“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” - George Orwell
A few days ago I noted that Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s home affairs spokesperson, expressed sympathy for former British slave traders and slave owners on the grounds that they faced “huge sacrifices” following the Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833.
Yusuf’s implied argument went something like this. Slaves were regarded as “property” and abolition removed their value as a financial asset. Abolition is therefore a moral act because it overturns that legal fiction. So far so good, but here is where the typical Reform UK smoke and mirrors enters the frame.
By stating that “British business made huge sacrifices in giving up slavery,” Yusuf and reform UK are implicitly portraying slave‑owners as voluntarily relinquishing economic benefits and acting against their own financial interests. Yet we know abolition occurred in the context of sustained public pressure, increasing difficulties in suppressing slave resistance, and declining profitability in parts of the plantation economy. Moreover, slave‑owners received substantial financial compensation, with payments continuing into the twenty‑first century.
I am returning to Yusuf’s claims because, tucked away in Reform UK’s current policy agenda, is the seemingly harmless pledge that schools will teach only “patriotic history”. We have already seen what Reform’s “patriotic” framing of the abolition of slavery looks like: it absolves former slave owners of profiting from enslavement and recasts them as having made noble economic sacrifices for the sake of moral progress. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There is a strong structural and ideological over-lap between the groups who profited from slavery (financiers, absentee landlords and merchant houses) and the groups who later opposed restrictions on child labour in Britain. They were not always the same individuals, but they were very often the same class, the same institutions, and the same economic interests.
At the time slavery was being abolished in the British colonies, the 1833 Factory Act banned work for children under 9 years of age in textile mills and limited hours for children 9-13years old to 48 hours per week. It was not until 1842 that all girls and boys under 10 were banned from working underground. By 1847, the working week for women between 13-18 was reduced to a 10-hour day. And in 1901 the minimum, working age was raised to 12.
Clearly, British businesses and financiers would find it very hard to claim the moral high ground when they were so willing to exploit child labour and where industrial injury and death were commonplace in the 1800’s.
Mining was among the most hazardous industries in nineteenth century Britain yet, despite this, children constituted between 20 and 50 per cent of the mining workforce. Given the high proportion of child miners before the 1842 Mines Act, historians generally agree that substantial numbers of children died in mining accidents each decade, reflecting the risks associated with industrial labour during this period.
While former slave owners and their financial backers were collecting large compensation payouts they and their class were exploiting child labour for even greater profit. Yusuf's eagerness to paint British slave owners as leading the moral crusade against slavery is at best misleading and at worse a deliberate lie.
Under Nigel Farage, Reform UK has promised to systematically reframe British social and economic history in a more favourable light. Young people, rather than being given disturbing facts that may make them “hate their country” are to have historical events framed in such a way that makes them “proud of Britain.”
What this means in the classroom is that topics such as class conflict, worker exploitation and the wider social and economic history of Britain will be taught as “normal for the era” not as examples of exploitation.
A “patriotic” curriculum does not necessarily erase topis but it does reframe them in a more favourable light. Take the use of child labour as an example.
Advocates of a “patriotic” curriculum are likely to argue that “children worked everywhere”, thereby shifting attention away from the particular intensity of Britain’s industrial development and its extensive reliance on child labour. Explanations will be framed in terms of economic necessity, emphasising that families depended on children’s wages, rather than acknowledging employers’ deliberate use of inexpensive and compliant labour. The substantial risks associated with child labour—including industrial accidents, permanent injury, stunted growth, and chronic illness—will be downplayed, with work instead described as providing “discipline” or “helping the family”. Within this narrative, the Factory Acts, like the Abolition of Slavery Act, will be presented as evidence of Britain’s moral leadership rather than as the outcome of prolonged campaigns by workers, reformers, and social movements.
Patriotic curricula generally avoid highlighting the exploitative and self‑interested behaviour of wealthier groups within society. The structural consequences of capitalist industrialisation, and the burdens it placed on the working class, are reframed in more positive terms such as “entrepreneurial spirit”. Class exploitation is recast as “opportunity for social mobility”, state inaction becomes “gradual improvement”, and employer resistance to reform is either omitted or reinterpreted as “concern for economic stability”.
The overall effect of Reform UK’s educational policy will be to present British economic and social history as a story of national virtue not social struggle. Britain is to be seen as an exemplar of moral progress, not of conflict between capital and labour. It will be a narrative where wealthy elites – just like those backing Reform UK – are seen as the driving force behind change, rather than workers, unions or reformers forcing it: a version of the past where exploitation is conceptualised away and where reform comes from above.
