Reading an Enid Blyton adventure to my children a couple of years back, I was quite shocked to encounter the n-word, used as part of a simile to describe some soot-covered, white-skinned children. Presumably it has been expurgated from more recent editions, but our copy of the book — I can’t recall which one it was — dated from the 1960s, having presumably entered the Gooch household second-hand in the 1970s when my older brothers were growing up. Needless to say, I engaged in some creative real-time editing. And I’ll confess it was not the first time I had done so while reading the Blyton books, which are fairly decent children’s literature but also reflective of dubious social attitudes present in post-war England.   

Perhaps other right-wingers would laugh this to scorn. You can’t bowdlerise the past, goes the argument; children are sophisticated enough to understand that the world was different back then. If we don’t expose them to an authentic version of the old days, they will not be able to understand them properly. We cannot project our own racial and political anxieties back into history. Let children have the uncut full-strength Blyton. 

This has sparked off another round of the usual laments

I see the point. And yet, it is complicated. The two poles of “Never make any changes at all to outdated cultural artefacts” and “Constantly amend cultural artefacts to ensure they align with contemporary sensibilities” represent a false dichotomy. Given the possibly terrible consequences of ethnic hatred and division, and the need for multiracial societies to minimise racial antagonisms in daily life, it is reasonable and consistent to remove, for example, the most grossly offensive racial slurs while taking the general view that texts, images and films should be left alone.  

Which brings us, by a roundabout route, to recent news reports from Essex, where the landlord and landlady of The White Hart pub in Grays have received a visit from the Old Bill, regarding their prominently displayed collection of golliwog stuffed toys. Five officers apparently raided the premises last week, confiscating a large number of the golliwogs. In a mildly farcical turn of events, the landlady has replaced the confiscated golliwogs with another dozen or so from her apparently vast collection.

This has sparked off another round of the usual laments about our ineffectual, politically compromised police, busy persecuting honest citizens for imaginary crimes while muggers, burglars and hooligans terrorise the law-abiding with impunity. And I don’t really disagree with the suggestion that it is an absurd waste of police time for them to be taking teddies into custody. 

Nevertheless, there is another point to be made here. We can believe that the police action is excessive without being obliged to defend the White Hart publicans as entirely innocent and harmless victims. Displaying golliwogs in your pub in 2023 is an act with a particular political salience, and a not very pleasant one at that. It is all very well for people to talk about how forty or fifty years ago, golliwogs were an innocent doll, a mascot for Robertson’s marmalade and a popular collectible. That may well be true, but the symbolic associations of specific images or items can and does change over time. Before the rise of Nazism, the swastika was best known as a decorative motif with spiritual and cultural resonances for several different cultures. Its use by the Nazis has turned it into an avatar of evil. 

That is not to say that golliwogs are comparable to swastikas, but simply to make the point that we all operate in a society where objects and symbols acquire particular meanings, whether we like it or not. There are no private languages, to borrow Wittgenstein’s formulation. We are always operating in a realm of common understanding. We cannot retreat to a world of special private meanings when challenged about the causes and meanings with which we choose to identify ourselves. Neighbourliness, consideration and good manners are classic conservative virtues, and all are premised on the idea that we must take others’ feelings and their worldview into account.

Golliwogs have come to represent — at best — hostility to and contempt for attempts to reduce racial discrimination in modern Britain, and at worst outright racialised bigotry. That does not mean that possessing or displaying them should be a criminal offence, or any of the police’s business; we are talking manners and morals, rather than crime and punishment. It does mean that we are generally entitled to draw certain conclusions about people who persist in displaying them, and that it would be good for social and cultural pressure to be brought to bear such that symbols of this kind gradually vanish from our common life. 

Conservatives should have the maturity and insight to admit that much good has come from the anti-racist campaigning of the last few decades. That doesn’t mean agreeing with everything demanded in the name of anti-racism. It does mean accepting that racial prejudice has declined significantly in the UK in the last half century, and that much of this decline can be plausibly assigned to initiatives conceived and undertaken by those bossy, nannying, finger-wagging liberal elites.  

We can love old Britain without pretending that everything was rosy in the garden. However charming some people may have found the golliwog, it always was a crude and unkind stereotype of an African person. In an all-white society, perhaps that didn’t matter very much. But in an ethnically diverse one, it does matter. And let’s be frank: the disappearance of the golliwog is just not a great loss to British cultural life, any more than the cancellation of The Black And White Minstrel Show or the fading away of the jokes about Pakistani shopkeepers that were still current when I was in junior school thirty years ago