Politicians should learn that history is not just a handy rhetorical device

Telegraph

15-06-2025

The head of Britain's Left-wing government warns that the country might become an 'island of strangers'. A senior black MP, Diane Abbott, attacks his speech as 'fundamentally racist'. Sir Keir 'doubles down', then a few days later apologises. He refuses, then accepts, an enquiry into organised child rape. The chairman of the main anti-immigration party, David Bull, announces that immigration has always been 'the lifeblood of this country'. To put it mildly, all this shows moral, intellectual, political and not least historical confusion.
Yet the history of migration is very simple. People have always moved, often compelled by war, persecution or economic stress. Such movement has invariably caused friction and often serious violence: xenophobia is a constant of history. England has for most of its past been a country of low immigration. Those who claim that immigration has always been our 'lifeblood' or that 'immigrants built this land' (in Diane Abbott's words) would have to show when and how this was possible given the rarity of significant migration until the 1990s.
Those who repeat the now familiar historical claim that England has always been a country of immigrants also have to skate over the awkward fact that when major immigration did occur, it was rarely a happy experience. Romans (including those probably fictitious black legionaries on Hadrian's Wall), Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans were violent invaders, even if some did build roads and cathedrals. Even 18th or 19th-century internal migrants – such as the Scots in Ireland or the Irish in Scotland – gave rise to lasting tensions still tangible after centuries of common citizenship.
Genuine refugees in small numbers met with popular sympathy, and some made an economic contribution – Huguenots are always mentioned here, and sometimes Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia or Ugandan Asians. Nevertheless they were met with hostility from those who felt displaced. Others fleeing manifest danger – French refugees from the Revolution, Belgians in 1914, Ukrainians in 2022 – received sympathy, but were usually expected in due course to return home.
The overall picture is clear: for nearly 1,000 years, the British Isles received few immigrants. Our history is one of emigration, as British expatriates became the 'lifeblood' of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, whether the indigenous populations liked it or not. One can certainly sometimes point to economic development as an outcome of immigration. But as the leading economist of migration, Sir Paul Collier, observes, 'migrants capture the lion's share of the economic gains from migration'.
It is not only with regard to migration that the censoring, sanitisation and rewriting of the past has been carried out. There have been attempts to argue that certain modern cultural phenomena have always been present. A recent example is the trans movement: Joan of Arc has been conscripted as a gender activist. Poor Joan, burnt by the 15th-century English, has been sacrificed to another cause by their descendants.
Most politicians and activists have always regarded history not as a source of wisdom, but as a handy rhetorical device. When history became a quasi-scientific subject in the 19th century, it aimed to cut through rhetoric and myth-making and discover often awkward and complicated truths. Despite postmodernist assertions that there is no objective reality, this is what most professional historians still try to do: that is why they read archives, analyse statistics and study context. But for some, what counts more than analysis is pushing a 'narrative' that serves a cause (and their careers), even when the evidence is against them. Some things are exaggerated; others are played down. African rulers' enthusiastic slave trading; violent Muslim conquest; the cruelty and oppression of many pre-colonial societies. In the West, this is linked with Left-wing obsessions about race and colonisation, but Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping – and for the sake of balance let me add Donald Trump – are equally keen abusers of history, with Tibet and Ukraine the main victims so far. No surprise there.
Our own history too has been and is being carefully moulded by people in unaccountable positions of influence, and is being propagated by schools, universities and museums – I noticed the other day that even the King's Gallery is not entirely immune. People mould history to serve ideological causes or in the hope of calming tensions, or (as in the case of museums) to attract new customers. Hence, the British tend to accept accounts of their own history written by historic opponents. We acquiesce in American accounts of the War of Independence (forgetting the slaves and indigenous people who fought for the Crown) and to nationalist accounts of the Empire.
One of the most taught subjects in English schools today is the Atlantic slave trade. Here, Britain's role, especially in abolition, was indeed globally epoch-making. Nevertheless, it is a brief and marginal episode in England's own long saga, and not its principal theme. The history of Britain's institutions is little taught, and the creation of England itself apparently not at all, despite England arguably being the prototype of the nation state. Why is there an England? Why a Britain? What is distinctive about them? You would be unlikely to find out at school.
It is notoriously difficult to decide what history should be taught and how. It is easy, however, to say what should not be taught: propagandist 'narratives' that are at best simplistic and anachronistic, and at worst patent falsehoods. One obvious example is that slavery and imperial exploitation created British prosperity. Another is that past empire makes Britain today racist – evidence shows the opposite.
History should teach complexity not simplicity. That past societies sometimes succeeded with resources far less than ours. That people thought differently from us, and were not necessarily wrong. That political decisions are hard and that the future is never clear (think of Chamberlain and Appeasement). Even children can learn these things. They might even remember them when they become adults.
Perhaps one day a responsible government will help this to happen.