Rafe Fletcher is the founder of CWG.
I watched my daughter perform We Are Singapore as part of her school’s National Day celebrations.
“This is my family, these are my friends, We are Singapore, Singaporeans.”
Perhaps not as existentially stirring as La Marseillaise or, dare I say, Star Spangled Banner. But 9th August in Singapore is less a tribute to inspiring ideals and more a reminder of the country’s precarity.
Uncertainty is a key theme in the school curriculum.
The Ministry of Education specifically stipulates that it aims to “cultivate the instincts for survival as a nation.” It looks back to Singapore’s context in 1965: surrounded by then-hostile states, plagued by unemployment, and without natural resources. The perennial implication is that today’s Singaporeans should not take their prosperity for granted. Nor assume it should always be that way.
Historical ignorance obscures political choices. It lulls a nation into complacency as it imagines its existence a matter of inevitability, rather than a product of past actions. And it’s something Britain risks in failing to engage with its deep past.
Former Conservative MP and historian Chris Skidmore once described secondary school teaching as taking a “Dr Who” approach. It jumps from age to age without ever offering a broader chronological framework. It cannot be right, he argued, that a student can achieve top grades and yet never have heard of The Glorious Revolution.
A 2025 Policy Exchange paper, Lessons from the Past, does at least show improvements in the reforms undertaken by Michael Gove as Education Secretary in the coalition government. British history is covered more exhaustively, yet it remains episodic. It fails to teach what Andrew Roberts calls “its long narrative arc” in a way “that enables young people to orientate themselves…within modern society.” And so something like James II’s deposition, a seminal event in British history, is so forgotten that former Westminster headmaster John Rae doubted whether one school leaver in a thousand could give an account of 1688, let alone say why it was a turning point in history.
I thought about the effects of such amnesia as I saw a Liverpool fan trying to historically justify the city’s irreducible identity on X. He argued it was “built on proud socialist values”. Replies called out the fan’s ahistoricism, reminding him of Liverpool’s former incarnation as an imperial commercial centre. And as a city that still returned Conservative MPs to Westminster as late as 1983. It does not mean Liverpool should be beholden to its past. That a contemporary socialist identity is illegitimate because it’s relatively new. But if we disguise change as continuity, we stop crucially examining the forces behind that change.
Green leader Zack Polanski does the same thing when he proudly recites Benjamin Zephaniah’s poem, The British, characterising the country as a land of immigrants. Take some “Celts”, “Norman French”, “Angles”, and “Saxons”, then add “some hot Chileans, cool Jamaicans, Dominicans,
Trinidadians and Bajans with some Ethiopians, Chinese, Vietnamese and Sudanese.” Mix it all together and there you have it: Britain.
Radically different historical phenomena are turned into equivalent episodes of immigration. One, the movement of northern European peoples over centuries who would eventually understand themselves as sharing collective identities. The other, mass global migration into an already established state in the space of just 80 years. One can welcome or criticise that transformation. But pretending it isn’t one shuts down debate on the decisions behind it.
Tensions between rupture and continuity have long been part of political discourse. Agents of change, for good or ill, consistently argue they are actually engaged in restoration. It’s partly why Rae found students to be largely ignorant of England’s own “revolution”. Because those who celebrated it denied it was one. The Anglo-Irish Whig Edmund Burke contrasted 1688 with France’s bloody revolution just over 100 years later. Where the Jacobins were idealistic radicals, the Whigs were restoring ancient liberties in the face of James’ unwelcome innovations.
But the difference is that such arguments can be tested when there is widespread historical literacy. So when the historian Steven Pincus disputes Burke’s watering down of 1688’s revolutionary tendencies, he grounds it in a wider context. Pincus does not dispute James II was a centralising authoritarian bent on restoring Catholicism. But he argues that Burke’s Whig predecessors had their competing agenda. He points to the subsequent financial revolution under William of Orange in the founding of the Bank of England and funded national debt, and the about-turn in foreign policy that forged a new alliance with William’s Dutch homeland. Pincus argues these were active political choices, albeit rooted in a narrative of continuity.
Britain can look back to 1688 and ask legitimate questions. Was it a revolution or restoration? English liberation or Dutch invasion? Parliamentary sovereignty or Protestant supremacy? On its tercentenary in 1988, Margaret Thatcher could both commemorate it as a salient moment in British history while conceding that interpretations differ greatly across the British Isles.
In that same parliamentary session, a 39-year old Jeremy Corbyn offered such a contrast. He called it the anniversary of a moment that guaranteed “the powers of the landowning class” and paved the way for imperialism. Yet at least it represents intellectual honesty. Corbyn was not arguing his desired settlement was what Britain had always been. He identified an inheritance and rejected it.
We may reject his interpretation. But doing so requires historical literacy. That needs historical anchors, which should come from schooling but also through an effort to place certain moments in the public consciousness. 1688 may spook some as an idea for its sectarian undertones. But remembering such an event need not be overtly celebratory or jingoistic. Rather, it serves as a reminder that our inheritance exists because of the actions of our forefathers. That is therefore contingent. Accept it or reject it, citizens should nonetheless engage with it.
While remembering its short history, Singapore also thinks about a longer one. A statue of British colonialist Sir Stamford Raffles still stands in the city centre. It pays tribute to his “genius and perception” in turning Singapore from an “obscure fishing village” into a “great seaport and modern metropolis”. A reminder that agency changed a country’s identity. Maintaining that agency means recognising change when it happens. And citizens who know enough to tell the difference.