Stealing our heritage

I see that everyone's favourite race baiter, Trevor Phillips, has told a fringe meeting at the Labour conference that British history is insufficiently "inclusive", on account of the fact that it is dominated by white people, and has said that it needs to be rewritten, to rectify this fault. Thus, whereas in the past it has always been thought that the Spanish Armada was defeated in part by Lord Howard of Effingham's fleet, and in part by the vicissitudes of the weather ("God blew, and they were scattered", etc), children will now learn that, to quote a noted historian (T. Phillips, Esq), "it was the Turks who saved us". Whether or not this is actually true is irrelevant as far as Phillips is concerned: all that matters for him is that non-whites (and, in this particular instance, Muslims) should be represented as having made a sizeable contribution to the development of British society, throughout the last thousand years or more. Perhaps he will also suggest that, as the 100 Great Black Britons website has laughably claimed, Edward III's wife, Queen Phillipa, was in fact black, and that, accordingly, her son, the famous "Black Prince", was a half-caste. Maybe we will now be told that Shakespeare was black. And perhaps that Queen Victoria was Chinese, Dickens Indian, and the Duke of Wellington an Australian Aboriginal.

The fact is, that, regardless of the specifics of what happened to the Spanish Armada, it is simply not true to claim that non-whites have made a substantial contribution to British history. Rather, their contribution has been completely negligible, because their numbers have, historically, been negligible. Our history is overwhelmingly dominated by white people, because we are a historically white country, and those non-whites who now live here are unlikely to have roots in this country stretching back any more than sixty years. This simple fact, of course, is not one which finds favour with the likes of Trevor Phillips. After all, it does tend to undermine the repeated assertion that Britain has always been a "nation of immigrants".