The Royal Academy is examining the part it has played in Britain’s history of slavery and empire – and the usual carping suspects will not be pleased
Very recent visitors from Mars may not know of the regular attacks on the National Trust for being “woke”, but the rest of us have heard plenty. The trust’s latest onslaught on British values has something to do with the lack of butter in the scones. Never mind that they have been made like this for years; Tory MPs and other critics perceive the keen threat to British values posed by margarine.
Such stories never stop coming. This week, Kemi Badenoch, the trade secretary, opined that the UK did not grow rich through “colonialism or imperialism or white privilege or whatever”, but owed its success to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This is the kind of half-digested, badly regurgitated history that leads to a forlorn Tony Hancock asking if Magna Carta died in vain.
