The Archive & The Rising Right: A Case Study of the United Kingdom

Reform UK, the United Kingdom’s far-right populist party, have rose drastically over the past years,[1] with it came a revival of the struggle over the British history. With this revival, archives, and sites of history at large, have once again become a hotbed of issues as the right has sought to ‘clean out’ the archives. This is already taking place ‘across the pond’ with the Trump administration having already laid off ought out a number of staff at the U.S. National Archive, including its head archivist,[2] and purged a number historical documents in its war against DEI (Diversity, equity, and inclusion).[3] What then might happen in the U.K.? With the possibility of the far-right regaining power, this essay will consider not only how the archive may change in the British context, but also its relationship with the state and its users.

            Beginning with the most obvious question: How might the histories found in the archive change? It is worth looking the general view and attitudes of the rights as a whole towards archiving and history as a whole. In 2001, archivist Trudy Peterson highlighted the two purposes of national archives, first that of ‘Good Governance’ which entailed maintaining government accountability and second that of ‘Cultural Custodian’ which entailed the maintaining of the people’s history and culture.[4] The archive, according to Peterson, will tend to emphasize one of these two roles, however, it is not the archives themselves that determines but the state (and the funding it provides).[5] Crucially, Peterson warns that ‘National archives as institutions are clearly linked to the revolutionary and nationalizing impulse’, and that the goal of cultural preservation is ‘entirely compatible with the nationalist impulse’.[6] Interestingly, Peterson is also critical of the public’s role in pushing archives towards nationalist impulse as public engagement is another crucial aspect of maintaining an archive. Through demonstrating how ‘good’ histories succeed while morally ambiguous histories flop, Peterson demonstrates how archives in the U.S. realised how ‘Triumphalism sells, revisionism can get you in trouble… [and that] it was safer to concentrate on the glories than the gories of the nation’s past.’[7] 

            More recently, historian Louie Valebcia-García has demonstrated how the far-right views history less as something to be critically analysed, but instead a tool to be used to reclaim return to nostalgic past through the creation of ‘Alt-histories’. He argues that the far-right tends to have a cyclical view of history and sees the present as an age of decline, hence why the past must be restored.[8] In this effort, the Far-Right turns to history not as a field for critical analysis, but as a tool for authority to confirm their ‘idealised past’ or ‘alt-history’.[9] Building on Peterson’s critiques of the national archive, Valencia-García also argues that blind trust in state archives is foolish as they can easily produce the ‘alt-histories’ the Far-Right seeks.[10] Considering these two conceptualisations, the far-right can be said to view archives and history as merely a tool to confirm a idealised past, or ‘alt-history’, through placing emphasis on the archive’s role as a ‘Cultural Custodian’ as to maximise its nationalist potential.

            Using this understanding of the far-right, it is now possible to imagine how a far-right Britain may change its archives and the history it will tell. This essay will focus in on the history of the British Empire as it is arguably the most controversial, there for a good representative, for predicting these changes. There is no doubt that the U.K. far-right is found if Britains imperial history. As a 2025 YouGov survey demonstrated, 64% of Reform voters and 55% of Conservative voters believed the British empire was something to be proud of with around the same percentage of these groups also believing British colonisation in fact benefited the colonised.[11] Such sentiments is also reflected by Nigel Farage, leader of Reform U.K., who lamented that under current understandings of British history ‘You would think the British Empire was the worst empire that had existed in the history of mankind. And yet it's the only empire ever created that now has a club of former members called the Commonwealth.’ Furthermore, he argues ‘we ought to be teaching people that this little speck on the map actually achieved quite remarkable things.’[12]

