Michael Wood on the ‘life in the UK’ history test
I had made up my mind not to talk about the ‘Life in the UK’ British history test. Earlier this summer, 181 historians and authors had their say about its factual inaccuracies; about the lack of social history; the omission of black history; the downplaying of Britain’s role in the slave trade. But this, in a real sense, represents the ‘official’ narrative of our history. When the prime minister said, in response to the fall of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol, “we cannot pretend to have a different history”, we have to assume that this is what he means.
It all jogged a memory. In 2011, I did a talk at a history conference about one of our TV series, in which we took a single village, Kibworth in Leicestershire, through British history. This was history seen through a single community: bottom up, not top down; the people, not the rulers.
At the time, the new Conservative-led coalition government was revising the history curriculum: they’d done the same after the 1979 election, then rejecting the ‘Marxist’ approach of EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Rodney Hilton, which had been so important in my student days.
Government officials sat-in on my talk but were unconvinced. A year or so later, in January 2013, the new citizenship test came out with an emphasis on history, giving an – at times eye-opening – prominence to the achievements of the empire. You’d think that the British stood alone in the Second World War – when actually we had the wealth and manpower of the empire behind us. It spoke of there having been “for the most part, an orderly transition from empire to Commonwealth” (Really? Indian partition? Kenya? Biafra?). At the time, I put it to the back of my mind, mistakenly as it now turns out. This summer the government refused a request to talk about black history on the curriculum. It bears repetition: this is now the official vision of UK history.
I have two big issues with the test. First, the colonised themselves are not seen as actors in our history. Second, the collective action of the British people themselves is ignored. A central idea in our series on Kibworth was that great change in history also comes from below. In Britain progress has come from an often contentious relationship between rulers and ruled over hundreds of years. Universal suffrage is a case in point – votes for women were fully achieved less than a century ago.
And, of course, there are battles to be won. There are still huge inequalities: half of all the land of England is owned by less than 1 per cent of the population; discrimination against black people is starkly underlined by Covid 19; the first-past-the-post parliamentary system is, many feel, no longer fit for purpose.
Our liberties (as they stand in 2020) were not benevolently handed down by the rulers. They were hard won by the people, from the Levellers and the Chartists to the Suffragettes and 20th-century reformers. Our island story, then, (to coin a phrase!) is a dialectic. To suggest otherwise is either ignorance – or deliberate ideology.
A mature democracy depends on the informed consent of the electorate, and it is vital that the disputed nature of our history is understood as such. It’s not about ‘balance’ – that’s not how history works. Opposed views are the point: encouraging realism about our past, judgment, critical thinking. That’s also what makes history such a useful subject to teach.
This all emphasises the importance of history in shaping a nation. And the importance of establishing a shared past, however contentious, which changes as more is discovered, as new perceptions develop. History is never fixed, always in the making, never made. But it is always made by us.
The great classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff said that when the ancient Greeks wanted to summon the spirits of the dead, they made a ritual sacrifice, giving “blood for the ghosts”. History also raises ghosts. But when we imagine the spirits of the past alive again, one thing should never be forgotten. What we see is the product of our minds. The dead only come to life animated by our breath, by our imagination. It’s we who make the past come to life. And the vision changes depending on who does the spirit-raising. So we must keep rewriting history: that is the name of the game. And don’t pretend there aren’t different histories.
We should keep rewriting history: our ‘island story’ is not set in stone