Peter Wilby wonders whether it has occurred to Niall Ferguson, that historians in US universities might have abandoned the Republican Party because it "has moved so far from evidence-based policies" (First Thoughts, 8th June, 2018). The trouble is that for Ferguson, unlike most historians, history has rarely been "an evidence-based subject". In his biography of Kissinger, he ridiculously claimed that responsibility for atrocities and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people should not influence "how we assess his legacy"! Again by ignoring the evidence, Ferguson was able to claim that British imperialism, despite its greed for wealth, land and labour, its use of weapons, massacres, concentration camps and torture, was a force for good. He has acknowledged that the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 made mistakes, but fails to connect it to the earlier British and French intervention in the area!
So no, Mr Wilby, it almost certainly hasn`t! The British public has been badly served by biased historians like Ferguson, who misuse historical evidence, and by governments which fail to release over a million hidden files of evidence at Hanslope Park. Only by facing up to the truths about the past, and by unpicking the idea of a glorious Britannia, can the country hope to rid itself of its bigotry and racism.
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