            Considering this, it can be argued that under a possible Reform government, the archives may begin to prioritise a ‘alt-history’ not to dissimilar to those present during the age of empire. As Bernard Cohn demonstrated, India artifacts take by the British in the early 19^th century became symbols of triumph over a despotic India, furthermore, linking to the rightist notion of colonisation being beneficial to the colonised, such ‘despotic’ artifacts also demonstrated Britain’s role in ‘civilizing’ the subcontinent.[13] Since such ideas are similar to those expressed today, it would not be a stretch to say that a Reform government will likely push national archives to pursue an almost orientalist ‘alt-history’ that emphasise Britain’s contributions to its colonies through prioritising documents regarding industrial and civil development such as of factories and democracies while marginalising documents about the human cost of the former and the unequal nature of the latter, as means of trying to attain British’s ‘proud’ past. Obviously, it cannot be said for certain if this will happen or not as it is impossible to predict the future with certainty, but the patterns highlighted by Peterson and Valebcia-García alongside considering the existing attitudes of the far-right towards certain historical topics, it can be speculated that a Reform government will seek to bring back the nostalgic understanding of the ‘civilizing’ British Empire.

            All that said, there is also the more obvious use of the archive as tool for oppression with such a use having historical precedent. As Wolfgang Ernst showcases, Nazi Germany did not only use the archives as a ‘Cultural Custodian’ to induce jingoism, but they were also crucial to the execution of the Holocaust as they were key to the party’s genealogical research used to identify Jews.[14] That said, to put this in the British context, Reform would likely use what is not present with the archives instead of what is, as its targets are not Jews but so-called ‘illegal’ immigrants. In their effort to stamp out migrants, Reform may turn to the archives to find whom may be undocumented. Such actions risk placing rightful citizens in danger as evidence with the 2018 Windrush scandal where many British residents from the Windrush generation faced deportation because they had not been given documentation when they first arrived during the post-war era.[15]

            Naturally such concerning (possible) developments leads to the question of response. Both Peterson and Valebcia-García also called for resistance in their exploration of right-wing attitudes towards the archive. Peterson argued since archives are responsible for documenting a nation’s history, it has a duty to eliminate all ‘blind spots’ and calls for a written collecting policy ‘to ensure that misunderstanding of motives does not give rise to political problems for the archives’[16]; Valebcia-García argues historians must continue to interrogate and even look beyond the archive to turn the ‘fragments’ found in them into history instead of ‘alt-histories’.[17] That said, it is also worth considering the acts of archival resistance happening currently, with the case of Germany being particularly interesting as the act of resistance was not coming from archivist, but from the archive user. As Annika Orich observed, in recent years with the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland in Germany (AfD), the archive has become a a place of resistance as people turn to them to understand the far-right’s rise.[18] Particularly, users have used the archive as a means of debunking the, to use Valebcia-García’s term, ‘alt-histories’ of the AfD that distorts and conflates the means of ‘dictatorship’ and ‘the Left’ as it allows them to: A) Descirbe the fallacies inherent in far-right narratives and B) pinpoint aspects of history that give those narrative their significance.[19] Drawing from Volker Weiß, Orich argues that the reason such ‘alt-histories’ are so easily formed is because of the ‘short memory of the political culture’[20], therefore to resist far-right narratives, one must make a conscious effort to ‘unpack’ the vast histories stored within the archive. In this sense, she concludes, not only is the openness of the archive key to the existence of democracy, as has been argued by Marlene Manoff and Jaques Derrida, but critical engagement with it is equally if not more important in maintaining democracy.[21]

            To put this in British terms, to resist the rise of Reform, the British people ought to use the privilege of open archives to critically engage with history as a means of countering far-right rhetoric such as anti-immigration. The people ought to uncover the role of migrants in key British events such as the Second World War where Caribbean volunteers served in the Royal Air Force and the Chinese dock workers whom supported the British supply lines during the war.[22] By uncovering such narratives, people may then combat the anti-immigrant stereotypes prevalent in Reform’s narratives. Furthermore, it can be argued the archives themselves should also aim to make engagement easier through public engagement, this is already being done within the U.K. with the National Archives many events and ‘classroom resources’ aimed at bring public attention to marginalised histories.[23] That said, Peterson’s warning regarding the public’s own tendence to desire simple triumphant histories and the nationalistic narratives such histories produce; furthermore such events often also require state funding which would likely be reallocated to prioritise nationalist histories in the event of a Reform government.

