The patriotic curriculum
Some clues to what it might include
I have been interested in the strange tale of Ian Gribbin, the Reform party candidate for Bexhill and Battle who, if elected, would represent the most famous battlefield in England.
With so many small parties standing so many candidates, this election has been punctuated by the sound of rattling skeletons. Even before close of nominations the Green party had deselected four candidates and had come under criticism from the Board of Deputies for acting slowly to vet wannabe Green MPs for utterances that had crossed the line between criticism of Israel and you-know-what. Meanwhile prospective candidates of George Galloway’s Worker’s Party were discovered not so much to have crossed the line as to be firmly encamped on the other side of it. You know where you are with someone who accuses the Jews of killing Jesus and suggests that Jewish misbehaviour led to the Holocaust.
Mr Gribbin’s skeleton was of different kind. If we want to extend the metaphor we might think of it as partially clothed. The UnHerd site, funded by the hedge fund tycoon Sir Paul Marshall, should be famous for the unreconstructed nature of its below-the-line comments contributed by readers and Mr Gribbin was one of these.
In July 2022, a propos of some obscure argument Mr Gribbin summarised what we might call a revisionist account of 20th century British history. "Britain would be in a far better state today had we taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality”, he wrote, adding the more contemporary observation that “but oh no -Britain’s warped mindset values weird notions of international morality rather than looking after its own people." Days later he attacked “the cult of Churchill” which, he said, needed to be “exorcised”.
When this set of observations emerged Mr Gribbin felt forced to apologise - assaults on Churchill not being an infallible way of attracting Conservative voters. These were he said “old comments” and had been taken out of context.