest-thumping jingoism we have come to expect from the likes of Kipling & Co.

The counter-narratives that emerged as part of the anti-colonial struggle of the 20th century, formulated by Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Frantz Fanon and others, offer yet more historical visions that directly reject western notions of progress and modernity.

The past indeed looks very different once we change our perspective, as global historians have long argued, and take into consideration a wider range of different experiences. Ultimately, Satia makes an impassioned case not to let the very definition of history be written by the victors.

This does not mean dispensing with academic rigour or indulging in some sort of historical relativism. Rather, it entails moving beyond an essentially moral framework embedded within an explicitly Eurocentric perspective.

Times Monster will prove uncomfortable reading for those who remain deeply invested in the myth of British exceptionalism embodied in historical figures such as Cecil Rhodes. And their inevitable response will be that he was simply a man of his time. Everyone is, of course, a product of their time, including Rhodes contemporaries who vociferously denounced him.

What he called his ideals were the dregs of Darwinism, the writer GK Chesterton stated, adding that it was exactly because he had no ideas to spread that he invoked slaughter, violated justice, and ruined republics to spread them. The people at the receiving end of colonialism, no less a product of their time but usually excluded from this argument, might also be expected to have held radically different views from that of their coloniser.

In 1902, the year of Rhodess death, Joseph Conrads classic expos of the brutality of European imperialism in Africa, Heart of Darkness, was first published in book-form. While Rhodes still fantasised about Anglo-Saxon world-domination on his deathbed, Conrads narrator, Marlow, argued that the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. In the end, however, Marlows courage fails him and instead he lies to Kurtzs Beloved, thereby preserving her faith in the nobility of the civilising mission.

In Times Monster, Satia does what Conrads narrator could not she tells the truth about the Empire and reveal the redeeming idea for what it really is. A cruel conceit, that Kurtz himself had to face with his dying words. Skillfully dissecting the narrative of progress that undergirds the case for Empire, Satia nevertheless offers her own path to redemption.

This urgent and compelling book encourages us to listen to different voices, to tell different stories, and ultimately to rethink what it means to be a historian and to engage critically and imaginatively with the past.

The author is a Professor of Global and Imperial History, Queen Mary University of London.

This article first appeared on Kim A Wagners blog.

Times Monster: History, Conscience and Britains Empire, Allen Lane.

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This ambitious history of the British Empire touches on everything from the Mahabharata to Marx - Scroll.in

News comes this week that Nicole Kassell, award-winning director of the dazzling Watchmen TV show, is to oversee a remake of The Wizard of Oz, the classic 1939 musical starring Judy Garland, for New Line Cinema. Well, good luck with that.

Myriad film-makers have attempted to recapture the magic of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayers pioneering movie, but none has really been successful. Sam Raimi is perhaps the most notable recent director to take on the challenge, with Disneys Oz the Great and Powerful, in 2013. Raimi is an accomplished director of brutally silly cult fantasy films, but his attempt to present a prequel featuring James Franco as the titular wizard lacked sparkle. The 1978 musical The Wiz was intended to capitalise on the popularity of Blaxploitation movies and featured a high-profile, all-black cast including Michael Jackson, Diana Ross and Richard Pryor, with music by Luther Vandross and Quincy Jones. Yet it was a critical and commercial bomb, eventually helping to signal the downfall of the very subgenre it had hoped to propel to greater heights.

Studios love to remake classic movies because they come with built-in audience awareness. The original Wizard of Oz is imprinted on our cultural hive memory: the scene in which Judy Garlands Dorothy emerges from the bland sepia of Kansas into the splendid Technicolor of the magical land of Oz is perhaps equalled only by the one in which Margaret Hamiltons swivel-eyed, green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West finds herself hideously melting away into nothing. The songs are splendid, and Garland holds the stage as if she really has cast a spell on us. And yet, in 2021, the story feels like a pretty drab, common-or-garden American childrens fantasy.

L Frank Baum, who first imagined Oz in his hugely popular 1900 novel, wanted to create a wholesome magic world drained of the spikier elements of European fairy tales and therefore more suitable for conservative US audiences. As he wrote in his original introduction: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written solely to pleasure children today. It aspires to being a modernised fairytale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out.