            All this is not to saw that archivists themselves are not engaged in acts of resistance, in fact evidence of this can currently be found in the U.K.. As already mentioned, the National Archive have produced media targeted at informing the public, however, archivist have also gone beyond established archival intuitions and have engaged more directly. As Susan Pell has highlighted not only have activist groups begun to build their own private archives, but archivist groups such as Radical Reference and Activist Archivist have begun to support these efforts.[24] Such archives, which Pell dub ‘Radical Archives’, exist apart for institutional archives and are strategically used in social struggles as the groups they represent fight for the right to represent themselves.[25] In this sense, similar to Orich’s observations, the archive becomes a space were memories of past political struggles can be mobilised for present-day struggles.[26] Through her exploration of the ‘radical archive’, Pell also calls upon scholars to reconsider how power is viewed in regards to the archive as she highlights how has tended to be viewed as a power of dominance; instead, she calls upon scholars to view archival power as ‘multiple, relational, and situated’ as to reveal the multiple ‘attributes’ of the archive. Only then can people see ‘the radical potential’ of the archive.[27] Evidently, there is a considerable about of resistance coming from both the archivist and the archive user, and evidently there is a vocal call by some members of both groups to politically mobilise the archive to counter the rise of the far-right.

            All that said, however, such an effort to mobilise the archive is not so simple as this desire to mobilise the archive is not universal among the archival profession. Archivist Theo Thomassen, in his 1999 article regarding the independence of the archival profession, argued that the archive and the archive profession must depoliticise as ‘if we do not depoliticise our professional discourse, we cannot control the quality and the exchange value of the services we render to society.’[28] That is not to say Thomassen believes archivist should be removed from engaging with society, in fact he believes archivist are a like to physicians as they both have an exclusive mastery of a specific discipline which aims to positively serve public welfare,[29] he merely believes that the best way to do that service is to remain above politics. Furthermore, some archivist outright rejects the notion that the archive is a space involved in social issues. As a 2021 study on ‘How do U.K. archivist perceive “white supremacy” in the U.K. archive sector?’ shows, a number of archivist (mainly senior) rejected the notion that structural racism existed in the archival profession and with some going as far to suggest involvement in political movements against far-right ideas would compromise academic freedom and be a means of ‘thought control’.[30] To relate to the struggle against far-right conservatism, the study also points to a incident with the Archives-NRA listserv email group surround the toppling of the Colston statue in 2020 where groups of archivist clashed over the removal of such statues.[31] This incident arguably demonstrates that the U.K. archivist community is even divide over if they should engage in social struggles, let alone resist the rise right. With these nuanced to drastic differences of opinions between archivist it is clear that mobilising the archive against the rising far-right will be a difficult task as some are against it.

            Another issue complicating the mobilising of the archive against the far-right is the fact that the far-right can, and have, also mobilised the archive against its opponents. As both Orich and Pell admit in their analysis of archival resistance from the left, archives are ultimately open to interpretation and those mobilising them politically can easily be undermined by an opposing archive.[32] Returning the Orich’s German example, she points out that the AfD has already begun to penetrate into cultural institutions of authority with the archive being no exception. In 2014, Marc Jongen, the AfD’s ‘party philosopher’, described the AfD as a ‘revolutionary’, ‘conservative’, and ‘reactionary’ movement of resistance against a ‘culture war’ which, in a later speech in 2018, he claims was started by ‘the Left’.[33] Orich specifically calls attention to Jongen’s archiving of his 2017 speech given at the Tenth Annual Fall Conference “Crisis of Democracy. Thinking in Dark Times” at the Hannah Arendt Centre for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, where he concluded Democracy had to be more populist, as she argues it ‘crystallizes and substantiates accusations commonly brought forward by the New Right against the “left,” which, in this interpretation, personifies the enemy of enlightened thinking and democracy.’[34] Evidently, such rhetoric of ‘resistance’ is not limited to the opponents of the far-right but can also be found amongst the far-right themselves, furthermore, to return to Valencia-García’s point of ‘history as a tool’, it seems that such phenomenon is not something that possibly could happen in the event of a right-wing takeover of government, but already is happening as they themselves seek to ‘resist’ the ‘Woke’ Leftist ‘culture war’.

