As an Anglo-Scot, I had a dog in the fight that was the Scottish independence referendum 12 years ago. I was a visceral opponent of the dismemberment of the United Kingdom, which, I believed, would damage all of us in the British and Irish Isles. As the UK’s ambassador to the UN in 2014 put it, “it was clear that Scottish independence would have had a devastating impact on the UK’s standing in the world, much greater than withdrawal from the EU ever would”.
Still, I felt obliged to consider Scottish nationalists’ arguments, and one I came across was this: Britain equals Empire equals Evil. Therefore, the Scots must separate themselves and sail off into a bright new, sin-free, independent future. Having read British imperial history for more than 20 years, I knew that the simple equation ‘Empire equals Evil’ is historical nonsense. But that was when I first noticed that a distorted narrative about Britain was being used to fuel a destructive political cause. And I said to myself: “Someone needs to correct the record.”
Scroll forward seven years to 2021. The Tory Minister for Equalities, Kemi Badenoch, is concerned about the divisive effects of the Left’s racial identity politics. She’s just championed the report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which urged us to stop thinking in terms of white oppressor and black victim, since, in terms of educational and other outcomes, Asian Britons are doing very well and the ones lying at the bottom of the social heap are poor whites.
Kemi has called me and the Cambridge historian, Robert Tombs, into her office. “What can we do”, she asks, “to tell a better story about Britain?” That moment was the germ of the book that Robert and I have just published.
In four brisk chapters, Our Islands’ Story: A Better Story about Britain, presents the history of this country and its empire. To recent generations of Britons, whose school education has left them with only fragments of historical knowledge – say, how it felt to be in the trenches during the First World War, or what it was like to be an African slave in the 18th century, or what the Nazis did – we want to give a coherent narrative of how the country they live in came into being.
What we have here in Britain didn’t drop out of the sky. It had to be built over many centuries, sometimes at very great cost. I have stood on the hill in northern Italy, where my mild-mannered father found himself playing stretcher-bearer in the miserable winter of 1944. What was he doing there? Defending the country he’d inherited, both for his sake and the sake of generations to come.
If we don’t understand what it’s taken to create and protect what we’ve received, we’ll have no idea how extraordinarily privileged we are. Ignorant and arrogant in equal measure, we’ll take our inheritance for granted. We’ll casually trash it. Maybe, like the students in France today, we’ll gleefully burn it to the ground.
The story that Robert and I tell is no fairy-tale. Britain’s history has had its fair share of failures and horrors. We don’t airbrush them out; we show them – dreadful civil war, abominable slave-trading, terrible famines, atrocious massacres. No doubt, all this is lamentable, but it really shouldn’t surprise. British history – like any other – has been populated by creatures and sinners, not gods and saints.
Nevertheless, our imperfect ancestors succeeded in creating some very valuable traditions and institutions. So, in the final chapter of Our Islands’ Story, we distil Britain’s history into an admirable legacy. Part of this is, in fact, a long and encouraging tradition of racial equality.
The movement to abolish slavery in the late 1700s was based on the Christian conviction that all human beings are fundamentally equal. This conviction was extraordinarily popular: in 1791 about 30% of the adult male population signed anti-slavery petitions. In the 1860s, textile workers in Lancashire went hungry rather than work on slave-produced cotton from the American South. And in the 1940s, British locals and policemen refused to comply with the US Army’s attempts to impose racial segregation.
This – and the rest – of the valuable legacy of our islands’ story deserves our admiration. And if our admiration, then also our loyalty.
Nigel Biggar, CBE, is Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas and, with Robert Tombs, author of Our Islands’ Story: A Better Story about Britain (Swift, £20)
