Britain’s Contested History
by Bernard Porter
Bloomsbury £20

HISTORY is a central front in the “culture wars” supposedly roiling British politics. Indeed, it may be the central front, other than the issue of trans rights.
 
The empire and its reverberations, who should and shouldn’t be on statues, what should be taught about the past in schools – the politician, particularly the Tory politician, who doesn’t have a sharp soundbite ready on these questions will have a cloudy future.

That is not surprising. Control the past and you have a fair shot at controlling the future too. You can set the parameters of the expected and the acceptable, framed by a common understanding of who “we” are and what “we” do.   

For example, a book published a few years ago argued that Britain was more or less unique in never having had a revolution. This observation, entirely inaccurate, would, if accepted, appear to preclude having any sort of revolution in the future.
 
Today, there is nothing Tories like less than being reminded of Britain’s record in the slave trade, in colonial violence and exploitation, all of it resting on racism.  

On the other hand, they do enjoy pretending that Britain won WWII more or less alone, with the Red Army in particular written out of the narrative.
 
They know that the truth eats away at the pedestal on which they stand politically, and that Conservatism is best served by comforting myths and misrepresentations.

Into this terrain – minefield or quagmire – steps Bernard Porter, distinguished historian, mainly of empire, with a short book summing up his reflections.

Porter canters through the last 200 years of British history, generally with a pleasant lightness of touch. However, his message boils down to this – there’s a lot of history, differing viewpoints have something to offer, there’s stuff to be proud of, stuff less so etc.

His attitude lacks a central framing that might give it some extra coherence. He devotes a chapter to the Empire, his professional speciality. He doesn’t like generalisations about imperialism. He writes that "Britain has usually been good at making the best of bad jobs” and that the empire is usually presented as “more atrocious than it was.”

While Porter, who now lives in Sweden as he tells us several times, is sceptical concerning conventional political definitions of patriotism this attitude does not best equip one to challenge it.  

He inclines towards a generally social democratic view of the world, which extends to evident sympathy for Jeremy Corbyn but not to a class-based understanding of history.

Porter plunges into contemporary politics, however, with a chapter on Brexit. He is very much against.  

The referendum vote he regards as an expression of mass stupidity and ignorance, based in large part on lies peddled about the past by the leading “leavers.”
 
Johnson and Farage did do that, it is true, although what effect they had on the outcome is imponderable.

The case against the EU was above all a democratic one, and that is an argument with which Porter does not grapple.

He may well be right about people “misremembering the past” and making choices based on flawed understandings of history. But what might lead to a more rounded appreciation? Apart from a general predisposition towards tolerance and reflection, there is little suggested here. More Marxism would minimise the muddle.