Civitas Blog

Here is what Ms Toynbee wrote back in January 2000 in a piece in the Guardian:

‘Everyone delves into the past for convenient emblems that suit their political predilections. National identity is constructed from a confection of selective memories according to political taste…. But does a modern pluralist society need to turn somersaults in an attempt to devise a common national identity at all? …

‘The left is not generally at ease with nationalism. The idea of Englishness makes the good [latter-day welfare-state, not classical-- DC] liberal’s flesh creep…. National pride is unsavoury stuff.

‘[W]e do not want or need definition. All attempts at national definition are bogus, sentimental, ahistorical, dangerously exclusive of some parts of the population, narrowly self-limiting, arrogant, and potentially aggressive.

‘We should stay sceptical about the romance of nationality…. “Our island story” all depends on who the confused “our” is. …To what extent can we be more proud of Shakespeare than a German might be?

‘People everywhere love their own country, just as they love family, home, garden or local landscape… But these strong natural sentiments turn into absurd and potentially dangerous nationalism when elevated into a general theory of the superiority of your own kind, your own people, your own language simply because it is yours.

‘[W]e should … quietly demonstrate an English disdain for nationalism as a meaningful creed. As for our own self-image, the less national navel-gazing the better. Wave no flags, make no claims, try to do the right thing more often than we have in the past.’

Here we have in a nutshell the self-deprecating and relativistic anti-national cosmopolitanism that lies behind present opposition to the republication of Ms Marshall's book and that can no more free itself from the need to draw on a narrative -- in this case a hopelessly bogus one -- to ground its self-hatred and hatred of country that Ms Toynbee wants British schoolchildren not to be inoculated against by being taught the kind of history Henrietta Marshall’s book provides. More than anything, Ms Toynbee dislikes the idea of giving young readers cause for being proud of who they were in being British.

Of the two rival accounts of this country’s history, I prefer Mrs Marshall’s version of events to Ms Toynbee’s any day and rejoice at the prospect that soon every British schoolchild may once again be able to learn of them by reading her book. For what they will come away with having done so is, as Ms Marshall puts it towards the very end of her book, the idea that:

‘From the very beginning of our story you have seen how Britons have fought for freedom, and how step by step they have won it, until at last Britons live under just laws and have themselves the power to make these laws.’ (p.510)

As for Ms. Toynbee’s version of British history, while not wanting to deprive schoolchildren from knowing that it and others exist, when there is fair fight between them all in the arena of ideas, rather than, as at present, the suppression of Mrs Marshall’s version, I have every confidence that they will respond to learning of Ms Toynbee’s version by singing the chorus to a well-known traditional English nursery rhyme that makes allusion to a well-known traditional English afternoon ritual -- provided, that is, they have not also been deprived of opportunity to learn these songs, as well as participate in the ritual of afternoon tea!