Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, in the London Independent (1-31-05):

The Tories want history to be made compulsory in schools. Who can disagree with that? Kenneth Baker's educational reforms in the 1980s pushed history into the wilderness and many parents have long argued that the subject should be made mandatory again. Careful now. This latest idea tossed out by Tim Collins the Conservative education spokesman comes at a time when a nervous, possibly manic condition is spreading fast through Michael Howard's party as they anticipate the oblivion that awaits them in a few months. As desperation rises Tories start kicking up dust storms over immigration, asylum and terrorists, and now jingoistic history. They warn the survival of the nation depends on our young understanding "our shared heritage and the nature of our struggles, foreign and domestic, which have secured our freedoms". The problem is that "shared heritage" for this lot means enforced whitewash and reassuring collective amnesia.

"There were Africans in Britain before the English came here," is the very first sentence in the seminal history book, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, by the white Yorkshireman Peter Fryer, who first became interested in the subject when he went as a reporter to cover the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury in 1948. Fryer is talking about the soldiers in the Roman imperial army who occupied parts of this proud island for more than 300 years. A division of Moors guarded Hadrian's Wall and for the next 500 years Africans were found in royal palaces and across the country.

Has Tim Collins read Fryer's tome? Or The Chinese Opium Wars, an old but essential book by Jack Beeching, the Thirties poet from Sussex who described how the British, through guile, bribery and violence, implanted opium in China causing widespread addiction, and grotesque profiteering? Does he know and acknowledge these facts? And if not is that because he never learnt history as a child or because he went to a school where pupils were taught a distorted history bloated with patriotic propaganda?...

Such partial knowledge is worse than no education at all. Better to ban history than create yet another generation of Britons who want to believe they are born to rule.

In 1992, Margaret Thatcher said in Bruges that Europe should be proud it conquered and civilised the rest of the world. In 1996, Tony Blair, said: "Consider British history and what it tells us ... an empire, the largest empire the world has ever seen". In Africa this month, Gordon Brown presumed to tell that continent that "we" should be proud of the people who built the Empire and that Britain should stop apologising for this history. Last week at the ceremony to reward contemporary great Britons, Brown roused the audience with more preposterous assertions about the unremitting greatness of this country and its history. Power does corrupt, the truth most of all.

There is no country on earth which can or should make such claims. Most don't. The endemic arrogance of our nation means it can do nothing else.