Why the northeast could benefit from the ‘Waitrose Effect’

A Church of England primary school in Richmond, London, has junked Sir Winston Churchill and J.K. Rowling as names for two of its houses and replaced them with the names of the footballer Marcus Rashford and the lady who helped out in the Crimean war, Mary Seacole. This was done, the school said, in order to be ‘more diverse’. Poor old Mary. She is always being roped in, because so many schoolteachers are devoid of imagination as well as being a bit ignorant. Seacole may be regarded as a ‘great Black Briton’, yet she did not consider herself black but Creole and Scottish. A somewhat sharp-tongued woman, she disparaged both black and Creole people, referring to them as, among other things, ‘grinning’, ‘excited’, ‘indolent’ and ‘good-for-noughts’. She also bandied the ‘N-word’ about with a certain abandon and not in an equivocal sense, either.

I daresay there were very good reasons as to why Mrs Seacole should disavow the quarter of herself that was of African descent. She was a creature of her times, after all. But this is the problem when you tear down idols and hastily erect new ones: the grounds upon which those old heroes were defenestrated almost always apply to the new heroes as well, whether it be Martin Luther King’s ‘homophobia’ or Gandhi’s not wholly admiring view of Africans. In a sense I suppose it doesn’t matter now. The schools and other institutions which do this kind of thing do not care much about the facts; they are simply genuflecting towards an idiotically fashionable modernity in which the appearance is more important than the reality.

Sometimes the appearance is more important than the reality, mind. I thought about this verisimilitude while listening to the furore that greeted the government’s decision to scrap its various expensive rail projects in the north of England.