“Almost exactly a year ago The Guardian carried an interview Alistair Darling in which he warned that the economic cataclysm which was just starting to engulf us would be “arguably the worst in 60 years”. How we jeered, how the accusations of gaffe and blunder were hurled at the poor fellow.  We learned that Gordon Brown was infuriated by the Chancellor’s candour - Mr Brown being a politician who has never done candour - and the air was thick with speculation that Darling’s days were numbered. But of course he was right, bang on the money”

avers David Hughes in The Daily Telegraph today.

That is not how I remember it.  I recall that HM Government was playing down how serious an economic mess it had caused, and the Chancellor’s gaffe was to have let the cat out of the bag, rather than to have told us something that neither the Government nor we then knew.  Whilst Darling was right in his assessment of the state of the economy, so was everyone else who predicted that we were in danger of suffering potentially the most serious recession in fifty years, if not a century.

I have noticed how this story of Alistair Darling being an all-seeing prophet concerning the economy has gained ground during the course of the mainstream media’s silly season. Even if the Chancellor had been uniquely prescient as is now (falsely) claimed, he does not deserve any credit in the light of his almost immediate “clarifying” of what he had told The Guardian as reported in the The Daily Telegraph the following day, 31st August 2008.

Whilst some inaccuracies in films are understandable, for example there were two bridges at Arnhem but just a road bridge in A Bridge Too Far and others are pure Robin Hood style fiction from start to finish (such as Braveheart, The Patriot and Gallipoli) it is always disturbing when falsehoods are unnecessary to the plot, such as Lord Burghley’s (formerly Sir William Cecil) political demise in Shekhar Kapur's 1998 film Elizabeth.  Why do cinema and TV film script writers do it?  What purpose does it serve?

Hollywood’s distortion of the truth

In 2007, during the commemoration of the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade following the campaign led by Tory MP William Wilberforce, a curious statistic was quietly and casually repeated.  This statistic comprised the claim that until the abolition of the trade by the United Kingdom in 1807, British slave traders had transported as many as fifty million Africans into slavery.  Complete, definitive records as to how many individuals were kidnapped and sold into slavery no longer exist (if they ever did) thus the “fifty million” figure does not have any basis in fact and it is hard to resist the conclusion that it was simply plucked from the air.

It is interesting to note that according to the fifth census conducted in the United States in 1830, twenty-three years after the abolition of the British slave trade, the total black population amounted to 2,328,626 individuals, of whom 2,009,050 were described as slaves and 319,576 as being free.  The census recorded that the total population of the United States was 12,858,670.  The population of the United States had grown rapidly, given that in 1800 records indicate a total population of 5,308,483 of whom 893,602 were slaves.  In 1790 the figures were 3,929,326 and 697,681, respectively.

It is a fair assumption that by 1807 a significant proportion of the population of African descent had been born in the United States and had not been transported.  For instance without the trade, the slave population nearly doubled between 1810 and 1830 (1,191,362 individuals increasing to 2,009,050).  Against this, it must be borne in mind that Africans were being abducted on a relatively large scale over the course of a century. Furthermore, though the main destination was the American colonies, many Africans were delivered to estates in the West Indies, albeit on a much smaller scale. Also, many prisoners perished during the journey to their new “home” or very shortly thereafter.

Taking all factors into account, fifty million is still an implausibly high figure which can only have been an extrapolation from various other estimates and loose guesswork of the likely numbers of individuals transported at the very height of the slave trade.  It is immaterial whether the figure for abductions was five million or even five hundred thousand.  It was an ugly trade, but funny figures do not make it uglier.

What a complete and utter disgrace.

Said Huw Edwards in an article promoting the BBC programme “Gladstone and Disraeli: Clash of the Titans”,

“I have more than a few reasons to name William Gladstone as a hero of mine. He was an even greater hero to some of my ancestors. In the mid-19th Century, most of the Edwards family were tenant farmers in Cardiganshire. Refusing to vote for the local (Tory) landowner at election time was a very dangerous thing to do. In those days, voting was not a secret process. Employers or landowners could check up on how workers or tenants had voted. The “rebels” were promptly punished. One of my ancestors was thrown off his farm near Tregaron for daring to vote Liberal…….It was William Gladstone who put a stop to this obnoxious system by introducing the secret ballot in 1872.”

The subliminal message is that the Conservative Party of the past was not above underhand tactics to achieve electoral success.  However, the myths do not accord with the facts.  The Whigs and Tories of the nineteenth century were of the same social class and neither party nor their supporters, were wholly immune from the vice of seeking electoral advantage by less than fair means.  Thus, a tenant farmer who supported a Conservative candidate was just as likely to suffer the wrath of his Liberal supporting landlord. 

It is also important to look at the issue in context of the age. Whilst the Reform Act of 1832 extended the franchise to a limited degree, the Act that really began the process of “the working man” being enfranchised was the Reform Act of 1867. Thus, the opportunity for the great landowners to purportedly bully the “little people” into voting their way had only just arisen.  It is important to bear in mind also that the Reform Act 1867 was passed by a Conservative administration.  That administration lost power in 1868, only for the Conservatives to be returned to power in 1874 (after a secret ballot) with a large majority over Gladstone’s Liberals.

