Whatever happened to decolonisation? In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, it was all the rage as demonstrations swept the UK, expressing anger at the death of one man 4000 miles away.

In Bristol, for example, a statue of Edward Colston, who made a fortune from slavery, was unceremoniously dumped in the River Frome. Two days later London’s diminutive mayor had a statue of a slave trader removed from St Katharine Docks.

This agitation on the streets was echoed in the boardrooms of many of Britain’s most important cultural institutions, which proceeded to compete against each other to self-flagellate over slavery, racism and the allegedly ubiquitous inheritance of colonialism.

Then things fell rather quiet. Sure, there was the odd ridiculous headline about decolonising the countryside, or the occasional dusty old skull was repatriated to a tribe who believed it had magical powers, but on the whole “decolonisation” slipped from the national discourse. It would be a mistake, however, to think the campaign went away or lost any of its subversive energy. Behind the scenes, “decolonisation” continues apace, rolling through our institutions where it is being used to erase our precious cultural inheritance.

The British Library is a perfect example. If anywhere should have been able to resist a racialised fad dreamt up by the Far Left it was surely the British Library — one of the greatest cultural treasures on the planet, with a collection of 170 million items that represent effectively this country’s collective memory.

Yet only a fortnight after Colston’s statue went for a swim, the British Library’s Chief Librarian, Liz Jolly, announced that she wanted to do some figurative statue-toppling of her own. George Floyd’s death showed, she said, why the Library needed to “decolonise”. Justifying a radical shift of strategy in an email to staff, she claimed “racism is the creation of white people”, which must have surprised Koreans, most of whom tend to loathe the Japanese, the Japanese, most of whom tend to despise Koreans and the vast majority of the Chinese, who generally tend to treat both with disdain.

‘The killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement are the biggest challenge to the complacency of organisations, institutions and ways of doing things that we’re likely to see in our lifetimes,” bleated the Library’s CEO Roly Keating.

What neither revealed was that a highly-organised campaign in support of decolonisation had been running for years within the Library. Organised by a motley crew of Far Left race activists, the campaign argued that the Library promoted “Western civilisational supremacy” (if only), labelled colour-blindness “covert white supremacy”, and demanded that a bust of the Library’s founder Sir Hans Sloane be removed. In other words, Floyd’s death wasn’t so much the inspiration for “decolonisation” as a convenient excuse.

Far from telling these poseurs to get on with their work, as he should have done, the CEO agreed.

The British Library is used by thousands of researchers every day who pore through its vast collection, which includes almost every book published in English. Yet it does not seem to have occurred to either Keating or Jolly to have consulted the collection to find out the truth about racism, or, for that matter, the roots of the “decolonising” movement.

If they had, they would have discovered that the “decolonising” lobby is animated by the absurd conviction that Western civilisation is a uniquely evil force. Its elevator pitch is that Europeans raped, pillaged and enslaved on a unique scale before poisoning the air we breathe and driving doe-eyed animals to extinction.

This conviction is immune to counterpoints. Don’t bother mentioning the virtues of Western societies or the vices of other civilisations. You might as well try and teach a giant panda maths.

Decolonisers loathe nothing more than how we in the West tell ourselves comforting myths about our societies. Sure, we’ve managed to eradicate smallpox, send men to the moon, and create a global economy that provides a standard of living and liberty beyond the wildest imaginations of our ancestors — or anybody else’s — but did you hear that we literally invented racism?

The Far Left had banked on racial minorities providing the revolutionary rage the proletariat had so singularly failed to deliver

The demand to “decolonise”, like the Critical Race Theory from which it emerged, was a response to a crisis on the Far Left. Just as Marxists in the 1960s like Herbert Marcuse despaired of the apathy of the working class and its refusal to rise up with revolutionary fervour, so a new generation of neo-Marxist and post-Marxist intellectuals in the 1980s and 90s were alarmed by the ability of Western capitalism to adapt to demands for equality from black people.

The Far Left had banked on racial minorities providing the revolutionary rage the proletariat had so singularly failed to deliver. Now it seemed black people, like the working class before them, were content to be served up an equal share of the pie. Black activists who demanded better media representation, more places in corporate Boardrooms, better policing and better incomes were, the post-Marxists wailed, merely repeating the historic mistakes of the working class.