Its hard to blame a nation that had barely put the tumultuous wild west era to bed for wanting to protect its children from the harsh realities of life, even if the end result was a bloodless, one-dimensional tale. Yet the popularity of modern family films over the past few decades has been based on their appeal to all ages, in many cases because they are a lot more frightening contain more moments of genuine, terrifying threat than a good number of R-rated horror flicks. Is there anything scarier in cinema than the scene in Toy Story 3 in which our heroes brace themselves for a fiery demise in the Sunnyside Daycare incinerator? Have we ever been more horrified than when watching Nemos mum get eaten by a barracuda as weve barely had time to digest the opening credits of Finding Nemo?

The problem with Wizard of Oz is that it is all much too hokey to appeal in the modern day. Dorothys final realisation that there is no place like home is a cheap eulogisation of simple, cosy, country life on a Kansas farm, written by an author who once suggested that his fellow white man would only be safe once all Native Americans were wiped from the face of the Earth.

Kassell has a history of working in far icier territory. She made her name with the 2004 thriller The Woodsman, starring Kevin Bacon as a convicted child molester who finds himself tempted back into a life of abuse. Its an unflinchingly dark and excruciating viewing. Watchmen imagines a bewildering, multilayered alternative future in which the events of the original, seminal Alan Moore graphic novel have unravelled in spectacularly unexpected ways that cleverly mirror the real Americas culture wars. Its another mature and cultured piece, about as far away from pantomime munchkins and the blimmin yellow brick road as one can imagine.

Perhaps Kassell is planning an all-growns-up take on the original story, though its hard to imagine quite how this would be of any interest. As Raimi discovered to his cost, Oz simply doesnt boast the sense of looming, gothic horror that permeates earlier, European fantasy tales such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Sleeping Beauty or Beauty and the Beast. For all its pointy-chinned, green-skinned witches and menacing flying monkeys, the story lacks the sense of impending threat that the Grimm Brothers had in spades. Asking Kassell to oversee a fresh remake is a bit like appointing Noam Chomsky to analyse the syntactic brilliance of Mother Goose.

In MGMs classic film adaptation, it is eventually revealed that the titular wonderful wizard is a conman illusionist from Dorothys own Kansas. Perhaps its time to finally accept that the supposed brilliance of Baums original novel is also a simple trick of smoke and mirrors.

See more here:
Is the new Wizard of Oz reboot doomed to fail like all the others? - The Guardian

Hardeep Matharu reports on how the history of the English countryside has turned into a dangerous battleground as various forces try to provoke an uncivil culture war

The anti-woke agenda of the Government and right-wing media is resulting in threats to the safety and careers of female academics, a historian involved in setting the record straight about British heritages colonial links has warned.

Professor Corinne Fowler, of the University of Leicester, told Byline Times that, following sustained attacks on her work, she has reported three incidents of threats to the police, while a project she has led to teach school children about the imperial history of buildings in their local area has been investigated by MPs in an attempt at political intimidation.

I consider it to be a worrying level of interference with intellectual freedom, she said.

Prof Fowler came to the attention of politicians and the right-wing media after co-editing a report by the National Trust, published last September, detailing how 93 of the buildings in its care have links to colonialism and/or slavery. The report was jumped on by those keen to further the culture wars because its list included Chartwell Sir Winston Churchills family home.

The academic said the timing of the reports release in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests and the tearing down of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol meant that it became a political football, dominated by a very emotional response in which factual historical discussion was denounced as the rewriting of history.

Sadly, what Brexit has taught us is that you can make political capital out of dividing people, Prof Fowler said. The most important thing about this is not to weaponise history. These kinds of interventions actually shut down the possibility of having sensible conversations because it all becomes polarised and politicised. I dont think that anybody of any political persuasion should be using history as a way of manipulating public opinion. Its worrying when national pride gets mixed up with historical fact.

As has been seen elsewhere in public life in a post-truth age, historical fact is being held hostage to irrational, unevidenced feeling.