            Such sentiments of needing to ‘resist’ the Left is already present amongst Reform. Farage himself lamented the ‘Marxist takeover’ of educational and historical institutions, implying a need to fight back against it in the name of preserving our democracy.[35] Furthermore, beyond the use of contemporary items from archives such as criminal reports and news headlines to confirm far-right ideas such as the violence of immigrants, it is not far fetched to argue that the far-right can also turn to historical documents to justify their distorted ‘alt-histories’. Rightist may turn to the archive to find evidence of Indian ‘savagery’ found in the documents of colonial officials as a means of confirming their own racial biases, in fact searches for such material are already happening. As archivist Daniel Jones writes, in his piece on ‘Archiving the Extreme’, far-right groups such as Stormfront are aware and have attempted to gain access to extremist material stored in the Searchlight Archives at the University of Northampton which holds a number of anti-communist and antisemitic materials.[36] Evidently, the mobilization of the archive goes both ways as the far-right is also engaging the archive reading and creating in response to their perceived threat of the Left; this bilaterality, as Orich argues, also further shows how the act of reading the archive as a means of resistance is ultimately only a small part of the larger general struggle it.[37]

            If there are is no one method or opinion in the ways in which the archive can be mobilised, then what exactly should people do? For this it is worth turning to American historian Hayden White and his attitudes toward history as a whole as he, despite his controversies, provides a good critic of the reality of historical study and what historians should morally do. In his seminal work Metahistory, White demonstrates how historical study is ultimately a poetic act as historians in reality go into their study with a prefigured narrative which, according to White, falls into a number of tropes ranging from the Romantic and the Satire to the Metaphor and, most importantly, the Irony.[38] White’s Irony refers to the historian’s tendency to pursue objectivity which, as many scholars have highlighted, he pleaded with historians to transcend in the name of writing more ethically.[39] To White, no one narrative was more disprovable then the other as he rejected the notion that were was any possibility to tell a one true history.[40] His critiques of Irony also extended to the archive which, as Knox Peden highlighted, he rejected as a objective ‘repository of ethical knowledge’ as by claiming the truthfulness of an archive in of itself is an act of prefiguring.[41] To further discredit the ethical value of objectivity within archives, Peden also demonstrates, the very notion of the archive is a place of objective truth is what has allowed the far-right to create their ‘alt-histories’ as evident in the fact that many Holocaust denialist often point to the absence of the ‘Final Solution’ within the archive.[42] Ultimately, White believes that the only real choices a historian can make are ethical and aesthetical choices, therefore, White calls upon historians to reject the notion of objectivity so that they may write more ethical narratives.

            This essay believe archivist also ought to listen to White’s plea as the profession of archiving is not too dissimilar to that of historian as the act of appraisal, which arguably remains prevalent today, in of itself it a means of deciding what history is being told. Although there are certain rules that archivist must follow in the maintaining of documents such as Respect des fonds, the act of appraisal and curation is ultimately up to the archivist. As Terry Cook argues, when appraising and curating, archivist must ‘remain extraordinarily sensitive to the political, social, philosophical, and ethical nature of archival appraisal, for that process defines the creators, the functions, and the activities to be reflected in archives,’[43] Arguably such considerations mirror White’s view of history as the ‘political’, the ‘social’, and the ‘philosophical’ and be considered merely aesthetic, with their own tropes among them. There exist Anarchist archives such as the 56a Archive presented by Pell in her article on radical archives,[44] Extreme archives such as Jones’ Searchlight archive,[45] and Conservative archives such as the one’s Orich pointed out.[46] If there can be this wealth of diversity in the form an archive can take then, following White’s advice regarding history, the archivist should reject any notion of trying to be objective and instead aim to transcend Irony and use their freedom of appraisal and curation to form an ethical archive aimed at creating a better future. That is how the archive can best contribute to society.