In an influential paper in 2005 called “Decolonising Anti-racism”, two Canadian academics, Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, argued that anti-racist campaigning that sought accommodation with Western society ignored its ineradicable Original Sin. If anti-racist campaigning didn’t frame itself as part of a global struggle to reverse white conquest then it wasn’t truly anti-racist at all. Forget asking for more crumbs from the table. Anti-racist work had to target the West’s vast ideological apparatus which, it was said, constantly sought to co-opt minorities.

A sign that such ideas had escaped from the fringes of academia was the emergence of those tedious recitations that now accompany any event in North America from the Oscars to the opening of a new branch of Wholefoods, in which a bubbly-voiced, teary-eyed blowhard acknowledges the alleged ancestral owners of whatever land they happen to be on.

Why might that be?

The UCL played a pivotal role in advancing the decolonising movement when in 2014 its BAME Student Network launched a campaign entitled “Why Is My Curriculum White?” (Cause you live in Europe?) One of their biggest beefs was that Francis Galton, the founder of Eugenics, had once conducted research at the UCL. Galton died in 1911. Yet somehow black students, it now claimed, were haunted by his ghost. Or something.

You may have spotted a pattern here. Just as the British Library’s effort was launched by disgruntled staff, so UCL’s decolonising was run by its allegedly disgruntled students. In a normal world they’d have been told to get on with their studies. Instead, management wailed, whipped themselves and awaited instructions.

The cry of “Why Is My Curriculum White?” was almost immediately taken up across the country. BAME Student Networks were soon competing to sound hard done by. In 2017, for example, Leeds University Student Union’s Education (sic) Officer Melz Owusu delivered an influential Ted Talk about decolonising the curriculum. I’ll save you the effort of watching it. She wittered on about her dyslexia and dyspraxia then tried to blame her difficulties on the “colonising of the mind.” In a clanger for the ages, she claimed that it’s a colonial bias that means Stormzy’s lyrics aren’t studied across campuses the way the works of Shakespeare are. Ah, yes, who but a bigot could value Hamlet more than “Vossi Bop”?

In 2019, Leeds University hosted a national conference for students and staff on “Decolonising” (what else). This conference is widely credited with amplifying the decolonising campaign and helping to create a nationwide network of activists obsessed with its agenda.

In 2021, Leeds rolled out mandatory decolonising training, created a new decolonising marking system for comparing courses, agreed to fund student projects to deepen decolonisation, published on its website a recommended reading list of books by dodgy race agitators, and announced a set of decolonising principles.

It’s clear, then, that before George Floyd’s death a network, Far Left activists in universities, libraries, museums and other cultural institutions were already sharing tactics and applying pressure on management to comply with their demands. What, though, was their real agenda? What are their final goals?

As we have learned from our experience of the trans lobby, most fruitloopy activists know better than to be explicit about their eventual aims. Sometimes, though, an activist isn’t quite as disciplined as they are meant to be. That’s why I think it’s worth studying an extraordinary essay by one of the people who organised that influential 2019 national conference held in Leeds.

Monisha Issano Jackson is queer, mixed race and angry. She starts from the perspective that universities are “at the heart of epistemic violence”. The idea that there are experts who teach and students who learn? She’s having none of that. In order to decolonise, she argues classrooms must be transformed into “anti-hierarchical spaces” — spaces, in other words, where ill-informed Stormzy superfans are afforded respect.

It’s hard not to despair and wonder what on earth our finest cultural institutions think they have signed up for. They seem to imagine they are merely “being kind” — helping make the world be more diverse and carey-sharey. Yet most of the people they are so desperate to placate have no interest in “rubbing along”, or widening the scope of a shared and mutally advantageous inclusivity.

“The attempt to decolonise universities,” Jackson wrote, “May mean the abolition of these universities”. (Are you listening, management?) She then quoted Audre Lorde who argued, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

It’s breathtaking how quickly the decolonising movement swept across our institutions. That is as nothing, though, compared to the shocking failure of our cultural elites to defend those institutions and their values.

That a fightback against this intellectual vandalism is necessary should go without saying. It’s not a racial question. It’s one of integrity and the truth.

We can only hope that other Brits — black, white or none of the above — will consign the decolonialist extremists to the dustbin of history

The good news is the fightback against this madness has already begun. At the end of last year, the undergraduate Black Studies course was shuttered by Birmingham City University. (Professional malcontent Kehinde Andrews called the decision racist — but what isn’t racist to the author of The Psychosis of Whiteness?)

We can only hope that other Brits — black, white or none of the above — will consign the decolonialist extremists to the dustbin of history where they believe our culture and history should be dumped. The decolonisers have no interest in improving our culture or our society. They want to destroy both.