Lessons for Britain from a murdered teacher

It is shocking how little attention has been paid here in Britain to the death of Samuel Paty in a Paris suburb last Friday. This was not some random killing. It was the deliberate murder of a teacher because he was conscientiously teaching.

Nor was it a pupil working off some personal grudge. Paty was beheaded, a method of killing favoured by Islamist extremists as their perverted form of justice. The young man who killed him, who had been accepted by France as a child refugee from Chechnya, had never met Paty. An online account in his name boasted: “I have executed one of the dogs from hell who dared to put Muhammad down.” It also posted a photograph of the head he had just severed. He seems to have been stirred up against the teacher by an online campaign against him led by a parent at the school believed to be in league with an extremist preacher.

Paty’s supposed offence was that he taught his pupils about freedom of speech issues. By way of illustration, he showed them a couple of the cartoons of Muhammad for which 12 of the staff of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo had paid with their lives in the Islamist attack on their offices in 2015. (Because some of the pupils were Muslim, he allowed them to leave the classroom or look away when the cartoons were shown.)

So a teacher was slaughtered for doing his job, and for freedom of speech, and all teachers in France now feel threatened. Few of them, perhaps, will suffer attacks as terrible as that which killed Paty, but all will sense the murderous pressure not to say anything that might incur the wrath of the fanatics. This, in turn, will damage children’s education and empower extreme Muslim parents against moderate ones. The authorities will have to counter it not only with physical security but also with the most vigorous intellectual defence of the right – indeed the duty – to teach freely.

President Emmanuel Macron rightly says that Paty was teaching “the freedom to believe and not to believe”. Winning this battle is “existential” for France, because, as a secular republic, the principle is foundational. Britain has a different constitutional basis, but we face a similar problem, and should show solidarity.

Islamism, after all, is a global movement. We can be grimly confident that there are people in this country – remember the killing of Corporal Lee Rigby – who will rejoice in Paty’s murder, and want to try the same thing at home. If we learn the lessons from his fate, he will prove himself a good teacher, even in death.

The National Trust is wrong about Churchill

When the National Trust recently put out its “interim report” on its properties’ connections with slavery and “colonialism”, there was considerable controversy. Many, including readers of this newspaper, were particularly incensed about the disparaging mention in the report of Winston Churchill, whose country house, Chartwell, belongs to the organisation.

This reaction clearly alarmed the trust, especially in relation to Churchill. Its director, Hilary McGrady, put out a short film of herself on its website protesting that it did not wish to pass any judgment on people mentioned in the report (though she did pass the judgment that Churchill was “a truly great national figure”), but simply “to tell all of the story”.

In the relevant chapter, “The British Raj in India after 1857”, the report mentioned, as part of Churchill’s alleged colonialism, his attitude to Indian independence in 1947. It said, “On 1 July 1947, he wrote to Prime Minister Clement Attlee (1883–1967), arguing that India should not gain independence.”

This is strictly true, but wholly misleading. Churchill by this time supported the end of British rule in India (he had opposed it earlier in his career). As leader of the opposition, he had told the Labour government so. His argument with Attlee was about India’s connection with the Crown, not about its right to self-government.

The Attlee government was about to launch the Indian Independence Bill. Churchill opposed the word “independence”, because what he wanted for India was “Dominion status”. This meant that it would still owe allegiance to the King. He sought for India the same absolute freedom of government as existed for other countries which already possessed Dominion status, such as Australia and Canada: “Dominion status is not the same as independence, although it may be freely used to establish independence,” was how he put it. He was not arguing against self-government.

Churchill put it more conversationally during the Second World War, in the hearing of the King’s private secretary, “Tommy” Lascelles, who noted it: “The old notion that the Indian is in any way inferior to the white man must go. We must all be pals together. I want to see a great shining India, of which we can be as proud as we are of a great Canada or a great Australia.”

I wonder if the National Trust’s researchers understood any of this when they wrote their report. The proper study of great people requires an immense amount of scholarly work. I also wonder if the trust is well equipped to fulfil its director’s demand for “all of the story” to be told.

There is no reason why it should be, since its task is to look after “places of historic interest or natural beauty”, not to embark on a history of the British Empire, hostile or otherwise.