Stuart Cosgrove: Johnson and co want to rewrite history to suit their narrative

Nothing surprises me about the gall and sheer nastiness of the current Tory government and their shameless lackeys north of the border.

I have ploughed through the report and tried wherever possible to give generosity of spirit to some of its arguments. Much has changed in Britain. We are no longer caught up in a black and white newsreel of hopeful Jamaicans stepping down for the SS Windrush, and at its best, the report unearths data that challenges some of our orthodoxies about family and schooling.

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Yet something about it smacks of ­convenient storytelling and conscious repositioning of the ideologies that ­surround race and racism.

Each night if the rain recedes, I stand outside the backdoor of my house for fresh air. It is a decent if unspectacular view which looks down the hill over the guardian angel of learning, a statue that sits on top of the Dennistoun Public ­Library, majestically reading a book. It is not the worst place to reflect on history and ideology.

The library is an original Carnegie building opened in 1905 and across the years some of Glasgow’s finest citizens, including the actor Bill Patterson and the polymath Alasdair Gray have ­occupied the wooden seats inside, doing their homework in the days when laptops had yet to be invented, let alone issued to free to school kids.

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The reason I was outside was simply to breathe. According to theoreticians, the leaders of successful societies never have to resort to crude propaganda to win our consent, they rely instead on ideology, which according to the patter – “is in the air we breathe”.

Ideology is the values and beliefs of a community develops to promote its socio-political interests. Make no ­mistake, this week’s report on race was not about ­advancing opportunities for diverse ­communities, it was about constructing an ideological story, one designed to emphasise British exceptionalism, a ­favoured theme of this self-serving ­government. The authors of the report have even claimed that Britain can be seen as a beacon for other white-majority countries.

Take the benefactor of my local library, Andrew Carnegie, he is a man of many narratives. Most Scots feel comfortable with his status as a philanthropist, there is something comforting and reassuring about it. Try telling that to Betty Mabry, the funk-rock singer and one time wife of Miles Davis who grew up near Homestead, Pennsylvania the town that was brought to its knees in the most brutal ways, as Carnegie and his goons fought trade unions to fend of improved wages and conditions in his steel works.

Official ideology sees Carnegie as a personification of the American dream, rising from poverty to untold wealth, the Scots see him mainly as a benefactor, whereas the sons and daughters of the ­defeated workers see him as a cruel despot. The fact that another Scot, Alan Pinkerton, co-ordinated the violent Homestead strike-breaking, works against another settled Scottish story, that as a nation we are at the progressive forefront of workers’ rights.

American ideology has written a ­powerful and at times immutable ­story that claims democracy is the most ­advanced form of government, that ­economic growth is necessary for the good of our culture, that equal ­opportunities are there for those that work hard, and that the private sector is always more ­efficient than the public sector.

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Britain abides by many of these, believing sometimes laughably that it has a special relationship with America. The report presented this week adds another astonishing chapter to the story, that the slave trade had a positive outcome, ­creating a new inflection that “culturally African people transformed themselves”.

The chairman of the report, Tony Sewell, was from the outset a deeply ­divisive appointment. He is a man with a reputation as an outlier who has in the past come close to glorifying empire whilst denying white privileges. He seems to have delivered for his masters and the report implies that a line should now be drawn on the past and its impacts.

It is highly convenient that this should come at a time when activist and historians are digging deep into the wealth accrued through slavery and the massive historic scandals of land ownership.

Just as the Conservative right fled from European Union when new wealth tax laws were imminent, so now we have a report that seeks to draw a veil over how past wealth was accumulated, just at a point when the reparations movement was racking up small success. Aberdeen University’s recent decision to return the looted Benin Statue to Nigeria is just one of the many reparations being undertaken here in Scotland.

Nor do I agree with one of the report’s implications that history can be concluded. We know from literature, poetry, music, and political activism that slavery is still a painful and present factor within African American memory. We know that many Scots are only now learning about the brutal practices that forced people from their lands in the Highland Clearances, and try telling an Irish historian that the Great Famine is no longer a substantial historic moment because there is an O’Neill’s pub in the Merchant City.

If Boris Johnson is paying attention, which is not guaranteed, it must frustrate him to hear President Joe Biden talking about his ancestors arriving in America on coffin ships forced from Ireland, by famine. His story implies that Johnson will have to think harder about Biden’s perspective on that special relationship and trust me, a few ill-conceived ­leprechaun jokes won’t cut it.

Black Lives Matter ignited many questions that some politicians would rather supress. The pathology of policing in ­urban America was a primary cause but it was also a movement committed to rewriting past wrongs in civic society, in education and in the workplace. One of the ­introductory sentences of the ­Government report will make chilly ­reading: “There is a new story about the Caribbean experience which speaks to the slave period not only being about profit and suffering but how culturally African people transformed themselves.”

What lies behind this report is reconfiguration of British historical narratives to suit the new conservatism of Boris Johnson and his crew. So far, we have had the Brexit campaign, missives about reclaiming the union flag, the denial of a vote on its independence in Scotland, patent ­fantasies about Global Britain and cringeworthy hipness, such as Empire 2.0.

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If the objective is to re-write narratives about diversity perhaps the government in London could begin by reframing ­immigration policy by recognising that Scotland with an ageing population has different migratory needs than the south of England, or by equipping asylum ­seekers to work and pay taxes.

This report however much it yearns to mark out new ground is a national project which is clearly a reinvention of Britain’s imperial past and a reiteration of the specialness of the Union at its historic height.

It is not good news for Scotland or its diverse citizens and we should not be fooled by its vainglorious claims to new thinking.