The secret ballot was a roaring success......but not for the Liberals.

Mr Parris as prescient as ever, predicts the new scramble for Africa.

“It is one of the grave distempers of our times, this prejudice towards the Jewish people, their nation and their collective identity. And one of the tasks of our times is its exposure, its combating and its defeat.”

Michael Gove

There has been considerable exaggeration concerning our so called “humiliation” at the hands of the Iranians by way of their seizure of fifteen Royal Navy personnel on 23^rd March 2007 and the alleged consequential loss of our military prestige.  That the abduction was allowed to occur reeks of incompetence on somebody’s part, but once it had taken place, we were left twisting in the wind until events took their course.

During the course of the past one thousand years the English, and latterly the British, have suffered numerous such “humiliations”.  There have always been steady supplies of tin-pot rulers and sometimes extremely powerful enemies who have seized our citizens or military personnel and subjected them to ritual, personal humiliation and sometimes even death.  It is the furore in the aftermath of such incidents that reveals our true mettle. These enemies always assumed the ease in which they inflicted the humiliation, was a sign of our weakness.  It was never so.  Retribution always followed by one means or another, even though the score being settled might be years in the coming.  These little embarrassments do no more than to strengthen our resolve to ensure that they do not happen again, so easily.

The seized personnel were pilloried for allowing themselves to be used for propaganda purposes by the Iranian Regime.  Regimes that pay no attention to the conventions of war have oft used captured soldiers for propaganda purposes.  The Chinese and North Koreans did so in the Korean War and likewise the North Vietnamese almost two decades later.  As we are not at war with Iran, it is not clear what proportionate response could have been made to ensure the earlier release of the hostages.  Besides, our military personnel cannot be expected to behave in a heroic situation on each and every occasion demanded of them, particularly when they are not at war with those who ambush them.  Not every imprisoned serviceman will behave like the prisoners of Colditz.  Even in Wellington’s Peninsula Army, arguably one of the best ever fielded by this country, seasoned soldiers ran away from time to time.  The Duke knew that most of them would return and fight another day.  Sometimes it is just not a good day to die.

Any argument that the abduction occurred because of our military weakness or lack of moral fibre is fatuous.  In many situations it is not militarily possible to rescue hostages, unless you are willing to spark the Third World War.  The mighty United States was forced to negotiate the return of their embassy staff seized by the Iranians on 4^th November 1979 and held for a little over fourteen months. Negotiation was the means of release for the crew of USS Pueblo, held for eleven months after being attacked and seized in international waters by the North Koreans on 23^rd January 1968. North Korea has never paid the price for that act of piracy.

Now it is only our pride that is hurt.  Only three centuries ago Arab slave traders regularly raided villages on the southwest coast of England, snatching thousands of free born Englishmen and women into slavery.  In July 1625, when as now, England possessed one of the most formidable navies in the World; these Islamic corsairs of Barbary sailed up the Bristol Channel, captured Lundy Island and raised the standard of Islam.  Now that was really embarrassing.

"DNA test can detect Picts' descendants"  reports The Daily Telegraph, today.  So far, so good.

 “A geneticist has created a DNA test for “Scottishness” that will tell people whether they are direct descendants of the Picts.”

Uh-oh.  I think the journalist added that middle bit about “Scottishness” himself.  It is not wrong in the widest sense, but it is not accurate either.  You see, the Picti were the real McCoy, a real native tribe like the Iceni and not the Johnny-come-lately, immigrant, warrior Scots and English who were Irish and German, respectively.[1]  The Scots were in fact invaders from Ireland and were distinct from the Picts and Gaels much as the Anglo-Saxons were distinct from the Celtic, British  tribes they displaced.  You will note that Dr Jim Wilson, of Edinburgh University, does not actually say that his DNA tests can determine “Scottishness”. The test is for “Pictishness” not “Scottishness”.

By the 11^th Century AD “Scot” appears to have become a description for everyone living in that area now known as Scotland, in the same way that "English" came to mean more than just Angle and/or Saxon. However, a descendant of the Picts can claim to have lived in these islands since time immemorial, whilst true Scots, like the English, a mere fifteen centuries.[2]

[1] Wikipedia reckons that the Picti and Gaels became the Scots, which is correct, but the Scots were a distinct tribe who hailed from Ireland and who colonised a significant part of what became Scotland.  Strictly speaking, therefore “Scots” are Scots, Gaels and Picts but the Scots were the politically dominant ethnic group who forged a nation in their image, in much the same way as did the English, south of the border.

[2] Examples of other jarring historical inexactitudes guaranteed to cause a fistfight if blurted in the presence of any descendant of  Hengest and Horsa during the course of an otherwise civilised conversation:

“When the English painted themselves from head to toe in woad, lived in mud huts and rode around in chariots, the civilised Romans lived in centrally heated villas.”

“Hadrian's Wall was built by the Romans to protect the English from the Scots.”

“The Legions of Emperor Claudius conquered England in 43 AD.”