            This essay has attempted to analyse how a possible Reform UK government could affect the archives, however, the theories and arguments can certainly (and should) be extended to other nations in the same situations. As demonstrated above, the driving force of the far-rights involvement in the archives, and history at large, is a desire to bring back a nostalgic past through the use of history as merely a cultural tool to form ‘alt-histories’ that justify their vision; in the U.K. this will likely involve the return of colonial and Orientalist views of empire where instead of being a destructive force, Britain was a modernising and civilising one. As for possible responses, as this essay has shown, there is no shortage of those who are attempting to resist the far-right through archives. Looking at other nations, people have turned to the archive as a means of challenging the far-right as it has become a place to root out the inherent fallacies within them; furthermore, archivist themselves have sought to mobilise the archive through the creation of their own ‘radical archives’ aims specifically engaging with social issues. That said, there also many complicating factors such as those within the archivist profession whom are hesitant to mobilise or see no need too, on top of this, the far-right themselves have also begun to mobilise their own archives in ‘resistance’ to its opponents.

            Through exploring the means of resistance and the far-right response, this essay has come to believe that the archive is no different from Hayden White’s view of history. Because of this, it has argued that in light of the fact the archive is in fact not a space of absolute truth with most, if not all, of the appraisal and curation choices made by archivist being aesthetic in nature, the archivist has a moral duty to make decisions based on ethical judgements and for the creation of a better present and future. Of course there are issues with this statement, however, those are beyond the scope of this essay as they fall into the realm of ethics.

Bibliography

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Carby, Hazel, ‘My Jamaican dad was an RAF hero. Why did no one believe me?’, The Guardian, 16^th November 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/nov/16/jamiacan-father-raf-hero-

Cohn, Bernard, Colonialism and its Form of Knowledge (Princeton University Press, 1996)

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Hancox, Dan, ‘The secret deportations: how Britain betrayed the Chinese men who served the country in the war’, The Guardian, 25^th May 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/may/25/chinese-merchant-seamen-liverpool-deportations

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Peden, Knox, ‘Hayden White’s Metahistory and the Irony of the Archive’, Journal of the Philosophy of History, 9 (2025), 177-195

Peterson, Trudy H., ‘The Nasty Truth about Nationalism and National Archives’, Proceeding of the 5^th General Conference of EASTICA, 19^th September 2001

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Susan Pell, ‘Radicalizing the Politics of the Archive: An Ethnographic Reading of an Activist Archive’, Archivaria, 80 (2015), 33-57

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Footnotes

[1] Patrick English & Dylan Difford, ‘YouGov MRP shows a Reform UK government a near-certainty if an election were held tomorrow’, YouGov, 26^th September 2025, https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/53059-yougov-mrp-shows-a-reform-uk-government-a-near-certainty-if-an-election-were-held-tomorrow [Accessed 11^th November 2025].

[2] Ali Swenson & Gary Fields, ‘The National Archives is nonpartisan but has found itself targeted by Trump’, Associated Press, 27 February 2025, https://apnews.com/article/trump-national-archives-firings-layoffs-historical-recordkeeping-559027fdd2f634263bea7774a78d66fe [Accessed 20 October 2025].

[3] Associated Press, ‘US Military first among the 26,000 images flagged for deletion in Trump DEI purge’, The Guardian, 7 March 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/07/military-images-trump-dei [Accessed 20 October 2025].

[4] Trudy H. Peterson, ‘The Nasty Truth about Nationalism and National Archives’, Proceeding of the 5^th General Conference of EASTICA, 19^th September 2001.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Louie D. Valencia-García, ‘Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History’, in Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History, ed. Louie D. Valencia (Talyor & Francis Group, 2020), 4-5.

[9] Ibid, 8.

[10] Ibid, 14.

[11] Matthew Smith, ‘British Attitudes to the British Empire’, YouGov, 29^th January 2025, https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/51483-british-attitudes-to-the-british-empire [Accessed 15th November 2025].

[12] Georgia Pearce, ‘Farage: We ought to be teaching people about the remarkable success of our country’, GBNews, 4^th September 2024, https://www.gbnews.com/news/video-nigel-farage-reacts-british-pride-decline [Accessed 15^th November 2025].

[13] Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Form of Knowledge (Princeton University Press, 1996), 79-80.

