Quite frankly, when I was teaching secondary school history, I would have loved to have been able to utilise clips from the BBC`s Horrible Histories series to enliven my lessons and increase pupil interest (Andrew Neil attacks "anti-British drivel" of BBC`s Horrible Histories, 02.02.20). What on earth does Neil find offensive? Is it not a good idea to get away from manipulated history, and teach children that so many so-called "British things" come from areas colonised by Britain. The song Neil heard included the lines: "Your empire`s built on fighting wars", and "most British things are frankly stolen". Playing this at the start of a lesson would provide an excellent introduction to an evidence-based analysis.
Failing to teach the truth about Britain`s far from "glorious" past has been an important contributing factor in seeing the UK as somehow exceptional, able to survive in "splendid isolation" as the myth about Britain`s pre-WWI position mistakenly informs us. Perhaps Neil wants to believe that Britain really was "alone" in 1940, that British imperialism existed only to spread "civilisation", and that atrocities were only committed by our enemies, but such colonial amnesia has to stop. The 2013 legal case brought by thousands of Kenyans against the British government for various acts of imperial barbarism after the Mau Mau rising, opened many eyes, but not Neil`s, it seems. What does he think is the reason the thirty year rule has been ignored so often by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that there now exists an archive containing 1.2 million files, going back to the end of the Crimean war, hidden from historians?
How much longer will the policy of externalising everything of the past which does not glorify our history, and show the country and its politicians in a favourable light, continue? When history is manipulated like this in other countries, we call it "brain-washing"!
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