Drake, Raleigh and the irony of ‘inclusivity’ drives

The past has been cancelled at Exeter School in Devon. The names of Elizabethan naval heroes Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake are being erased from their school buildings. For so long central to Britain’s national story, the pair have now been tried and found wanting. Forget their brave exploits: the head teacher Louise Simpson has decreed that neither Raleigh nor Drake ‘represent the values and inclusive nature’ of the school. Deemed inappropriate for today’s children, their names must be scrubbed out, their legacy forgotten.

A by-now familiar irony of ‘inclusivity drives’, such as the one being undertaken by Exeter School, is that they almost always involve exclusion. Drake and Raleigh, Simpson explains, have ‘less than positive connotations’ in modern times. In other words, Elizabethan sea dogs do not stand up to woke scrutiny. They are tainted by association with a less than perfect past and must be expelled.

The children of Exeter School will be spared exciting tales of British victory over the Spanish Armada and the circumnavigation of the globe for fear they might accidentally imbibe some of those ‘less than positive connotations’.