Revealed: Hard Right Tory MPs behind Oliver Dowden’s ‘retain & explain’ agenda for British history
Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden had a virtual meeting with leaders of Museums and Heritage organisations to discuss his ‘retain and explain’ agenda for British history on Tuesday 23rd February.
Essentially the agenda is that, whatever local communities and democratically elected Councillors may want, statues, monuments and place names associated with the slave trade, slavery, imperial wars and so on should remain in place.
Instead an explanation can be displayed as to how such figures and acts are understood now.
The agenda is controversial one although after the meeting Dowden tweeted that a working party had been informed to look at how to implement ‘retain and explain’.
Dowden has been informed and influenced by a group of hard right Tory MPs and Peers, the ‘Common Sense Group’. They laid out their agenda in a letter to the Telegraph last autumn. As may be gathered they are definitely in favour of retaining the statues and monuments of imperial Britain about which, in their view, no explanation and certainly no apology is required.
Letter, Daily Telegraph 9th November 2020
SIR – The Common Sense Group (59 Conservative MPs and seven peers) was formed to speak for the silent majority of voters tired of being patronised by elitist bourgeois liberals whenever issues such as immigration or law and order are raised.
Part of our mission is to ensure that institutional custodians of history and heritage, tasked with safeguarding and celebrating British values, are not coloured by cultural Marxist dogma, colloquially known as the “woke agenda”.
So, when National Trust directors implicitly tarnished one of Britain’s greatest sons, Winston Churchill, by linking his family home, Chartwell, with slavery and colonialism, 20 of the group wrote to the Culture Secretary requesting he review the trust’s funding applications to public bodies.
After revelations that the National Maritime Museum, guardian of Nelson’s Trafalgar coat (pierced by a bullet on Victory’s deck) would, in light of Black Lives Matter protests, portray “multiple perspectives on history” and thus review Nelson’s “heroic status”, our group challenged the museum’s CEO, Paddy Rodgers.
Subsequently, both the National Trust and Maritime Museum have attempted to reassure the public about their intentions, and kindly invited Common Sense Group members to visit Chartwell and the Museum.
However, recent comments by the trust’s chairman – as ill-informed as they were unwise – prove the good judgment of the chairman of the Charity Commission, Baroness Stowell, in reminding charities that their purpose is far from involvement in the theory or practice of politics.
History must neither be sanitised nor rewritten to suit “snowflake” preoccupations. A clique of powerful, privileged liberals must not be allowed to rewrite our history in their image.
Sir John Hayes MP
Lord Lilley
Sir Edward Leigh MP
Sally-Ann Hart MP
Tom Hunt MP
Imran Khan MP
Lee Anderson MP
Gareth Bacon MP
Scott Benton MP
Bob Blackman MP
Ben Bradley MP
Brendan Clarke-Smith MP
Philip Davies MP
Nick Fletcher MP
Jonathan Gullis MP
Andrew Lewer MP
Chris Loder MP
Marco Longhi MP
Craig Mackinlay MP
Karl McCartney MP
Pauline Latham MP
David Morris MP
Andrew Rosindell MP
James Sunderland MP
Martin Vickers MP
Giles Watling MP
William Wragg MP
Baroness Eaton
London SW1
Leave a Reply