Reposted by Lorna Devenish
Very depressing that this highly misleading statistic is now being promoted by Conservative Shadow Home Secretary. Philp contrasts “foreign born” with “British citizens” but a lot of the people in the “foreign born” group ARE British citizens.
![Let's take an example. I teach the women's suffrage movement, in which many students will take pride. Should I leave out the bit in the First World War where the Pankhursts start spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories about the "hidden hand" of Jewish finance - and demanding expulsions? Or...
aren't students better off knowing that people (& societies) are morally complex: that those they most admire can get things badly wrong & that antisemitism isn't just something Fascists do? Given recent events,I think that's a better contribution to citizenship than crying "Up the Suffragettes!"
The problem with promoting "pride" or "shame" is that these things are hopelessly entangled. If I'm proud of Alan Turing, I can't also be proud of those who drove him to suicide. I can be proud of Josephine Butler, but not of the child trafficking rings she smashed. I'm with Gladstone on this:
[Screenshot] Gladstone looked to history for inspiration & illumination; as he put it in 1887, "No greater calamity can happen to a people than to break utterly with its Past". But he had little patience with "timorous" histories that looked only for the good bits:
"Our judgement on the age that last preceded us should be strictly just. But it should be masculine, not timorous; for, if we gild its defects and glorify its errors, we dislocate the axis of the very ground which forms our own point of departure".
As Gladstone understood, we do not honour the past by stopping our ears to the parts we don't like. History is not made by gods & monsters, but by human beings, who are constructed, like all of us, out of "the crooked timber of humanity". We can honour Churchill's war record, or Gladstone's progressive reforms, or the suffrage activism of the Pankhursts, without suppressing the darker impulses to which they, like us, were subject. We might even draw inspiration from the knowledge that remarkable things are achieved, not by plaster saints, but by people as flawed and fallible as ourselves.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cixgmtrg7nzy4gkmyfeosaox/bafkreigcxeavnwg56a3sain6g4fxlbmaskbogtfc4yegeohwxmporto6ai)
