Simon Jenkins - The Churchill row is part of the glib approach to history that gave us Brexit

By Dilip -
The idea of history as composed of heroes and villains is infantile. Inside every hero lurks an opposite. The best answer to a stupid question is no answer, as McDonnell said when asked his favourite Tory. Fake history may be a clever way to engage the empathy of the young with otherwise difficult material. But if the purpose of history is to offer lessons for the future, distorting it is fraught with danger.


Churchill, hero or villain? Prince Charles, goodie or baddie? Jesus Christ, yes or no? John McDonnell, modern Herodotus or fool? Tick the boxes and pass the GCSE. Welcome to the new history. McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, is entitled to dislike Winston Churchill, but why for Tonypandy? Churchill happened to be Liberal home secretary in 1910 and was asked to authorise a small company of soldiers to help local police during the Rhondda disturbances. He did so with reluctance and later professed sympathy for the miners. The one man who later died was hit on the head by a Glamorganshire policeman. The soldiers were not involved.

What is this really about? The answer is yah-boo history: binary storytelling charged with fake emotion, sucked dry of fact or balance. It is history as partisan docudrama. Why did McDonnell not mention Churchill’s role in the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent Germans? Does he not care about dead Germans? Is he for bombing civilians?

This may seem harmless fun, like Horrible Histories and 1066 and All That, or like “faction” films such as Vice and The Favourite. But we can disregard comedians and film-makers. We cannot disregard serious politicians. McDonnell may have been caught off guard, but this is not harmless. As history is raided, indeed raped, by identitarians and populists, glib judgments on the past become fodder for every tribal grievance. In Wales, any myth is history if the English are involved – though on Tonypandy I commend BBC Wales’s history blog by Phil Carradice.

Reassessing Churchill has moved from cottage industry to parlour game. His career straddled the most turbulent period in modern times, the strain of which on public figures should make current politicians hold their tongues... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/14/winston-churchill-history-brexit-john-mcdonnell

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