Last month, more than a hundred historians wrote an open letter demanding changes to the history section of the Home Office’s citizenship and settlement test saying it presented a misleading view of British history. Here, Frank Trentmann – who initiated the letter – and Stephen Parkinson, a former Home Office special adviser, debate the matter. Trentmann writes in a personal capacity.
From Frank Trentmann:
Dear Stephen,
I am pleased to debate official history with you. After all, you helped write what is probably the most widely read history chapter in the country.
We – 181 historians – are not saying we have one correct interpretation of the past. We range from bright young scholars to the most eminent historians writing today, and have different philosophies and politics. But we are experts and object to the misrepresentation of history.
In my view, the problem lies in a combination of errors, omissions and distortions. The pages are littered with mistakes – e.g. p. 37 says the Bill of Rights (1689) meant that a ‘new Parliament had to be elected at least every three years’; actually the Bill just said ‘frequently’. My first question, however, is about deletions. In previous editions, there are references to the deaths in the middle passage and colonial independence movements. These were cut out just as the history section was made longer and mandatory. Now slaves were ‘travelling on British ships in horrible conditions’ (p. 42), an unfortunate phrasing given that several hundred thousand died on board. Why cut out deaths?
Even great Britons are airbrushed. Alan Turing is celebrated for his inventions, but we are not told that he was persecuted, castrated and died. Elizabeth I previously had ‘many enemies’: now she is always Gloriana. Victorian politics is summarised as a shift from landed property to the urban middle classes. There is no Lord Palmerston or Salisbury, no constitutional crisis of 1910. The official test question about D-Day gives ‘British invasion of Europe’ as the correct answer – what about the Americans and Canadians who died on the beaches?
A grown-up country deserves a grown-up history. The Britain we get is a caricature, always great, always leading and almost always alone. Great Britain becomes a little Britain shouting for attention.
As someone who cares for history, you will, I hope, join our demand for a review of the handbook.
Best wishes, Frank
***
Dear Frank,
I’m afraid I didn’t write the Life in the UK history chapter, but as a Home Office adviser when it was published, I’m happy to discuss it – especially with such an eminent group.
It is hard enough to define Britishness, let alone devise a test for it – as Sir Bernard Crick was asked by David Blunkett to do in 2002. Despite agreeing that a basic sense of UK history was important, Crick argued that it should not form part of the test. Inevitably, many simply skipped the history pages he wrote. I hope you would agree that it was right to change that?
You raise ‘errors, omissions, and distortions’. The first, alas, are perennial (Crick’s edition had some clangers), but the second two are more serious charges. I can’t explain Elizabeth I’s ‘many enemies’ – they are absent from the first edition, appear in the second, then disappear again – I think you may be reading too much into that. But I agree that the barbaric death toll ought to be part of any account of the slave trade. I have no problem with Crick’s rendering, which rightly called it evil.
There is no malign intent behind the omissions. The absence of Salisbury and Palmerston hardly suggests a clandestine jingoism. (There is no Disraeli either – who, in both previous editions, has Victoria proclaimed Empress of India.)
This is no caricature. Successful invasions of Britain by the Romans, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Vikings, and Normans are all mentioned, as is our long dependence on immigrants – from monarchs like William of Orange and George I to the skilled tradespeople of the Middle Ages. The Irish plantations, the potato famine, and highland clearances are treated candidly, as is Cromwell’s brutality in Ireland.
Alan Turing is no more ‘airbrushed’ than Benjamin Britten (p. 91), whose sexuality also goes unmentioned. But his example is instructive. Turing is significant because he invented the computer and helped to crack Enigma. Is his sexuality equally important, as you seem to suggest? Perhaps – but for what it tells us about ourselves, and how we construct history. His Royal Pardon, the enactment of Turing’s Law to right the injustice wrought on countless gay men like him, and his honouring on a banknote are now important things to know – not just to understand Alan Turing, but to understand modern Britain. None of these could be mentioned in the 2013 handbook for the simple reason that they had not yet happened.
A new edition will need to cover the introduction of same-sex marriage, the Scottish referendum, and Brexit (good luck to whoever has to condense that into a brief, uncontentious paragraph). A handbook like this should be (and is) constantly reviewed, but we will never arrive at a ‘final word’ on the matter – and nor should we.
