Why the new British citizenship test distorts history Tread carefully … history is a contentious subject. Photograph: Darren Staples/Reuters The Home Office has been struggling for some time to devise a model of "Britishness" to which immigrants seeking British citizenship should aim. Many of its efforts lean heavily on history, and on teaching prospective citizens about the great events and people of Britain's past. Usually this is done in order to foster admiration for our past achievements. The latest manifestation of this is the Home Office's 180-page syllabus on Britishness, on which prospective citizens will be tested before being allowed to stay. Of course any "national history" is bound to be controversial. It may be because I'm a professional historian, and somewhat proprietorial towards my subject, but I've always objected to British history's being used – "prostituted" would be my word for it – in order to inculcate patriotism. Still, if the government is set on this, there may be a better way of doing it.
Roy Hattersley: Why I was wrong about Harold Wilson | Politics 27 Feb 1963, London, England, UK --- Original caption: London, England: Harold Wilson in February 1963 as the newly elected leader of the Labour party. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis When, 50 years ago, on 14 February 1963, Harold Wilson was elected leader of the Labour party, even many of his supporters – wrongly I now believe – thought him a politician without principle. Wilson had endorsed Aneurin Bevan's denunciation of the American-led South East Asia Treaty Organisation, and then – when his hero had resigned from the frontbench in protest – taken the vacant place in the shadow cabinet. He had supported the Nato nuclear alliance, but when Hugh Gaitskell promised to "fight and fight again" to save Labour from unilateralism, Wilson had challenged him for the leadership on the grounds that party opinion must be respected. There was a rational justification for both decisions. The suspicion of dishonesty was increased by Wilson's publicised lifestyle.
Paul Kennedy: "It’s my contention that the story of the 'middle people' hasn’t been told" You claim in your new book that the turning point in the Second World War occurred much later than is often argued. Does that put you at odds with the views of many of your colleagues? It puts me at odds with many works! There’s a colossally stupid kind of claim, which is to say, “Moscow, December 1941, the battle that won the Second World War”. That would have surprised the Americans and the Japanese! I’m also tilting against a very popular strand of literature that says, “The decisive battle, the decisive intelligence breakthrough” – I’m saying that history is much more complicated than that. So I’m tilting against a) a historiography that is very populist and makes large claims and b) the notion that, by late 1942, it was downhill all the way for the Allies. You argue that the problem solvers were those you call the “middle people” – engineers rather than strategists, on the one hand, or troops, on the other. It’s my very strong contention that their story hasn’t been told.
The Spirit of '45: where did it go? | Film | The Observer Ray Davies, robust, articulate and dignified, aged 83, veteran campaigner, a Labour councillor in Caerphilly for 50 years, sits in a Spanish civil war beret and recalls the time, in 1945, when he was 15 and had already worked two years underground in Welsh mines. "In those days, it wasn't safety that came first, it was coal," he says. "We were in the pit and the message came down – 'Labour's won by a landslide!' Ray Davies is one of a number of octogenarian "stars" of The Spirit of '45, an uplifting documentary by the film-maker and master chronicler of ordinary lives, Ken Loach. For The Spirit of '45, Loach has mined British regional and national archives and found deeply moving film footage and sound recordings that powerfully illustrate a country determined to build a very different community out of the rubble of war and create a new social fabric. June Hautot, 76, another of the film's stars, still lives in the house in south London where her mother died when June was 11.