A leading Conservative MP has said that a report by Historic England tying historical sites to slavery should be “shredded”.
“I first thought it should be shelved, I now think it should be shredded,” said Sir John Hayes, who leads the ‘Common Sense’ faction of Conservative MPs, which 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” and is a major voice for social conservatism and lockdown scepticism within Boris Johnson’s party, which is increasingly focused on liberal elite issue like climate change and the green agenda.
“It has no use whatsoever and it’s indicative of an organisation that needs to be brought to order,” said Sir John of the publicly-funded organisation.
“Of course slavery was awful and of course it was right we abolished it, but I am not sure we need to go through this kind of comprehensive report linking tangentially all kinds of places and buildings to that effort.”
Historic England is one of several publicly-funded organisations, museums, and so on to have intensified its efforts to tie much of Britain’s built heritage to slavery, imperialism, and so on in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement crossing the Atlantic in the wake of George Floyd’s death in the United States.
Others have included the National Trust, the country’s biggest heritage charity, which has produced “research” linking locations in its care such as the late Sir Winston Churchill’s home to “colonialism and historic slavery”.
National Trust chairman Tim Parker went so far as to openly back BLM, insisting that “Black Lives Matter currently is a worldwide human rights movement with no party political affiliations in the UK” in a letter to a Trust supporter upset that it was getting involved in political causes.
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