Facts should not be given equal status to opinion, the academic said. Historians write history, thats what they do. When new evidence comes to light about East India Company connections or the slavery business and how that, for example, shaped philanthropy and philanthropic giving in this country, we then adjust our view of the past accordingly, as led by the evidence.

Its good to have conversations about how to interpret certain facts that come to light but I dont think the basic, fundamental facts should be open for discussion. Thats dangerous. Opinion is given too much sway and we end up having quite irrational conversations about history which are not led by the evidence or guided by facts.

Taking its cue from Donald Trumps Make America Great Again movement in the US, Boris Johnsons anti-woke crusade is well underway carrying forward the divisions laid down by Brexit, which for years was preceded by stories of bendy bananas signifying Britains imprisonment at the hands of the EU.

Another absurd but emotional narrative is now being developed around the term woke originally a reference to those working to eradicate social and racial injustices, but now repackaged into a project of denunciation of anyone considered unpatriotic, leftie or criticising structural ills in Britain. In many ways, it is the clearest modern expression of the old colonial divide and rule presided over by the British Empire to devastating effect of which the Prime Minister is so beloved.

As with Brexit, it seeks to divide along identity lines. How Britain sees itself, its past and values is a key battleground.

The strategy was brazenly on display recently in a Telegraph article entitled We Will Save Our History From Woke Militants. In it, Housing, Communities and Local Government Secretary Robert Jenrick said that there has been an attempt to impose a single, often negative narrative which, not so much recalls our national story, as seeks to erase part of it by a cultural committee of town hall militants and woke worthies. The piece announced a change in the law to ensure that planning approval will be required before historical monuments are removed.

Reports in the past week that the Government will be conducting a review into left-wing extremism and attempts by far-left activists to hijack political movements such as Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion contain echoes of the same.

But, backing up Government ministers is much of the press, with the anti-woke agenda now crystallising around the launch of the forthcoming GB News channel. This week, journalist Andrew Neil said he is launching it because I believe the direction of news debate in Britain is increasingly woke and out of touch GB News will be proud of our country, even when revealing its shortcomings and its inequalities. Our default position will not be to do Britain down at every turn.

Aside from the fact that much of Britains media landscape is dominated by newspapers with tendencies to the right, Neils words reek of hypocrisy for another reason.

Ive had hundreds of hostile articles written about me, Ive had my work misrepresented, Ive had threats, Ive got police reports, Ive had all kinds of problems and attempts to intimidate me at a political level, Prof Fowler told Byline Times. How is that not closing down discussion, how is that not cancel culture?

As soon as you slap a label on someone its an excuse not to listen to something really interesting they might have to say, whether or not you agree with them politically. The woke term is a particularly annoying one because it implies that someone is politically biased and therefore cant be trusted.

One of the articles referencing Prof Fowler in the wake of the National Trust report suggested precisely this with the headline of the Mail Online piece declaring: National Trust is Accused of Recruiting Biased Team of Academics to Probe its Properties Links to Empire and the Slave Trade. It included a photo of her in a personal context and details of the other female historians who had co-edited the report.

She is worried that theres so much hatred being projected at women in public life and fears it is part of a wider project to rollback progressive wins.

There is a pattern, an international pattern, across Europe, Australia and the US of trying to discredit academics, particularly female academics, but also climate scientists and increasingly historians of empire, Prof Fowler said. And thats all happening in the context of nationalism.

Its not that journalists shouldnt be critical, its their job to be critical, but when they are running inaccurate, misleading or hostile articles about the work, theyre just fuelling a hostile environment for intellectual curiosity. Intellectual freedom really matters and name-calling is never helpful, ever.

The problem is that, for every hostile Daily Mail article, there are about 300 or so threats that come to me personally on the basis of that coverage. Theres a lot of anger and suffering around at the moment and its not okay to parade historians in front of people as some kind of enemy when all theyre doing is their job. We should be, yes, critical; yes, sceptical; but not hostile or demeaning.

Im not saying Ive been intimidated by it because I havent, Im not going anywhere, but thats not for everybody. That level of threat and intimidation is not something that everybody would choose for their own sanity to withstand. You shouldnt have to be super resilient to be a woman in public life.

