4 June: Bad History: Niall Ferguson

Fine blogging by Histomast on the historian was warmonger.

1 May 2006: Bad history: Life in the United Kingdom

Various papers have run with the story (lifted originally I think from last week's Times Education Supplement) that the government's flagship advice to applicants for British citizenship is replete with embarrassing historical errors. (Eg who was Prime Minister in 1978? Not Harold Wilson, as the booklet reports). The Telegraph complained for example, that the guide 'erroneously [claims] that the Magna Carta was the origin of Parliament, that the massacre at Glencoe took place before the Battle of Boyne and that Charles II was recalled from exile in France instead of Holland.'

Bernard Crick, the author of the guide is, well-known as the author of a rather enjoyable biography of George Orwell. As I pointed out in my book on anti-fascism in the 1940s: he also played a walk-on in part in the anti-fascist resistance to Mosley's postwar revival.

Life in the United Kingdom is the companion volume to the government's new test for people applying for citizenship. The latter are expected to know the answer to such questions as 'Who is the Prime Minister?', 'how do you pay a phone bill?', or 'when was Britain last invaded?' Poor History is supposed to create a British national identity, and Bernard Crick, a lifelong advocate of 'Citizenship' was asked to provide the narrative.

Three years ago, I remember leaving then the Secretary of State for Education Charles Clarke stumped when he spoke at a meeting of the London Socialist Historians Group. 'Does New Labour have a theory of history?', I asked him. The Tories had a theory of history in the 1980s, as everyone knows. Britain was a naval power: a blue thread ran from Trafalgar to the Falklands. The Whigs had a theory: the story of Britain was the story of the creation of Parliament. Old Labour had a narrative too: the rise of social movements and social reform. But under the permanent newness of Blairism, there is no history, no coherent narrative. And if New Labour knows no history then why force migrants to learn it?

Both the original guide and its public critics show their politics clearly. Crick, for example, has been criticised for having failed to mention either the miners' strike or the Falklands War in his list of Margaret Thatcher's 'achievements'. I suggested that shows a certain new Labour squeamishness on his part - while the Telegraph, which has been assiduously plugging the BNP in recent weeks - has an agenda of its own.

Following articles in the Guardian and on the BBC website, Wikipedia has a list of some of the questions that applicants for British citizenship taking the test could be expected to ask: one question which appears to have been in both the mock papers was 'from when can the United Kingdom be dated?' The right answer - both according to Crick's book and in the dummy tests is 1707 (the Act of Union). The Telegraph wants the date pushed forward to the Act of Union 1800 (ie the annexation of Ireland). Now even the Telegraph would accept that Dublin is no longer part of the United Kingdom. But still at issue between Crick and his detractors (who emphasise 1800) is a simple question: is Belfast today Irish or British? 

25 March 2006: Bad history: who ended slavery?

There's a typical Tristram Hunt piece in today's Guardian: this time on the government's proposals to commemorate next year the 200th anniversary of the first bill abolishing the slave trade.

As a one-time New Labour activist, Hunt has an eye for the partisan misuse of history. He is right to suspect the government of planning nothing more than a celebration of the Wilberforces and the Pitts.

But as the historian in short trousers, Hunt makes heavy weather of the obvious follow-up question - if not them, then who ended slavery?

'This is a complex, nuanced story', he writes - when it was nothing of the sort.

Hunt doesn't know and therefore cannot name the people and the organisations who did most to end the trade: people such as Toussaint l'Ouverture, the leader of the great Haitian slave revolt which brought an end to the trade in that part of the Caribbean ten years before 'abolition'.

Nor does Hunt make any reference to the London Corresponding Society, the heroic organisation of the London workers who did more than anyone else to create a majority opinion in England against slavery.