By Robert J Davies

There is something almost exquisitely horrible about what Historic England is currently spending taxpayers’ money on. This publicly-funded body, whose remit is to preserve heritage buildings and monuments, is now combing rural England on the hunt for links to slavery.

As the Daily Telegraph reported at the weekend, “village halls, farms, schools and parish churches” have been included in the witchhunt. Appallingly, the aim is to use this research to help it encourage more people from “minority ethnic and transgender communities” to visit such sites. In the eyes of the Woke, these are, of course, God’s chosen people and Historic England are keen to bend with the wind on this one. As for the rest of us lowly Canaanites, we can presumably go hang somewhere.

Yet all this is laughably insulting. It implies that such minorities need to be fed juicy titbits about how mean-spirited and cruel white heterosexuals are in order to be attracted to visit a stately home. It further cruelly implies that without targeted benevolence, they would not be allowed through the door. Yet they’re as welcome to go and look around and explore our heritage as anyone else and to do so as the individuals they are, rather than as a glued-together, oppressed minority.

But the truly appalling aspect to this research is the potential it has to incite violence and vandalism at the sites Historic England chooses to name and shame. So much for their role as custodians of our built heritage! The report traces a “money trail” from wealthy and important figures like Francis Drake and William Gladstone to historical buildings funded in part from wealth generated long, long ago by slavery. Some of this money, however controversially acquired, was used for the public good, to fund church repairs or the building of schools and village halls – many of which are still in use to this day. What effect is it likely to have on such places particularly in remote parts of the country, to be outed as a beneficiary of some far-off plantation?

For instance, the village of Nunnington in Yorkshire has been included because a slave-owner built schools and houses there and a pub in Brockenhurst, Hampshire, has a pub named after a family with slave connections. That pub will almost certainly be needing to change its name pretty soon. And headteachers of schools on the hitlist may legitimately fear that a brick will one day come flying through a classroom window, possibly thudding down on a child’s head. BLM and Antifa don’t need much of an excuse to go hunting for trouble – noisy, placard-waving demonstrations, vandalism, looting and, the old favourite, statue-toppling. Armed and inflamed by an official denouncement of links to slavery, what is to stop a mob of these people turning up in some peaceful rural idyll and wrecking it? Even if lives are not lost, the tranquility and sense of timeless security that such places still enjoy will be lost forever.

Why do that to them in the third decade of the 21st century, even if it is true that some of their previous good fortune was ill-gotten? Why throw a slab of red meat onto the plates of known left-wing thugs and risk the sort of unpleasant scenes that towns and cities in Britain and the US have witnessed over the last few months?

There is no logic to it, save for the logic of Cultural Marxism which evidently has now infected the very heart of traditional Middle England with its accompanying ideology of equality and diversity and critical race theory. There is not scope in this article to do justice to these damaging, nihilistic creeds but their basis is always the same: to divide us up by our group identities and then side with those groups deemed to be oppressed. The losers in all this are native people, especially those who are male and straight. They in particular, are now under pressure to stand aside in favour of the supposed oppressed: blacks, gays, transgender, queer, even queer+ to use Historic England’s terminology. They clearly know how to get down with the kids on this one!

Historic England have spent two whole years and Heaven knows how much cash, working and consulting on an Inclusion, Diversity and Equality Strategy, telling us what we already know: that access to our Island Story in all its forms should be open to all. But that won’t be nearly enough. In the course of their reseach, they will have triggered countless left-wing revolutionaries intent on using historic injustice as a means by which to express their hatred of traditional Britain. They will have been led down the path of bending our precious heritage to suit an aggressive leftist narrative. Who knows what the consequences of that will be. I very much fear that if our native population continues to fall, this miserable exercise will not only continue but rev up and much unhappiness will result from it. Where now for England’s green and pleasant land?