Michael Wood on crafting a new national narrative

“We need a meaningful story for the new generation – our composite union,” writes historian Michael Wood

Published: September 19, 2024 at 11:39 AM

Save

What a summer we have had in 2024, with an astonishing election result. There has been much talk of national renewal, and in due course we’ll see what that means. But it felt like a watershed. The new prime minister Keir Starmer’s dad was a toolmaker, his mum a nurse; the cabinet is majority comprehensive-educated, with more alumni of Parrs Wood High School than of Eton.

Ad

Among commentators – not just on the left – there’s been a growing feeling that 14 years of Tory rule, compounded by Brexit, have undermined what the great medieval historian Ibn Khaldun called asabiyyah: group feeling – the glue that makes societies work.

And watching TV on election night, I found myself wondering whether, like sediment settling in a glass, the time has finally arrived for a new national narrative.

One hundred years ago, the British empire reached its apogee. It was a world, as depicted in popular culture, orchestrated by Elgar and redolent with the scent of saddle soap and railway smoke. As Jan Morris memorably put it in the Pax Britannica trilogy: a world of P&O liners rolling down to Rio, of “dominion over palm and pine”, of an empire on which the sun never set. It is amazing to think that our oldest fellow citizens today were alive then.

What changes they have seen over the span of a single lifetime. World war, imperial decline, the election of ’45 and the birth of the welfare state. Wilson’s recovery in the Swinging Sixties, then the Thatcher era that saw Britain’s de-industrialisation. Blair’s Cool Britannia orchestrated by cocky Oasis optimism – till, fatefully, Iraq ushered us into the past quarter century to Brexit and beyond, with its starkly divided narratives of Britain.

That’s a very simplistic sketch, I know. But it seems to me that certain ideas of national identity continue to have a massive influence on us: on our vocabularies of nationhood, our understanding of the world and our place in it.

It’s nearly 30 years since the British flags were lowered in Hong Kong, signalling the end of the empire. Yet the narrative still grips us. Look at the plethora of Winston Churchill films released around the time of Brexit: Darkest Hour, Churchill, Dunkirk.

To be sure, these were great and often heroic events. My dad, injured on D-Day, was treated at Haslar Naval Hospital in Portsmouth; Uncle Syd was torpedoed and sunk off Tobruk; Uncle Bill saw Dunkirk, D-Day and the march to Berlin. My postwar generation grew up with all that, and also with the idea that we were good and right – that we were different.

My parents, aunts and uncles were good folk – hard-working, deferential little people who believed in that story. But they served a vast imperial project whose lineaments and oppressions are being laid out now by a new generation of historians and writers.

All empires are based on exploitation and violence: we waged war in every corner of the Earth. It is staggering to think, for example, that the enormous financial compensation for slavery fixed in 1837 was not paid off till 2015 – paid to the descendants of the owners, not those of the enslaved.

Of course, there are still those willing to prop up people’s sense of themselves with a tissue of myth and racial prejudice. But the time is surely now finally up for the old narrative. We need a meaningful story for the new generation – for our composite union in which all Britons, of whatever origin, recognise themselves. Fundamental to this is the meaning of history: how it sustains and defines us, and how to build that sense in a fragmenting world for a new, inclusive vision of our history.

The enormous financial compensation for slavery fixed in 1837 was not paid off till 2015 – paid to the descendants of the owners, not those of the enslaved

What should sit at the heart of a new narrative? The British empire has been the greatest influence on our history over the past three centuries. It shaped us all, whether our ancestors came from Govan, St Kitts or Bangladesh, from Bodmin, Halesowen, Cardiff or Belfast, our identities remade as Britons to go out to the world.

Now, for the first time, arguably, we have a government that reflects British society: 92 per cent comprehensive-educated, close to gender-equal, with a black foreign secretary and a female chancellor. It has taken 200 years since a demonstration for reform was crushed at Peterloo, almost 100 since the expansion of the franchise to include all women, and 80 since that transformative election of 1945. Not long, then.

Democracy, as we are often reminded, depends on the informed consent of the governed. In that, history has a crucial role to play. And history, after all, is written by us. All of us.

Ad

This column first appeared in the September 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

Authors

Michael Wood

Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester

Ad

Ad

Loading...

Ad

Loading...