In order to reverse the rise of “woke history”, pupils in England will, under a Reform government, have to study a radically new curriculum — or rather, a radically old one.
Under plans put forward by the party’s education spokesperson, Suella Braverman, pupils would have to cover the signing of the Magna Carta, the Wars of the Roses, the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, the Act of Union, the Enlightenment and Victorian Britain in a syllabus which would be at least 60 per cent devoted to “British” history. I take the view that there are no boring bits of history, and therefore no “wrong” answers on the curriculum. But I am baffled as to why only two out of three of England’s civil wars have made the cut, and indeed why it is that learning about them is meant to make you feel more patriotic afterwards. There are passages of history where we come out well, but Charles I’s wars of choice, or the republican experiments that followed him, are not among them.
Reform’s proposed history curriculum raises any number of questions, not least why “winning the second world war” is not higher up the list of worked examples of the UK’s patriotic history. Is it because Reform politicians or those in their orbit often seem to be agnostic about whether that one was an unalloyed good?