Black History Month

Andrew Bowie Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. [Interruption.] Ah, the hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Abena Oppong-Asare) has returned to the Chamber; I congratulate her on securing this vital debate. It was a genuine pleasure to hear the passion and pride with which she spoke as she opened the debate earlier. I thank her for ensuring that we have had this debate. I think it is the first time that we have debated Black History Month in this place for five years.

Madam Deputy Speaker, do you know that really frustrating feeling when you want to find a book, but cannot remember the title or the author? That is where I have been today: racking my brain and googling furiously to find the name of a book that I borrowed from Inverurie public library when I was about nine years old. If anyone remembers the name of this book, let me know—write in! It was about a boy who somehow manages to go back in time to early 18th-century Britain and who falls in with a young African kid—a slave who has been transported from his home to the United Kingdom. This book—I really wish I could remember its name—stuck with me because it was the first time I had ever come across the idea that someone could be thought of as lesser than or enslaved to somebody else simply by virtue of their skin colour or place of origin. As a nine-year-old, I simply could not understand it. It really affected me and sticks with me today.

I grew up in 1990s and early noughties semi-rural north-east Scotland, about as far removed from the upbringing of the hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) as it is possible to get. I grew up in Inverurie, a town of about 10,000 people, and we had one BME child in my primary school of about 250 pupils. I remember the excitement when a young girl from Thailand joined our class in primary 7 and the incredibly ignorant but entirely understandable questions asked about her home by kids brought up in what I admit was a very sheltered and comfortable environment—Ome, if you are watching this, please forgive us.

I was lucky. I had brilliant teachers and parents who encouraged me to read and ask questions. In secondary school, Inverurie Academy, my history teacher, Mr Anderson—that teacher that everybody has; the legend—taught with an enthusiasm and dry wit that was infectious, using his broken golf putter to point to places on his already very out-of-date map. It was in Mr Anderson’s history class, and because of his teaching, that I began to have a real understanding and appreciation of the fight for civil rights in the deep south of the United States of America, of Rosa Parks, John Lewis and Martin Luther King, and of the fight for equal citizenship. I remember being so inspired by the “I have a dream” speech that I managed to get a CD of great speeches of American leaders, and I listened to it so often on my portable CD player that I wore it down.

I remember being sickened at the images of lynchings in Mississippi, Tennessee and Georgia and how people in my parents’ lifetime—people who looked and lived like me—could treat other people differently simply because of the colour of their skin. I remember asking, as someone who loved and still loves the United States, how a great country founded on the principle that all men are created equal could send young black men to fight and die for freedom in Europe but not allow them freedom and equality at home.

We are not America. We have a very different history in this country, which others have touched on, but my point is that education—teaching—is so important. It challenges, it forces us to question, it takes us out of our comfort zone, and it informs. That is why Black History Month is very important, and it is a shame that this is the first time we have debated it in five years.

It is very good that the Government have an inclusive and flexible curriculum, teaching kids more about Britain’s role in the slave trade, for example, but also about its role—the role of people in this place and of the Royal Navy—in the eventual abolition. Britain was the first and only imperial power to vote money, men and resources to ending the barbaric and inhuman trade in life that cities such as Glasgow and Bristol grew rich on the back of. I am glad that, because of the flexible curriculum, black, Asian and minority ethnic history can be taught across many of the themes of the history curriculum by reflecting the contribution of black, Asian and minority ethnic people across the ages in the UK and more widely.

One of the petitions relevant to the debate is e-petition 324092, entitled “Teach Britain’s colonial past as part of the UK’s compulsory curriculum”. I do not have a problem with that. In fact, I would encourage it—especially in Scotland, where time and again we pass over our colonial history. I have heard in this place that Scotland will somehow become the 60-somethingth country to wrest itself from imperial Britain’s evil clutches, as if we had nothing to do with colonialism and the empire and Scots were not themselves colonialists, traders, governors, plantation owners, soldiers, sailors and missionaries.

[Anne McLaughlin (Glasgow North East) (SNP)]

Does the hon. Member accept that there are many people involved in the independence movement who make documentaries and are banging the drum to say that Scotland’s role in the slave trade has been overlooked? We want people in Scotland to be aware of it.

[Andrew Bowie]

Absolutely. There are people in the independence movement and the Unionist movement who would say exactly the same thing: we need to have an honest and robust debate about our history, good and ill. I agree with the hon. Member.

We should teach about our colonial past in schools. We should examine our past critically. We should examine why empire existed in the first place, how it came to pass that a quarter of the globe was under British rule, why European powers vied with one another in the race for Africa, why family of mine and so many other normal Scots found themselves working for a colonial administration in the Indian subcontinent—so much so that at one point, seven out of 10 colonial administrators in India were Scottish—and why Glasgow was the second city of empire.

As the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin) said, in Scotland we should front up and accept the fact that we were very much at the forefront of exploration, expansion, invention and, at times, exploitation. We must do that in a rational, sensible and mature fashion. We do not learn by cancelling history, renaming tower blocks, removing statues and covering up museum displays. In short, we should not hide our history away, for that is what it is—history. It is incredibly complicated because it is written by us—human beings—and human beings are incredibly complicated. Very few people were all good or all bad. Rather, individuals in history, just like us, were human and shaped by their understanding of the world as they found it, their lived experiences and their education.

While acknowledging the wrongs of the past, we should seek to explain, understand and explore and build a better, more understanding future—one built not on guilt, but on a mutual understanding that history means different things to different people. Just like that book I still cannot remember the name of taught me when I was nine years old, and just as Mr Anderson did teaching about the fight for civil rights in 1960s America, we do not increase understanding by telling people that they should be ashamed of their past or their country. Rather, we do so by exploring and explaining what has gone before and putting it in context, thereby working to make our future better than our past. That could and should be the great achievement of Black History Month.