There is a struggle for historical memory here. In the course of erasing important achievements of the past, what you’re doing is encouraging people to forget what the past was really all about. There’s that famous quote from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which a man from the Ministry of Truth makes the point that, by 2050, people will no longer remember who Shakespeare was. They will no longer remember who all the important philosophers were. People will simply not know the writings and the arguments of all these great figures from the past.

We’re actually running ahead of that schedule by a good 20 or 25 years. Already we have a situation in which people no longer remember who the real Aristotle is, because we’re told that he was this founder of white supremacy. Kids going to school today might be told that Churchill was a war criminal. When you have such a warped vision of one of the greatest icons of 20th-century British history, then you can’t remember very much about where you’ve come from.