Teaching Britishness.
Posted by Will Haggard on February 6th, 2007
The debate brought forward on the subject of Britishness, and the stomach churning article which we are directed to in the Independent on government initiatives to teach Britishness in the classroom, leaves some serious questions unanswered.
Alan Johnson proclaims that we are ”a nation built from and by people from other countries.” A new GCSE combining History and Citizenship should thus be built on this premises ”emphasising respect for other cultures and tolerance of religious and sexual differences - and would debate such concepts as freedom of speech and justice.”Â
 As admirable as such initiatives at first appear, has Alan Johnson actually bothered to read British History? Such trendy contemporary values as “respect for other cultures, tolerance of religious and sexual differences, which sound like they’ve been lifted out of an equal opportunities manual, smack of contemporary values being imposed on the past to suite the political agendas of the present. Â
“We are a nation built from and by people from other countries,” is a fantastic description if one were to describe New World countries such as the U.S.A or even my mother’s country Colombia, in which generations of wholesale immigration have created entirely new countries over the last three centuries. To describe Britain in such terms, when this island last experienced an invasion in 1066 and has only received like the rest of Western Europe any sizeable amount of immigration in the last fifty years, is a gross misrepresentation of this country’s history and of the nature of European cultural identities. The truth of our history is that we are not built on multi-culturally diverse notions that ministers like Alan Johnson would have us believe.Â
By all means teach British history and its component parts in England,Wales,Scotland and Ireland but please can the ministers read their history books first! The teaching of our own island’s history will give us a better sense of what it really means to be British, including such notions as freedom of speech and the evolution of parliamentary democracy, than a trumped up citizenship class contrived to embrace purely today’s political agendas.
Absolutely. The British Isles had been net exporters of people for centuries - probably more than anywhere else. In our colonies, there was a lot of repression, theft, murder, drug dealing on a national scale, war and ethnic cleansing; there was not a lot of tolerance. Just because these things happened in the past, does not mean they tell us about ‘Britishness’, or are qualities that we celebrate. The fact that the Education Secretary does not want to let people inquire into the past with an open mind, but rather inculcate them with a message (regardless of what that message is) is saddening.
That we have been “net exporters” does not change the fact that we have also been quite important “gross importers”. To say that immigration is a modern phenomenon is a complete myth - even the Scots and the Angles came from overseas (Ireland and Germany/Denmark respectively), and that’s without getting into the Vikings, or the various waves of Dutch, Irish and other European immigrants. Britain is as much an immigrant nation as any New World country - indeed, more so than some, like Bolivia, where the genepool is still dominated by precolombian indigenous “blood”.
Multiculturalism is nothing new. Anglo-saxon settlements where often not far from Briton (what we’d now call “Welsh”) settlements, or later from Viking settlements, but the cultural and linugistic differences between these peoples were intense. The names of English towns, variously Anglo-saxon or Viking, give a clue as to the degree of separation between these two coexistent cultures.
To me, nothing reflects our rich and varied heritage as much as our language. The rise of “Hinglish” is only the most recent example of the porousness of English. While the old “francois” language is intercomprehensible with modern French, I challenge anyone to make sense of an untranslated Beowulf without having done a degree - because of the successive languages that have collided with English (Welsh and Gaelic, Norse, French, Dutch, Irish) since it was written.
I wholeheartedly agree that the Empire should be taught in schools. Its absence from the history curriculum is a criminally wide memory hole that must be filled. But even then the various peoples of the Empire have - willingly or otherwise - contributed massively to British culture.
Don’t sell short our rich and varied heritage.
I take the point that over millenia the British Isles has undoubtedly accumulated and been shaped by what has been termed “immigration.” It’s interesting that all the historical examples offered up of any seismic consequences happened over a thousand years ago, e.g Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Romans, Britons. I think one would be hard pushed to sow the rhetoric of cultural tolerance, diversity and respect within these chapters of our history. Given the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain, pushing Britons into the extremities of the British Isles and in turn fought bitter wars against the Vikings, this hardly seems like the historical premises which would justify a historical perspective as advocated by Alan Johnson.
It is ironic that 19th and 20th century Imperial British historians are now so out of vogue with the contemporary liberal/left for imposing their world views upon the progress of history, when New Labour is adopting exactly the same methods in Alan Johnson’s education intitiatives.
I wonder if Alan Johnson has ever read Winston Churchill’s epic “History of the English Speaking Peoples”? “A nation built from and by people from other countries” is just what he was talking about. Churchill thought we were an “Island Race”, shaped over the centuries by influxes of new peoples, that this was defining feature of our national character.
Perfect Mr Johnson might have thought! So in-tune with today’s politics, and who better than Churchill to have come up with it, him being our “Greatest Brit”!
Except, on closer inspection, the Island RACE that Churcill was banging on about might not be all that politically correct after all…