No future for parties who rewrite the past

THE Jubilee was a time for national celebration – but for the SNP Government it was also an opportunity to pick yet another fight with Westminster.

A book for schoolchildren outlining the history of the UK and the Commonwealth should have been an uncontentious endeavour. Yet civil servants in Scotland urged a series of alterations in a bid to eliminate references they deemed to be problematic – including a mention of England’s 1966 World Cup win.

Also off limits was the Queen’s intervention ahead of the 2014 referendum, when she voiced her hope that voters would ‘think very carefully about the future’.

And officials took issue with a description of the Queen Mother’s death as a ‘tragedy’, which was said to be an inappropriate term given that she was a ‘very old lady’.

The supposedly ‘Anglocentric’ tone prompted an exchange of emails with Department for Education staff who were putting the book together, requesting changes to dozens of sections. And yet the Nationalists still refused to allow the publication to be sent to schools in Scotland, unless they specifically requested it.

It’s an episode that demonstrates the extraordinary pettiness of the Scottish Government – but isn’t it also deeply sinister for any administration to attempt to rewrite history?

We know that relations between the two governments are strained after years of the SNP stirring up division at every turn.

Whatever the opinion of mandarins and their staff in Edinburgh, the past shouldn’t be subject to such cack-handed revisionism.