There are nations that dig for history, and there are nations that practically trip over it on the way to buy a pint of milk.
Ours… this sceptred, sea-sprayed, eccentric, magnificent isle, is wonderfully the latter.
Where else can you stroll from a Roman wall, to a Norman cathedral, past a Tudor palace, into an Enlightenment museum, and end the day reading a Victorian novel by lamplight? Where else produced the Magna Carta, and the Beatles, the world’s first vaccine, and the world’s first postage stamp? Where else exported parliamentary democracy, modern science, and, for better or worse, the global queueing system?
We have, by any measure, one of the most extraordinary national histories anywhere.
Which is precisely why the latest contortions of our national broadcaster feel so bizarre, and why millions, quietly and not so quietly, are beginning to mutter the unthinkable: “Why are we still paying for this?”
A History Series With the Joy Squeezed Out
The BBC’s new series Empire, written and presented by David Olusoga, is now at the centre of what one Oxford historian calls a “relentlessly negative” retelling of British history.
Prof Lawrence Goldman, not a fringe voice, but an emeritus fellow at St Peter’s and part of the History Reclaimed group, argues that the programme has lapsed into activist framing, allergic to nuance and uninterested in anything but a “victimhood narrative”. These are his words and concerns, not mine.
He points out that the series devotes long stretches to Britain’s role in slavery but ignores the fact, uncomfortable for modern narratives, that Britain spent immense blood and treasure to abolish that very trade across the world. The British are heroes. Where is that mentioned?
Gone, too, are the complexities, the institutions Britain built, the scientific and medical advances spread, the educational reforms championed, and even the stories, real, documented stories, of people from former colonies who speak warmly of their experience of British rule. Jeremy Paxman did not shy away from including those voices in his 2012 version, the new series seems to be left on the cutting room floor.
Selective Storytelling Helps No One
Goldman even highlights what he sees as factual omissions, such as portraying Canadian indigenous soldier Mike Mountain Horse as someone who “found himself” on the Western Front because of empire, while omitting that he volunteered.
Or describing British action against Ijebu Ode in 1892 without mentioning, as Goldman claims, that it began when the Ijebu blocked trade routes in violation of a paid agreement.
Now, whether one agrees with every complaint or not, there is a broader point here, history cannot be reduced to therapeutic morality plays. It is sometimes inconvenient and full of people doing the best they could with the world they had. Pretending otherwise does no favours to scholarship or the public.
A Broadcaster Forgetting Its Purpose
The BBC once treated history as a shared national inheritance, something to illuminate, not litigate.
Now it seems to increasingly hand the mic to activists rather than academic historians, and dismisses concerns as if the public were a bothersome Zoom waiting room. The now familiar accusations of bias, defensiveness, and editorial homogeneity swirl again, fuelled by reports and resignations.
And then comes the inevitable sigh heard in living rooms across the land: “Why am I funding this?”
I hear it daily. Many have quietly cancelled their licence. Millions more, it seems, are thinking about it. As for me? I’m certainly thinking about it. I can’t bear to watch BBC news anymore without screaming at the television. I’m sure many are the same.
The Inevitable Satire of the Future
In fact, you can almost imagine the YouTube documentary in a few years’ time: “How the UK Once Had a National Broadcaster That Charged Citizens to Tell Them UnTruths About Trump, Their Own History, White People, Trans Issues, and Everything Else Under the Sun.”
It will be narrated by a synthetic voice, animated by AI avatars of long gone presenters, and watched by millions who can barely believe the BBC ever existed. It will describe, with a mixture of pity and fascination, a vast, lumbering institution that mistook its own worldview for universal truth, and slowly dug its own grave with a spade labelled “editorial certainty”.
A Nation Deserves Better
Britain’s history is astonishing, brilliant, yes sometimes heartbreaking, but inspiring and a human story on the largest scale. We have a truly magnificent history and there’s so much to be so proud of.
If our national broadcaster refuses to treat it with the dignity it deserves, then perhaps the nation is right to ask: “Why keep paying?”
At some point, the licence fee doesn’t just feel outdated, it feels unearned.
For if there is one lesson our history teaches, it is that the British people have an uncanny habit of prevailing in the end, and if the next victory is simply choosing our own voice over one that has lost its way, then so be it, we will win this one with the oldest weapon we possess, the quiet, immovable will of the nation.
And the BBC will be defeated.
By Claire Bullivant
