Civitas Blog

The National Trust is to celebrate reaching a 3.5 million-membership landmark by changing its focus. No longer will it just look after the buildings and artefacts that constitute our national heritage. Now it will “advise people how to adapt their lifestyles to climate change and challenge government to be more ecologically aware.” How is it beginning? By throwing its weight behind opposition against the expansion of Stansted airport.

As it so happens, there are a number of simple things that the National Trust could initiate in order to reduce its own ‘carbon footprint’, if indeed that is to be considered a genuine priority. The most obvious would be to eliminate the farming of animals on all its land. Since, according to the currently popular theory of anthropogenic climate change, world meat consumption is a large contributor to global warming, this would mean the National Trust would reduce its own contribution to climate change and be taking a principled stand for other landowners to follow. Indeed, they could set aside their land not for carbon inefficient British agriculture but to grow more forests to act as carbon sinks. Whether the National Trust will commit do doing this remains to be seen.

In his last budget, Gordon Brown pledged to increase public expenditure so as to bring funding per child in state schools into line with the average costs per child in the independent sector. This move would involve increasing annual state spending per child from £5,000 to £8,000. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, to close this gap, the Exchequer would need to spend an extra £17 billion per annum.

According to a report in today’s Times, the Chancellor has just been taken to task for this pledge by the House of Commons Select Committee on Education. They have argued to carry it out would only anger tax-payers unless the extra spending could be shown to result in improved performance by state schools.

To date, there has been little precious sign of extra spending in this sector having done so. According to the same news report, during the last eight years in which New Labour has been in power, annual public expenditure on education has increased by over 50%, yet last year only just over a quarter of pupils from state schools managed to obtain good GCSE grades in English, mathematics, science and a language — a fall of 4 percentage points from 2002.

I wonder whether, if instead of increasing public spending on state schooling in the manner pledged, the government were to award to parents of pupils at them who obtained good GCSE grades in these subjects a sum of £2,000 for each year their child had attended one, there would not soon be a spectacular and demonstrable improvement in the attainment levels of state schools at far less cost to the taxpayer.

At last the People couldn’t bear it any longer, so they said to the Barons (who were now Noble English Gentlemen): “We really can’t stand this misery any more. Won’t you do something?”

These are just a few of the things the Barons put in their List. But you can see what a bad King John was when they had to put in things like that. There were lots more things in the List, so they called it the Great Writing, or Magna Carta.”

So wrote Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall about what happened in England on 15 June 1215 some 791 years ago. She did so in her 1937 re-working of Our Island Story written for still younger children and published under the playful title of Kings and Things.

Ken Livingston is behaving very strangely at the moment and his behaviour invites speculation, but more than anything else one is left wondering if he’s a sandwich short of a picnic. His choreographed insult against intelligence – that the Tiannamen Square massacre was an event comparable to London’s poll tax riots – is merely the latest is a string of public relations bungles that had up to this point focussed on Jews. It is difficult to see what he’s trying to achieve. Has he been seduced by the glamorous dream of the Orient? Is he making the general inference that dictatorial communism in China, with its thousands of political assassinations, concentration camps, not to mention its extreme censorship of the press, is no worse than was Thatcherism in Britain? Is he reaffirming his leftist sympathies so as to endear the Chinese to his particular brand of relativism - or perhaps to sure up his uneasy alliance of Muslim and socialist supporters in this country by defining himself against conservatism and anything Judeo-Christian or otherwise western? Is he just trying to get himself ejected from the Mayoral seat in London? There was a sharp, sarcastic comment piece in The Times earlier in the week, and a good leader in the Daily Telegraph.

While Ken does everything he can to discredit Britain, it is worth remembering that today marks the 400th anniversary of the formation of one of the world’s oldest national flags, the Union Jack, which was introduced by James I/VI when he became King of England and Wales as well as of Scotland. It has become one of the best recognised and most highly respected brands in the world – not to mention a fashion item (perhaps the most famous instance was Geri Halliwell in a skimpy Union Jack dress in 1997). Apologetic multiculturalists and others generally embarrassed to be British tend to shy away from symbols of corporate national identity. But we should be proud of our nation and proud of our history. The Department for Culture Media & Sport has a list of 16 days when the flag should be flown on government buildings – that could do with being extended to 365.

Last Saturday, Chancellor Gordon Brown gave a widely reported keynote speech at a Fabian Society conference on the Future of Britishness in which he was widely reported as having called for a new national public holiday to celebrate all that is good about Britain and Britishness.

That apparent call of Brown’s has sparked off some lively and often amusing letters in the broadsheets from those writing in to offer suggestions.

Many have rightly pointed out, Britain is less in need of any new ones, than appreciation of the value and meaning of existing ones like Guy Fawkes’ Night or the reigning sovereign’s official birthday.

The most amusing suggestion I have come across came in a letter in yesterday’s Times. N.L.Denton wrote to point out that, since the current government ‘has spent the past eight and a half years trying to eliminate any sense of Britishness or pride in Britain, [a]n appropriate day to celebrate the British way of life, culture and values would be the anniversary of the day when this government is voted out of office.’

CLICK HERE for further details of Our Island Story

The Daily Mail and Daily Express today follow the lead of yesterday’s Daily Telegraph by devoting a full page each to reporting and commenting on the decision by Civitas to republish the out-of-print classic children’s history of Britain, Our Island Story, by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall.

Civitas decided to republish the book so as to make it available to every primary school in the country from concern that today’s schoolchildren receive a raw deal from their study of history through being deprived of acquaintance with the grand narrative sweep of their country’s history that Mrs Marshall so ably supplied.

So enthused was the Telegraph by Civitas’ decision to republish the work that it decided to broaden the appeal Civitas had made to friends for donations towards the costs by inviting its readers to join in making contributions. This they have done enthusiastically and in most splendid fashion, many recalling in the process how inspired they became with history by first reading Marshall’s book.

Indeed, today’s Daily Telegraph contains as equally an enthusiastic paean to the book by Lady Antonia Fraser.

As might be expected, the coverage given by the Mail and Express to the prospect of the republication of ‘Our Island Story’ has been no less positive than that of the Telegraph, although neither saw fit to follow the Telegraph’s example by calling on their readers to contribute financially. Perhaps, they sensed, rightly or wrongly time only will tell, that the target will be reached without need of their doing so.

We should not expect their enthusiasm for the project to carry over to papers like the Guardian and to their readership. Already, misgivings have started to be voiced by those who have expressed concern that, in her book, Mrs Marshall chose to refer to the Maoris whom the British first encountered in New Zealand as ‘savage cannibals’.

Even were Mrs Marshall’s book to have contained no such infelicitous forms of expression, and, arguably, for the period it contains very few indeed and all are easily excisable or amendable so as to bring her book into line with current political sensibilities, Civitas’ decision to make her book more widely known to today’s schoolchildren would still face massive opposition from the same quarter.

For the source of their concern with a book such as hers is altogether different and goes much deeper. Rightly its opponents sense that what the book gives and would give young readers who fall victim to its charms, or victim to any other that purvey a similarly Whig interpretation of our island’s story, is a sense of national identity that these opponents of the book wish bitterly to resist schoolchildren today being given the opportunity to acquire.

Back at the very start of the millennium, well before Civitas’ decision to reprint Mrs. Marshall’s book was even a glimmer in anyone’s eye there, the redoubtable Polly Toynbee had given voice to precisely those sentiments that truly underlie the recently voiced opposition to the idea of republishing and disseminating Marshall’s book.

Posted by David Conway on June 23, 2005 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)