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My Week

Posted by Sammy Wilson, MP for East Antrim, at 14:14, Wed 28 July 2010:

Prime Minister's questions last week was not the same without David Cameron, who had taken himself off to America to demean himself and the country as he sought to curry favour with the disastrous and unpopular President Obama. In his absence Nick Clegg showed why he is and will remain the junior partner in this coalition. There were cringes all around as he declared the war in Iraq illegal seemingly oblivious of the consequences which that carried for all the soldiers who took part in that action.

Across the Atlantic the Prime Minister was also blundering through a pathetic performance in which he did his best to put his own country down. We are the junior partner he declared. He might be right but what was the point in spelling it out. However he then went on to declare that that we had also been the junior partner in 1940 when we were fighting Hitler, a statement which bears no resemblance to the facts.

Maybe he was pandering to the shallow and ill informed American opinion which seems to gets it history from the fiction portrayed in the Hollywood movies in which American heroes are always the victors and the role of any other participants in world events is either downplayed or ignored. On the other hand he may simply be a victim of a British education system which has systematically airbrushed history teaching from the curriculum in the interests of political correctness.

As the education system from policy making to teacher training, to classroom teaching has been infiltrated by the left wing liberal, British hating, patriot bashing, politically correct fascists the teaching of history has gradually vanished from the classroom. Not just in history but across the curriculum knowledge has been replaced with skills, learning has been replaced with learning how to learn. History has suffered particularly because on top of the skills versus knowledge debate there is also the fear that to teach British History may offend the many foreigners who now attend British schools. So we have a nation including a Prime Minister it seems who are ignorant of our history and achievements an essential ingredient in building up a sense of national pride.

In a simple test set for university first year students it was found that only one in six knew that the Duke of Wellington had led the British Army at Waterloo, only one in ten could name a single 19th century Prime Minister and some of the students hadn’t heard of the Reformation and thought Martin Luther was the leader of the civil rights movement in America. If this represents the historical knowledge of the academic cream of our country what are the rest like?

For Mr Cameron’s information, we were not junior partners in the fight against Hitler and Nazism in 1940. In fact Britain and the British Empire countries were the only ones who stood between Hitler and victory. As in the First World War the Americans sat it out until they were either sure of who was going to win or they were forced into fighting. In fact while we were struggling for our very survival the Americans were doing very well thank you by selling us munitions which we had to take out loans to pay a debt which rose to $500billion and was only finally paid in 2006. Seventy years ago with our army evacuated from Dunkirk, most of its equipment left behind on the beaches, the RAF stood alone against the waves of German bombers and fighters in the Battle of Britain. We were not junior partners to the Americans who forbade some of their own countrymen who wished to join the fight against Hitler by enlisting in the RAF from doing so.

Maybe it was with his boss’s historical illiteracy in mind that the Education Minister Michael Gove has announced a reversal of the Labour Party’s plans to further dumb down the curriculum by putting greater emphasis on the learning of basic concepts and facts. If he succeeds maybe future generations will be more aware of our proud stand against fascism than the Prime Minister appears to be.