Best wishes, Stephen
***
Dear Stephen,
Your scatter shots miss the mark, I am afraid. The cutting out of dead slaves is part of a pattern. I am pleased you agree that the slave trade was ‘evil’, but the official Home Office history swapped ‘evil’ for ‘booming’. Now slavery was an ‘overseas industry’ but ‘illegal’ within Britain ‘by the eighteenth century’ (in fact, Britons debated precisely this question). The previous acknowledgement that ‘Liverpool and Bristol gained great prosperity as a result of this trade’ is cut, too. In short, Britain is quarantined from the bloody enterprise, which historians have shown is a myth.
Difficult parts are airbrushed or removed, with bizarre results. Appeasement, for example, is cut out, which makes a mess of the second world war, and downplays Churchill’s achievement.
On Alan Turing, similarly, my criticism was not that his sexual identity should have been mentioned but that he (and others) were persecuted for it. We can only learn from history if we are prepared to acknowledge mistakes.
From your own list of examples, let’s take Ireland. In the 2007 edition, ‘James I began a policy of “plantation” or colonisation by force in Ulster’. Now we get ‘the English government encouraged Scottish and English Protestants to settle in Ulster.’ Such bowdlerisation runs throughout the book. Force and encouragement are two rather different things, would you not agree?
Personally, I believe an understanding of key historical topics is useful for citizenship. Germany expects applicants to know that ‘racism’ was at the heart of the Nazi regime. By contrast, the current British text has removed ‘racist ideology’ from Hitler’s mind and, instead, says that he ‘believed that the conditions imposed on Germany… were unfair; he also wanted to conquer more lands for the German people.’ Such an explanation should be unacceptable in an official, mandatory history. The second world war was not a conventional war but a war of extermination. Since David Cameron, prime ministers have supported a Holocaust memorial. In the book that ‘has been approved by ministers and has official status’, the word Holocaust does not even appear.
You are right, we shall never have a single consensual history. There were flaws, too, in the Labour version. Where we differ is on what history is. Yes, the official history has (some) facts, but what matters is the meaning given to those facts. That there is no single right interpretation is not a license to edit, distort and falsify the past according to one’s whims.
Best wishes, Frank
***
Dear Frank,
I’m surprised to be accused of ‘scatter shots’ – I was simply trying to engage with the range of points you raised.
Indeed, I think your eagerness to discern a ‘pattern’ of ‘bowdlerisation’ is driving your own scattered and selective approach. There are certainly flaws and errors – just as there were with both previous editions (and in every work of history) – but I don’t think the narrative you are seeking to impose – that the current version seeks to ‘edit, distort and falsify the past’ – is borne out by the text.
For instance, I agree that the statement that slavery was ‘illegal’ in Britain misrepresents Lord Mansfield’s judgment of 1772 (widely misunderstood then and since), but I don’t agree with your suggestion that the handbook seeks to ‘quarantine’ Britain from the slave trade: it makes clear that this was an industry ‘dominated by Britain’ and that slaves were taken ‘on British ships’ which sailed ‘from British ports’.
I’m glad you’ve changed what you say about Alan Turing. When a future edition covers the recent pardons, it should certainly set out the persecution which many gay people suffered. But that is a different point to your initial accusation that failing to mention Turing’s sexuality in a short box on 20th century inventions is ‘airbrushing’.
Do you mean to imply that the changes you highlight have been made for a particular purpose? And are you only concerned with the most recent revisions? The Holocaust was not mentioned in the 2007 edition either – do you think that successive ministers (Labour and Conservative/Lib Dem coalition) omitted it to distort the past?
I see that your next book is a moral history of Germany since 1943. I think it’s right that future German citizens learn about the racist atrocities of the Third Reich. Today’s Bundesrepublik is, quite literally, a different country. Britain, more complicatedly, is the same country which both established and abolished a slave trade, and which built and dismantled an empire. That’s much harder to distil into a bite-sized nugget.
There’s a key point I think you overlook. The two previous editions contained a history section which people didn’t need to read and wouldn’t be tested on (and which contained its own narrative judgements). Now, we check they have engaged with a brief account of British history – but we don’t test what conclusions they have drawn from it. You can pass the test whether you think the British Empire was a Good or a Bad Thing (as 1066 And All That would put it) or if you think it’s a complex issue worthy of further research and reflection. I think it’s an important British value that we let people make their own minds up on such issues, and to debate them freely and frankly.
Best wishes, Stephen
***
Dear Stephen,
I am a historian, not a politician, and have no interest in scoring party political points. But I do not like to see history distorted, especially in an official, mandatory text.