Im very concerned that were going to rollback progress in terms of us trying, genuinely trying, to level the playing field for people of colour, for people with disabilities, for women and on LGBT rights. If you have such a hostile environment and youre supporting an environment where its okay to attack women, its okay to attack people of colour, and its okay to attack academics, then how can you have a civilised society which isnt bitterly divided and polarised?

Thats my real concern a lack of respect, openness and ability to learn and grow as a society, together, no matter what our political views.

Prof Fowler has no desire to contribute to the worrying climate being fuelled through the culture wars.

She believes that unconditional respect for all detractors, not concessions on historical facts, is required: You cant have a meaningful conversation with people if youre hostile to them because they dont immediately see what youre driving at.

The academic would like to see history being explored through a local lens as she does with her Colonial Countryside project with schools as well as more initiatives such as University College Londons Legacies of British Slave Ownership which allow people to personally engage with Britains colonial past.

She describes her new book, Green Unpleasant Land, as an important intervention on our countryside and Englishness. Inevitably, it has been subject to ridicule by elements in the right-wing press.

For 400 years, the countryside has been closely connected with ideas of Englishness, she said. Whether thats working-class rural Englishness and farming, but its also this idea of the rural idyll and Arcadia these sorts of ideas which have been written about by poets for hundreds of years.

The real question is why does such work by a historian not keen to attract any public attention on a personal level provoke such a warped reaction? Exactly who or what is she attacking?

On 6 January, Donald Trump told his supporters that they had to show strength to take our country back; that nothing less would suffice. They later stormed the US Capitol, carrying the Confederate flag through the halls of American democracy as if like a dagger through its heart.

We have seen where a manipulated idea of a country, its history, and what it stands for can lead. We turn a blind eye to the deeper, darker project sitting beneath the anti-woke culture wars here in Britain at our peril.

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Anti-Woke Crusade Igniting Threats to Safety and Careers: 'There's So Much Hatred Projected at Women in Public Life', Warns Historian Byline Times -...

Russell T Davies could not have known when he made Its A Sin that it would come out during another pandemic one that has elicited an entirely different response. How bittersweet it must be for the survivors of the Aids pandemic to see the care and attention that has been given to cracking Covid.

There are a million reasons Its A Sin is so powerful, and I do not have the word count to go into them all here. It is powerful because it is full of love and it is full of joy, but to me it is powerful because it shows us the true nature of shame, and how deadly it can be. Shame, mostly born out of other peoples ignorance, is what kills. Shame is what essentially leads to the death of one character, a heartbreakingly beautiful boy who is ultimately too scared to find out if he is HIV positive, meaning the disease progresses to Aids.

During his last days, he tells his shocked mother that he is sure he has killed other men, simply by loving them. Later, his friend Jill tells her that so many of the men dying alone in Aids wards believe that, in some small way, they deserve it. That in some small way, this disease is their punishment for not being the child their parents wanted them to be.

Its tempting to see Its A Sin as a very modern period drama, to compartmentalise what happened and tell ourselves that the world has long since moved on. But the shame of Its A Sin is not that far away. While advances in science mean HIV is now an entirely manageable condition, campaigners have faced uphill battles to get preventative drugs, known as PrEP, made available on the NHS. In 2019, almost 700,000 people across the world died from Aids-related illnesses, while 38 million people were living with HIV. And a report published last year by the UN found that the Covidpandemic risks setting back the goal to end the Aids pandemic by at least 10 years. The report estimated that even a six-month disruption in HIV treatment could result in an extra 500,000 deaths in sub-Saharan Africa alone.

We must be careful, too, in believing that the kind of shameful ostracisation gay men faced in the 1980s is a thing of the past. If anything, shame has become mainstream thanks to the advent of social media, and Covid has only cemented its position as a powerful global currency. Shame is the religion that drives the culture wars. Shame is now state-sanctioned, with full-page adverts in national newspapers shaming us into not leaving the house. For many LGBTQ+ people, shame did not magically die with the repeal of Section 28 (a mere 20 years ago). And the trans rights conversation, which now dominates the media, seems powered by shame.