[14] Wolfgang Ernst, ‘Archival action: the archive as ROM and its political instrumentalization under National Socialism’, History of the Human Sciences 12, 2 (1999), 19.

[15] Amelia Gentleman, ‘‘I’ve been here for 50 years’: the scandal of the former Commonwealth citizens threatened with deportation’, The Guardian, 21^st February 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/feb/21/ive-been-here-for-50-years-the-scandal-of-the-former-commonwealth-citizens-threatened-with-deportation  [Accessed 16^th November 2025].

[16] Peterson, ‘Nationalism and National Archives’.

[17] Valencia-García, ‘Far-Right Revisionism’, 13-14.

[18] Annika Orich, ‘Archival Resistance: Reading the New Right’, German Politics and Society 134, 2 (2020), 2.

[19] Ibid, 8-10.

[20] Ibid, 10.

[21] Ibid, 2.

[22] Hazel Carby, ‘My Jamaican dad was an RAF hero. Why did no one believe me?’, The Guardian, 16^th November 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/nov/16/jamiacan-father-raf-hero- [Accessed 15^th November 2025]; Dan Hancox, ‘The secret deportations: how Britain betrayed the Chinese men who served the country in the war’, The Guardian, 25^th May 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/may/25/chinese-merchant-seamen-liverpool-deportations [Accessed 15^th November 2025].

[23] ‘Education sessions and resources’, The National Archives, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/sessions-and-resources/ [Accessed 15^th November 2025]

[24] Susan Pell, ‘Radicalizing the Politics of the Archive: An Ethnographic Reading of an Activist Archive’, Archivaria, 80 (2015), 34; 38.

[25] Ibid, 34.

[26] Ibid, 38.

[27] Ibid, 41.

[28] Theo Thomassen, ‘Archivist Between Knowledge and Power: On the independence and autonomy of archival science and the archival profession’, Arhivski Vjesnik, 42 (1999), 167.

[29] Ibid, 153.

[30] Karen S.M. Macfarlane, ‘How do UK archivist perceive ‘white supremacy’ in the UK archive sector?’, Archive and Records 42, 2 (2021), 272; 275.

[31] Ibid, 272.

[32] Orich, ‘Archival Resistance’, 18; Pell, ‘Radicalizing the Politics of the Archive’, 45

[33] Orich, ‘Archival Resistance’, 18-20.

[34] Ibid, 20

[35] Pearce, ‘Farage: We ought to be teaching people about the remarkable success of our country’, GBNews, 4^th September 2024, https://www.gbnews.com/news/video-nigel-farage-reacts-british-pride-decline [Accessed 15^th November 2025].

[36] Daniel Jones, ‘Archiving the Extreme: Ethical challenges in sharing, researching, and teaching’ originally in The Ethics of Researching the Far Right: Critical Approaches and Reflections, ed. Antonia Vaughan, Joan Braune, Meghan Tinsley, and Aurelien Mondon (Manchester University Press, 2024), 184-195 [Open Access version in use], 5; Daniel Jones, ‘The Searchlight Archive collection at the University of Northampton: A research note’, Journal of Deradicalization, 3 (2015), 213

[37] Orich, ‘Archival Resistance’, 18.

[38] Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (John Hopkins University Press, 1973), 8-10; 34.

[39] Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘Above, about and beyond the writing of history: a retrospective view of Hayden White’s Metahistory on the 40^th anniversary of its publication’, Rethinking History 17, 4 (2013), 495.

[40] White, Metahistory, 4.

[41] Knox Peden, ‘Hayden White’s Metahistory and the Irony of the Archive’, Journal of the Philosophy of History, 9 (2025), 190-193.

[42] Ibid, 189.

[43] Terry Cook, ‘‘We Are What We Keep; We Keep What We Are’: Archival Appraisal Past, Present and Future’, Journal of the Society of Archivist 32, 2 (2011), 174.

[44] Pell, ‘Radicalizing the Politics of the Archive’, 36.

[45] Jones, ‘Archiving the Extreme’, 5 [Open Access version in use].

[46] Orich, ‘Archival Resistance’, 18.