Farage Says Stop ‘Apologising’ for the Past as Corbyn Pushes Reparations

Nigel Farage has come to the defence of the United Kingdom’s heritage, lambasting Labour Party proposals to ‘audit’ the past, saying that people should stop apologising for Britain’s history and look to the future instead.

Brexit Party Leader Nigel Farage, while campaigning in Peterborough, called for a return to forward-thinking rather than staying mired down in arguments over the past.

“I think if we obsess about the past, different times and different cultures, it can be very difficult to move forward. So I think some of this stuff is just not helpful.  I don’t think I should apologise for what people did 300 years ago. It was a different world, a different time,” said Mr Farage in comments reported by The Telegraph.

“You could apply that argument to any civilisation, any country and we seem to be terribly keen to apologise for the past and a bit less worried about creating a good future,” he concluded.

As to the question of how the history of Colonial Britain should be taught in schools, Mr Farage said: “If you want to get into British empires, you can compare the British empire with the Belgian empire, the German empire, you compare it with the Spanish empire, compare it to the Portuguese empire and you’d find by comparison with the others we were not even a military empire, we did it on bribery, that’s how the Brits did it. This stuff doesn’t help.”

Labour is reportedly set to announce in its manifesto this week that, if elected prime minister, Jeremy Corbyn would investigate the impact of British Colonialism and the “legacies” associated, paving a path that could lead down the road to reparations.

In May of this year, Corbyn called for Britain to pay reparations to the former colonies of the British Empire.

Claire Fox, a Brexit Party candidate, said of the Labour Party’s latest proposal: “No doubt this is part of their politically correct identity politics stuff, designed to make everybody feel guilty for being British and will amount to a lot of woke proposals.”

“I’ll save the Labour Party some time. I’ll tell you something about Britain’s colonies. If you ask a historian you realise those colonies fought behind the banners of national sovereignty and self-determination — the very principles that are ignored and sold out by today’s Labour,” she added.

Earlier this month, Breitbart London reported that Bristol University had hired its first Professor of the History of Slavery to research if the university had any ties to the slave trade and if it should apologise for its past. The universities of Cambridge and Glasgow have already entered into similar left-wing endeavours.

The hysteria over history has also laid siege to some of the UK’s beloved historical monuments. In a 2017 Guardian op-ed entitled “Toppling Statues? Here’s Why Nelson’s Column Should Be Next”, Afua Hirsch argued that famed British war hero, Horatio Nelson, was a “white supremacist” and that his monument in Trafalgar Square should be destroyed.