Bad historians beware: the truth is out there

This October, inspired by the Guardian’s“bad science” column, Times Higher Education magazine decided to strike a blow for truth-lovers with the nation’s first “bad history” column, written by members of the History & Policy Network. No longer can lazy politicians or cliché-loving hacks slip on their rose-tinted spectacles and moan that things ain’t what they used to be: the professionals are coming. And some cherished British canards have already been hunted down.

How supine, for instance, are today’s MPs? Not very, actually, compared to 50 years ago, when it was possible for two entire years to pass without a single government MP rebelling—unheard of in the supposedly conformist present. Postwar social mobility, too, comes in for a beating, given that less than 20 per cent of manual workers’ children got into grammar schools in the 1950s and 1960s. Even the decline of the family isn’t safe from scrutiny, with the news that there were as many impoverished lone mothers in Britain in the 1880s as there were in the 1980s—the kind of detail that leaves “broken Britain” looking rather harder to blame on the Blair years.

This article first appeared in the December edition of Prospect magazine.