You are wrong when you say that the text and test do not impose an interpretation. Take this question from the current Life in the United Kingdom: Official Practice Questions and Answers – (TSO 2019), p. 26:
Which of the following statements is correct?:
- Elizabeth I handled Parliament very badly during her reign.
- Elizabeth I had very good relations with Parliament.
Show me any Tudor historian (right or left) or school teacher who thinks this is a sensible dichotomy. However, since the Home Office insists on an ‘illustrious history’, migrants better tick 2.
I won’t bore readers with repeating omissions, but this version of the past eliminates a lot, from French defeats of the English in the 15th century, across the extremists of the civil war to appeasement, racism and beyond.
On Turing, you continue to misrepresent my criticism. It was not that we’re not told about his sexual identity. It was that ‘we are not told that he was persecuted, castrated and died.’ Your repeated suggestion – that it is only ‘now’, after the pardon, that it is important to know of the previous injustice – reflects the underlying problem. This history has room only for happy endings.
Historians follow basic standards and these are violated at multiple levels. The handbook says that ‘Britain has given the world some wonderful inventions’ and then includes insulin, MRI and the world wide web. The first was discovered in a lab in Toronto, the second by Paul Lauterbur (US) and then refined by Peter Mansfield. Tim Berners-Lee is, indeed, British but the web was born at Cern in Geneva. Why not be truthful and celebrate British-international collaboration?
Your note on West Germany illustrates the dangers when facts are twisted to suit preconceived notions. The Bundesrepublik is not ‘quite literally, a different country’ but, as its constitution affirms, the legal successor to the German Reich. That is why West Germany in the 1950s took on pre-war debts and paid restorations to other countries and many victims, though more should have been done. We are not guilty of the sins of our fathers. But, as citizens of a country, we carry moral accountability for our shared past. Why assume that Britons cannot handle conflicts, injustices or failures in their long history?
When over 500 historians (as of 30 July) find the official history so bad that they call for its formal withdrawal and review, you would hope that someone in government takes notice. On 12 June, the Prime Minister said ‘we cannot try to edit or censor our past’. Does this not apply to the Home Office?
With best wishes, Frank
***
Dear Frank,
I’m not sure whether that’s an actual question – it’s not one currently used – but the handbook does say that Elizabeth I ‘was very skilled at managing Parliament’ while James I and Charles I ‘were less skilled politically’. That’s a crude simplification, but I do not think it is misleading.
Topics like these could fill a doctoral thesis, but that’s not what this test is for. It’s 24 multiple-choice questions that might be sat by world-class academics or people fleeing persecution who haven’t had the privilege of formal education. It is, inevitably, reductive – but attempts to equip new citizens to continue their exploration of British history and debate it with others.
You miss my point on Turing: by suggesting that his story is incomplete, you are co-opting him to tell a different one – an important story, but not one which has to be told through his lens, or in a box on inventions.
I am not inviting you to make party political points – merely asking you to follow the ‘basic standards’ you champion and look dispassionately at each iteration of the text. You criticise the current edition, but turn a blind eye to what came before. For instance, Crick’s original text said this:
for many indigenous peoples… the British empire often brought more regular, acceptable and impartial systems of law and order than many had experienced under their own rulers… The spread of the English language helped unite disparate tribal areas that gradually came to see themselves as nations. Public health, peace, and access to education can mean more to ordinary people than precisely who are their rulers.
I’m sure that’s an excision your co-signatories would welcome – but I don’t recall 500 historians demanding its formal withdrawal.
The text could certainly be improved in some of the ways you suggest. But your repeated accusations that the past has been ‘edited’, ‘distorted’, ‘falsified’, ‘airbrushed’, ‘bowdlerised’, and ‘twisted’ (whether deliberately or not, you decline to say) are, I think, unfair – and unsupported by a complete reading of the primary sources.
We should constantly re-examine the past, and be open-minded to new stimuli which help us challenge our preconceptions. I have thought and learned more about Edward Colston, for instance, since his statue came down than I ever did while it stood. And I have learned from this exchange, so thank you. But I am wary of history by petition – however distinguished or numerous the petitioners.
It is a remarkable compliment that people from all over the world – including countries with whom we have a complicated past – want to come here, become British citizens, and help us write the next chapter of our national story. When they pass the test, they’ll receive a welcome letter from a second-generation Ugandan-Indian immigrant who now occupies one of the great offices of state. We must have got something right.
Best wishes, Stephen
Comments