Ministers and supporters of Boris Johnson's government have been lining up to condemn the „rewriting“ of British history and what they see as attempts to impose a single, „politically correct“ version of it on public discourse and institutions such as the National Trust and the Royal Botanic Gardens, among others. This lecture argues that a far greater threat to open debate about British history, the empire, the role of slavery and other sensitive subjects is posed by the government's continuing attempts to control and in some cases suppress research into these topics in the interests of imposing its own, supposedly patriotic version of the British past in a range of areas in public life.