Peter Hitchens, one of the more vicious ‘little englanders’ peddling the poison of English chauvinism in the British tabloids, finishes his dire diatribe against an internationalist history by arguing that ‘The person who knows no history remains forever a child, unable to see when he is being fooled and robbed.’ How absolutely true. On this single point I am in one hundred percent agreement. The problem is, Hitchens and I have completely different concepts of what our history is.

For him, it is some imagined purely English affair – national history as a story and as something to be proud of. He rails against a ‘multicultural’ view of history and bemoans the fact that Florence Nightingale has been supplanted in the nation’s affections and consciousness by Jamaican born Mary Seacole. Whatever the respective merits or otherwise of these two very minor historical characters, neither has any real decisive bearing on the historical narrative that we ought to be developing.

Hitchens calls for a return to a national narrative but I suspect that if he was presented with a comprehensive one, he might not like what he reads. For England, like virtually every nation on the planet, is a product of wave after wave of occupation, settlement, immigration, assimilation and integration. For example, the great unifying moment of English history took place a thousand years ago when invading Normans, themselves originally from Viking stock, unified, by bloody terror, the Viking north with the Saxon south to create what we now refer to as the English nation. Prior to that, Britain was little more than a feuding patchwork of Saxon kings, VIking invaders and disgruntled Celts pushed ever more to the margins. And the Celts themselves? They too were uninvited immigrants who hailed probably from central Europe and before that possibly from northern India.

The Anglo Saxon history that Hitchens pines for is one of conquering Germanic tribes that supplanted the space left by the crumbling Roman Empire. Even the ancient Britons of Boudicca fame, were themselves travellers that had inched their way from the European land mass, part of a general migration of Homo sapiens who were spreading out across the planet in a process that apparently started in East Africa some one hundred thousand years earlier.

We certainly do need to be creating an historical narrative, one that begins some six million years ago when the transition from Ape to Man began. Although the details of that transition are necessarily sketchy and incomplete, that must always be the starting point for any school child. Any talk of a ten thousand year old god sent creation, with humans living alongside dinosaurs, should be confined to the dustbin reserved for ancient superstitions and fairytales.

In fact, I would suggest starting the historical narrative a whole lot earlier. The real starting point for any history to have a semblance of coherence is the big bang itself, a mere 14.7 billion years ago. We know it took place because we can still detect the radiation and light waves from that cataclysmic event. Of course, we should teach that ‘starting point’ with a great deal of scientific humility and openness given our still embryonic understanding of the physical and chemical forces at work. But as Peter Hitchens’ brother would insist, notwithstanding our own scientific limitations, we should not be filling our children’s heads with gobbledegook about gods and prophets, witches and devils, heaven and hell, and all the rest of the millennia of primitive story telling.

From the big bang we could safely jump, at least at high school level, to the formation of our own solar system some five billion years ago, and from there to the first stirrings of life on this planet. The jury is still out on how exactly inorganic matter evolved into organic cells, and how and why those first single cell creatures began to replicate themselves, but we are now certain that we humans are the highest product, at least for now, of the greatest show imaginable, the story of evolution. Forget for the moment the respective merits of Ms Nightingale and Ms Seacole, evolution is the one to get our children fired up about history.

And then to Africa, because the prevailing scientific wisdom would strongly suggest that we homo- sapiens all originated from Kenya and Ethiopia or thereabouts. The anthropological debates about how we migrated out of Africa, either in one migration or a succession of migrations, are truly complex but fascinating stuff. Did we modern humans inter-marry with earlier Hominoids like the Neanderthals, or did we simply wipe them out? Or perhaps a combination of both. The religious witch-doctors masquerading as learned rabbis, priests and mullahs, will do everything in their powers to stifle such wondrous debates, but this is the real stuff are human history, but Peter Hitchens has nothing to say on this at all.

Having laid out and explored the many contentious points of our dimly lit pre- history, without for one moment lapsing into religious obscurantism, we can move to firmer ground and more reliably sketch out our transition from hunter-gatherer to settled farmer, whose food surpluses inadvertantly allowed for the division of society into a majority of manual toilers and a tiny minority of rulers, administrators, and religious elites. The new, relatively affluent material conditions of modern, settled humans allowed for the creation of highly stratified and antagonistic classes the defining feature of a ten thousand year epoch, of which we have yet to transcend. And you can bet your very last quid that Mr P Hitchens and his Daily Mail masters will not want this ugly, stubborn fact implanted in the national psyche.
No one has yet put the matter more eloquently than that old grisly German historian and philosopher, beavering away in the British Library mid nineteenth century.

‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.’ Marx, Communist Manifesto, 1848

It is this class based historical outlook that drives Peter Hitchens and his ilk into paroxysms of rage. And why? Simply because they are the direct beneficiaries of such a system. They work loyally and tirelessly for the owners of capital and receive good remuneration for that loyalty. It is their task to propagate a national story that demonises ‘the other’ and divides the workforce into ‘strivers and skivers ‘, native born English against ‘benefit plundering’ immigrants.. But the stubborn truth is, as brother Christopher found out late in life, we are all immigrants in one way or another. Grandmother Hitchens turns out to be a Jewish grandmother from some far away East European location, and before that who knows where those Semitic origins lay.

One thing history does teach us with some degree of certainty, we are all, in the final instance, including our esteemed Mr Hitchens, of African origin, and therefore, by definition, migrants. And the history of every nation, Britain no less than others, is a history of many overlapping and intermingling cultures. We are all immigrants Mr Hitchens – get over it. But superseding that rich but in essence, superficial multiculturalism, multiculturalism that Hitchens so abhors, is a far more profound history, a history of bitter class antagonism, which even the Daily Mail has failed to totally obliterate from the national consciousness. And be sure, as the contradictions of capitalism become more pronounced, so too will those class antagonisms.

And so to modern British history. Britain was able, by dint of superior weaponry, nautical knowledge and entrepreneurial ambition, to create a formidable commercial empire. That empire was held together, principally by brute force and slavery, a fact that Hitchens prefers not to acknowledge. But for every decree and action taken by the British imperial authorities, there tended to be an equal and opposite reaction in the colonies. The reverberations of empire are still being felt around the world today, whether it be in Africa, the Indian sub-continent or right back here in the oldest colony of them all the thirty two counties of Ireland.

There has been a half-hearted attempt in recent decades to address this bloody history of imperial conquest and school children have responded positively to this more honest slice of global history. But Hitchens and his political counterparts in Downing Street are desperately trying to turn school history back to a mindless pro-imperial British propaganda exercise, all the better to allow successive British governments to indulge in new and bloody colonial exploits. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya readily come to mind. This is what the Florence Nightingale versus Mary Seacole nonsense is really all about.

Hitchens should ponder the wisdom of his own final sentence and see how his yearning for a colonial national narrative is in fact, a childlike yearning for a safe and simply bed-time story. Sorry Mr Hitchens, it just doesn’t exist.

PS. For a near definitive account of successive waves of migration to Britain there is no finer book than Robert Winders, ‘Bloody Foreigners’, a must for Michael Gove’s new national curriculum.