David Starkey: When history becomes propaganda you get bad history

to say the historian dr david starkey was listening to that and joins me here in the studio thank you so much for coming in again such a pleasure to see you hello we appreciate it black history month a good idea a necessary idea um we have now a substantial black population it's very important to get the perspective right it's about five percent um they are in search of roots they want a sense of belonging here to do that you need a history but there is a great problem you see when history becomes propaganda which effectively it has become then i'm afraid you get rather bad history and i hate to tell you colin there was a great deal of bad history in your admirable summary you called mary c cole the nurse she wasn't you called mary seacole heroic she wasn't she was a really nice generous soul and you know what she went to the crimea to do not a nurse not to nurse not to set up a hospital not to tend the wounded she went to and i'm reading from her own autobiography which survives she went to set up and hotel and it was a hotel obviously not for ordinary soldiers ordinary soldiers didn't go to hotels it was for officers and she was there to make a profit and she sold luxury items and because she went out rather late in the war and she bought a great many luxury items which he hadn't sold by the time that the war ended she went bankrupt and yet we're presented with this woman as if she were florence nightingale quite deliberately it's a manufactured past now this is really dangerous and it's the great challenge to my colleagues in black history which is to be honest is to produce a real well-documented history now there's a remarkable book by um by a woman called miranda kaufman which is called the black tudors now when you look at it there's one thing that strikes you about a third of the book is written in italic type why because it's fiction we know so little about these people the most famous black in tutor england is of course called white he's called john blong as a joke he is henry viii's black trumpeter he is the only black in tutor england who's portrait we've got we know nothing else about him apart from his daily wages and then but an entire indo you can see what i'm meaning when you're in quest for roots you invent we used to invent you know stories about king arthur this is this is a new equivalent of the arthurians they'd like to call it propaganda yes define propaganda for me well it comes of course you as a catholic should know propaganda it is for the distribution of the faith and it's an attempt at creating a sense of belonging and rightness uh that's what it's about um which in some ways i said it's a worthy goal you made you you quoted burke oh by the way again forgive me another mistake was not a tory he was a wig you experienced a moment of conversion faced by the french revolution though he's become a patron saint of torres but this is what burke is talking about he's talking about the need to feel you're part of an organic entity that that we want our immigrants i passionately want our immigrant communities to feel that they're part of us but at the moment i think you're doing it in dangerous ways you're doing it by trying to invent routes which aren't there it'd be much better to be honest about it and to look at what has happened really in the last 40 to 60 years you see there actually is a potential genuine patron saying to black nursing in britain she is she's a woman called mrs pratt which may may not be as resonant as mary seacole she's nigerian she and she hasn't got a statue and nobody talks about her but she is the first known black nhs nurse she goes on and she returns to her native nigeria and she becomes a major figure there but there that is a story fighting again against discrimination here the establishment of nursing is something to be taken seriously that's a real story but you see it doesn't go back quite far enough we are requiring black britons to look at history throughout the ages almost to be colorblind to it to to derive lessons from history that have got nothing to do with race that tell us other stories other parables about about people hate love activism all the complicated stuff that history can can tell us about but they haven't got a stake in it but you see i think this is so wrong um they do have a stake because they're called human beings even though i said that you i was wrong but no sorry this is something i believe absolutely passionately let me tell you a little story it was when i was many years ago about 20 years ago when i was uh in america and i was selling my book elizabeth my great triumph number one best best seller and when i went into the the public libras in chicago which absolutely magnificent that post-modern building the entire front row was filled with a huge number of black women i thought oh my god what is going to happen i gave my usual spiel i sat there for me slightly nervous was i going to be asked questions on how many black ladies in wedding not a bit of it they were fascinated by elizabeth they were attached to the idea of a strong woman they wanted they wanted to know about her they wanted to know about her life and it is this problem if you prioritize one characteristic of a person skin color that's a problem similarly my own life you know i'm i'm a gay i'm puff now when there is no no no no we can we can use those derogatory terms and when i was at lse there was a desperately serious attempt at setting up a sort of gay history group the meetings were dire beyond belief and i remember vividly one of my wonderful sardonic colleagues from the philosopher department come in came in sat down listened to 10 minutes of infinite boredom and got up sneered and said oh damn yet more puffs of the past but it's again it's when you identify with simply a particular characteristic and desperately quest david historians are always sorting aren't they i mean you're sorting wheat from chaff all the time and they've got to be well let me make this point it's got to be but necessarily by subjective criteria so for instance i cited two examples there of in our industrial history some people find industrial history a bit boring compared to interesting wars or subjugations or whatever else it is but those two items of historical history which tell really important stories about the communities of south wales and the scottish borders largely uncommemorated today is that because actually industrial accidents aren't very interesting they just happen or because we've there's been an active act of forgetting i don't think it's that it's that usually in in those industrial accidents that you describe uh certainly one of them was simply an act of god putting to see in the hurricane i know well let me i'm really going to enjoy this because i'm going to correct you dave yeah actually the whole of scotland knew there was bad weather coming right terrible european hurricane all over the north sea and only the ports of imoth and a couple of others on that berkshire coast went to sea because they were skinned and they needed the money so there is there is a story to be told there is a story to be told but it isn't that it's still an act of god and so much of course of the history of disasters is you want to learn a lesson it's not a terribly important lesson learning don't go out in a hurricane um and but even even other fun is largely receded because whereas of course dresden man-made man inflicted from which you can draw political lessons looms large again similarly with slavery one of the reasons that it's so prominent now is of course let's be quite truthful it's been weaponized and let's let's again just investigate this a little bit further one of the things you let's look at all the myths that surround that as well as the the absolute horror let's get it shouldn't need saying but let's say it again the horror of the thing itself you will repeatedly see for example that britain was the largest slave trading nation this is nonsense i have the exact figures in my pocket because they've been determined there are about 12 million slaves which are exported across the atlantic half of them are done by one country which is it yes porch spain portugal portugal brazil just under 6 million britain is next with three and a half but regularly it's misquoted similarly the constant refrain we're talking about statues commemoration the constant refrain that there are statues of slavers in britain there are no statues of slavers there are people who did other things and benefited from it but they're also again what we've completely failed to explore are the paradoxes who were the what you talking about tori which political party did the great slavers support the greatest of them the man whose statue is still in guild hall william beckford william beckford is a passionate pitite wig and you know what he's a great campaigner for liberty he supports wilkes he's why he's got his statue in guildhall there's a vast inscription on it which the city fathers clearly have never read and do not it's there it's because he was rude to george iii he's a hero of liberty and it's of course the wonderful dr johnson who summarizes all this nobody yelps more loudly for liberty than an american yankee slave driver

Channel: GBNews

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Keywords: GB news, gbnews, Colin Brazier, Gloria De Piero, Michelle Dewberry, Andrew Doyle, Inaya Folarin Iman, Kirsty Gallacher, Liam Halligan, Tom Harwood, Rebecca Hutson, Darren McCaffrey, Simon McCoy, Nana Akua, Mercy Muroki, Andrew Neil, Neil Oliver, Alastair Stewart, Dan Wootton, Rosie Wright, Great Britain, United Kingdom, England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Alex Phillips, news, breaking news, Mark Dolan

Id: TvwPybHC5xw

Length: 10min 52sec (652 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021