Baroness Claire Fox has torn into cancel culture, saying that a lack of free speech and growing shame in Britain's history mean that key moments in the nation's past are being "trashed"
Baroness Claire Fox has torn into cancel culture, saying that a lack of free speech and growing shame in Britain's history mean that key moments in the nation's past are being "trashed".
She said there is a growing tendency to become "moralists" about history in an attempt to avoid dealing with challenging aspects of Britain's past.
The non-affiliated life peer said the cancellation of history is "dangerous", calling instead for people to acknowledge the struggles and challenges that led the country to the present day, even if they disagree with individual views or actions.
When asked whether feelings of shame towards Britain's history is holding the nation back, Fox said: "Yeah, because it's ridiculous. Things that happened in periods of history we have to understand because we need to know about them.
"But we've become moralists about that history. In a way, it's actually much more narcissistic. It's much more about us today.
"I mean, very often when people are trying to cancel the great Enlightenment philosophers that I love, like Hume or Kant - they've never read them, don't know anything about them.
"They don't understand the philosophical underpinnings of the modern democratic world we live in.
"Free speech didn't just come out of nowhere. It had to be fought for. Fought for intellectually. Because the whole notion of having the freedom to speak didn't exist hundreds of years ago.
"People fought for it, just like they fought for universal suffrage or any of the freedom of association, freedom of functions.
"Now, if you're just going to write all that over, saying 'oh, they were all promoters of colonialism. They didn't fight against slavery', I mean first, usually people don't know what happened historically. I don't want to whitewash history. I'm not here to say everything that happens in the UK or Britain was wonderful - of course it wasn't. But we can look in a different time and say we wouldn't do that.
"But what we're doing is instead we're actually trashing the ideas associated with the development of very important things that we hold dear today.
"And so I think that it's very dangerous that we've got into that situation."
Fox made the comments at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc) Conference in London.
Arc was established as "an international community with a vision for a better world".
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Its mission is to generate a new approach to society, which would allow everyone to "prosper, contribute and flourish".
Fox threw her weight behind Arc's intention to view humanity in a more positive light.
She said we shouldn't just look back at our history solely in a negative light, warning that a tendency to do so "actually alienates us from our history, and actually, we're never going to learn from history that way".