Its A Sin reminds us that shame is a dead end for everyone involved. It gets us nowhere. Its interesting that this show about shame has in itself been shamed, for not telling the story of all the women who died of Aids. But for me, the most powerful character was Jill (interviewed in The Telegraph last month), who shows us how powerful it is to be set free from shame. As Russell T Davies knows, the only way you kill shame is by exposing it to the light. Let this extraordinary drama be a prompt for us all to do just that.

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Shame drives the culture wars and its powerful legacy still lives on - Telegraph.co.uk

It seems so obvious why Captain (later Major) Sir Thomas Moore mattered. Why should we even ask? He was so decent, raised so much money for charity, served in the war defending India and what was then Burma. And he was so modest. It is really no wonder that he became a national hero.

But there is something more. He stood for a kind of Britishness that resonated with Middle England. First, he linked the war and the coronavirus crisis. Each year on Armistice Day we realise how few survivors there are from those two extraordinary generations who gave their lives for their country. Those wars dominated the lives of British families for more than a century. Nearly 900,000 military dead in World War One. Nearly 400,000 in World War Two, not counting 70,000 civilian dead. In Blake Baileys new biography of Philip Roth, he describes VJ Day. As he celebrated with the other youngsters, writes Bailey, Roths jubilation tempered somewhat by the sight of older people sobbing on benches probably the parents of boys who had been killed, he thought. The war was over and it was a wonderful thing, but not for them. They would have this grief forever.

Hence the shock when young demonstrators desecrated the Cenotaph and the statue of Winston Churchill last year. For so many British people, these were disgusting, unforgivable acts. This brings us to the second reason why Tom Moore was regarded as a national hero. Without ever wishing it, he had become part of the culture wars, the growing divide about what kind of country Britain is or should be.

I cant remember any moment in my lifetime when Britishness has been so bitterly contested. Which statues of the past should be torn down? Is Britains past something to be celebrated a story of freedom, tolerance and democracy or is it something to be ashamed of, a dark story of slavery, racism, colonialism? The older you are, the more likely you will see it as the former. The younger you are, the more inclined you will be to see it as the latter. Of course, its not just a generational conflict. If youre black or brown you will wonder why generations of British historians and politicians have been so silent about the legacy of slavery and Empire.

What does any of this have to do with Tom Moore? On Twitter I saw this by @JarelRB just after Moore died: The cult of Captain Tom is a cult of White British Nationalism. I was appalled. No, it isnt, I replied. People wanted to pay their respects to a fine man. Its as simple as that. @JarelRB turns out to be the Reverend Jarel Robinson-Brown, a young black clergyman still in his 20s. He has now deleted his tweet and apologised; the Church is investigating. But what fuelled his anger?

Many want to build a statue in Tom Moores memory. Who would bet against that statue being desecrated in no time? Why? Because some (many?) would share Robinson-Browns anger and see respect for an old army veteran who raised so much money for charity as a cult of White British Nationalism. Too white, too male, too old, too patriotic. This is what we have come to. We shouldnt pretend otherwise.

Is it a coincidence that this response to the death of Sir Thomas Moore took place at the same time as a debate about patriotism in the Labour Party? It is clear that one reason Labour lost so resoundingly in 2019 was not just because Jeremy Corbyn associated with Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites and terrorists, but because there was a sense among many ordinary British people that he preferred the Palestinian flag to the Union Jack, the IRA to British veterans.He didnt know (or care) when the Queen gave her speech on Christmas Day. Sir Keir Starmer knows this cost Labour hugely in the last election and has started to speak about patriotism and the British flag. But then a video from 2005 appeared of Starmer boasting of supporting the abolition of the monarchy. Guido Fawkes commented: It wont go down so well in Bishop Auckland or Ashfield.

This isnt just about one quote. YouGov published a poll about patriotism. It asked people, How patriotic would you say you are? A 61 per cent majority of British people polled said Patriotic. 88 per cent of Conservative voters but only 44 per cent of Labour voters called themselves Patriotic. There was a similar divide between Leavers (81 per cent) and Remainers (54 per cent).

Middle England took Captain Tom to its heart. Rightly so. There is so much to admire and respect. But another England would, I fear, disagree. Much of the political debate over years to come will be over these issues.

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Why Tom Moore mattered: a culture war over the Captain - TheArticle