Narrative resurgent.(Our Island Story)(Book review)

Our Island Story, by H.E. Marshall; Galore Park Publishing in association with Civitas, 2005, about $60.

A BEAUTIFUL BOOK is now available whose stories, pictures and occasional poems will delight and inform its readership in equal measure. It is the republication of H.E. Marshall's Our Island Story, a history of England, subsequently of the whole British polity, from the coming of the Romans to the end of the Victorian era. Written in Australia, by a Scottish woman, and first published a hundred years ago, it maintains a frank and unashamed love of its subject matter. It is enjoying great success and will bring to many of those who read it a sense of enchantment and deep gratitude.

One of the most notable features of life in all the advanced societies, British society being no exception, is an astounding ignorance of history among huge sections of their populations. The enemies of the free society have, in the last century and a half, deployed two strategies for the destruction of our liberties, in Great Britain and many societies. They have first pressed for the replacement of the market economy by a socialist system. This approach, in terms of any straightforward overall appeal, is now dead. What we need to understand is why our socialist enemies have clung so passionately to a residual version of it, namely a huge reliance, a near monopoly indeed, on public finance for the primary and secondary stages of education. In the British instance, this near monopoly extends, with disastrous results, to tertiary education too. Why this insistence on public money when it comes to the transmission of formal knowledge and culture?

The answer to this question connects with the second strategy for our destruction as free people, namely with the assault on our identity. What our enemies have sought, and still seek, is the socialisation of mind, as a substitute for the socialisation of capital. What they have done, mainly through the medium of state-financed education, is to steal our history from us, to impose on us a mean view of ourselves and our past, to take away from us a truth that even the poorest of the British poor knew a hundred years ago: the greatness and singularity of the British achievement. While the poor had a sense of it, a large part of the nation could have fleshed it out with detail.

The English, later British, story is of the gradual containment of despotism. Slowly the rich and the mighty were brought into the same legal constraints as the poor and the humble. Government became lawful government. Coercion of the kind still prevailing today in much of the world became regarded as illegitimate in this land. Eventually it became widely recognised that different segments of society have different interests and that some of these contrary interests, if they could be reconciled at all, could be so only on the basis of agreed procedures of discussion and action.

Along with these politico-legal innovations, there came in recent centuries the most astounding achievements in economic life, in trade, in industry and farming and warfare, in engineering, medicine, architecture and science. There were huge international changes too, brought about by the English/British achievement. In many parts of the world, slavery was abolished under British influence. Today the British see their achievements copied and often surpassed by the other nations of the "Anglosphere".

Characteristic of the Anglosphere, however, is that many of its intellectuals maintain an unprecedented contempt for its accomplishments and hostility to its purposes. Education has been their principal redoubt. Until the Second World War, state-financed education in Great Britain survived, even flourished. In the 1960s, however, the enemies of freedom grasped that publicly financed education depended for its effectiveness on an ongoing consensus between teachers and taught. If the consensus could be broken, anti-British, anti-civilisational material could be imposed on schools. The correctional mechanisms which served to secure the interests ...