Kemi Badenoch accuses Labour of wanting to teach children to be 'ashamed' of Britain's past - as Tory leadership candidate calls for a new history curriculum to instil 'pride in our country'

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Tory leadership hopeful Kemi Badenoch last night accused Labour of wanting to teach children to be ‘ashamed’ of Britain’s past, and called for a new history curriculum to instil ‘pride in our country’.

In an interview with the Mail, she warned that negative teaching about the UK’s history is undermining the fabric of our society.

‘We need to make sure people have a good understanding of history, but not try to rewrite history to the point where everyone is ashamed of their past,’ she said. ‘Young people now don’t want to join the army because they’re embarrassed about their country and they don’t think it’s worth fighting for.

‘There is no future if the people who are here will not fight for this country.’

Her comments came after the Labour Government launched a review of the school curriculum.

As an equalities minister in 2022, Mrs Badenoch established an expert panel to devise a new history curriculum covering ‘both sides’ of Britain’s colonial past.

But the review – which was close to concluding – has now been ditched by the Government, and it has instead launched its own shake-up of teaching.

Mrs Badenoch said her ‘model curriculum’ would help foster ‘pride in our country’ among those born here and make it easier to integrate migrants arriving from overseas, who sometimes act like ‘guests’ in this country without embracing its history and customs.

‘Wherever your ancestry is from, we are now a multiracial country,’ she said.

‘Whether people like that, whether they don’t like it, that is a fact that is not going to change.

‘How do we make sure that we can teach history so that everybody has got a stake in it, and it’s not pitting one group against the other?’

Mrs Badenoch added that Labour scrapped her new history curriculum because ‘they want the bad history – that you should be ashamed of your past’.

‘That is why I worry about this Labour Government, because those of us who grew up with proper history are still finding it difficult,’ she said. ‘What is the world going to be like when we have several generations of people who have been taught that their country is bad? It’s not going to go well. And I want to fight that.’

Amid calls for the UK to pay reparations over the slave trade, Mrs Badenoch said the Left-wing establishment seemed determined to suggest that the UK was uniquely guilty.

‘Slavery was not something that was unique to Western countries,’ she said.

‘It is still endemic in places in Africa and the Middle East. They may not call it that, but that’s what it is.

Mrs Badenoch, 44, was born in Wimbledon, but spent her childhood in Nigeria before returning to the UK as a teenager.

She said that the experience of spending her formative years in a country where she ‘never felt safe’ had given her a deep appreciation for the UK’s long history of democracy, freedom, equality and security.

‘I will always be grateful for being lucky enough to be born here,’ she said.

‘It was very much fate, and I would do anything for this country – I would go to war for this country, I would fight for this country. I would die for this country.

‘This is my country. I love it the way it is. I don’t want it to become like the place I ran away from. I want it to get better and better, not just for me, but for that next generation.’

Mrs Badenoch is facing Robert Jenrick in the final run-off in the contest to succeed Rishi Sunak as the leader of the Conservatives. The outcome will be decided by the votes of about 140,000 Tory party members, and the results of the contest are set to be declared on November 2.