Whether it was Nigel Farage attacking the RNLI or official cover-ups of racism, the attempts in 2021 to stoke division have fallen flat at every turn In January, when England’s third national lockdown was just beginning and most of us were blissfully ignorant of the middle letters of the Greek alphabet, I used these pages to make a prediction. Not about the pandemic but about another equally tedious and long-running nightmare that most people hoped would be over by now: the culture wars. I predicted that during 2021 what are called “contested histories” – those relating to empire, slavery and race – would be increasingly “weaponised for political gain” and that the historians who study them, along with the minority communities for whom contested histories are family histories, would be among the “new enemies” paraded before the culture war gallows. Continue reading...
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