23 March 2007
TV historian and lecturer Simon Schama came to Number 10 for the latest in our podcast series.
Parts of this transcript may have been edited
Read the transcript
Simon Schama:
Hello, I am Simon Schama and I am lucky enough to be sitting in the White Room of 10 Downing Street talking to the Prime Minister about, guess what, history, why it matters now, past, present, how they are mixed up and how they shape the way we think of ourselves as being British.
So I did just want to start with a slightly general question about, you know, how history might be seen by kids as boring old stuff and by a lot of other people as a luxury, rather than a necessity. And I have spent a lot of my life persuading people that if you want to understand about now, say being British, you need to understand about then, and I wonder what you thought about that?
Prime Minister:
Yes, I totally agree and history was always, along with English, my favourite subject at school so I always really enjoyed it, yes, and always wished I had read history rather than law at university. And I think it is fascinating, provided you can teach history in the right way though, I think sometimes when, I mean you obviously have to know when all the Kings and Queens came, and I can’t remember now.
Simon Schama:
No, not at all. I think you can drop the occasional Egbert actually … some of them …
Prime Minister:
But you know you had to learn that, and I did. But actually what is far more interesting is to look at the economic and social and political trends over time, and also then to study particularly, I mean I didn’t actually study this history at school, but I am particularly interested in 20th century history, late 19th century history, the build-up to the First World War, between the wars, afterwards.
Simon Schama:
Have you been to Gladstone’s house?
Prime Minister:
I haven’t, I have been past it on many occasions.
Simon Schama:
You have got to go, of all the places that breathe the soul.
Prime Minister:
Really?
Simon Schama:
You know because he, like you, talked a lot about ethics and religion and how you could do that. It is utterly wonderful. But ask for, I think they will give it to you, ten minutes alone in the library. The books are still arranged on the shelves the way he arranged them and they tell a story. It is quite wonderful.
Prime Minister:
I mean he used to sit down when he was Prime Minister, they tell me, in Downing Street, and, I mean, my authority for this I think is probably Roy Jenkins biography, but would spend a couple of hours reading a book on theology or something.
Simon Schama:
Yes. You look amazed … does this never happen to you, Prime Minister?
Prime Minister:
I think… yeah …
Simon Schama:
He was editing theology and he was editing Latin stuff actually while he was Prime Minister, and he did also have a volume of business, possibly not as heavy as yours, but a fair volume of business too. No, he has in the room the shelving the way he wanted and the axes to go and, you know, do his tree chopping, so it is stunning, and railway tickets, I mean it is an amazing, it is full of his ghosts actually.
Prime Minister:
Someone, I can’t remember who it was now, once played me a recording of Gladstone. There is a recording of Gladstone.
Simon Schama:
Yes there is, a rather high voice.
Prime Minister:
Yes, and there was a slight northern accent to it, which is fascinating to hear it.
Simon Schama:
Yes. So running on, we have got a number, fortuitously and wonderfully, of commemorations really, in the line in which we think that history might help us get a grip on now. You can either treat commemorations as acts of piety, which is fine if we are talking about the dead in the war, or they can be moments to reflect on, well in the case of the Act of Union or the case of the abolition of the slave trade, allegiance, really. But do you think actually, let’s take that commemoration, the Act of the Union, that when it actually happened a few weeks ago, a month ago, was an occasion just to sort of hammer the life of the Union an occasion or simply hot air to be shared, or do you think actually there has been, or it is a good moment to reflect on the virtues of the Union?
Prime Minister:
Yes I think it is a good moment to reflect on the virtues of the Union because I think the interesting thing is that although the Union is 300 years old there are very modern reasons for its existence today, and I also think in terms of, I mean I look at this country very much in today’s world, as being you know a small country, in fact, 60 million people, limited geographical space, the early 21st century, you know the fact that we have the Union between England and Scotland, and indeed the United Kingdom, it gives us collective strength that I think we otherwise wouldn’t have. And I think it is worth then reflecting back on as a result of the Act of Union how much we then benefited, intermingled and indeed inter-married over the years and so on. So I think it is a very useful time to look back and reflect.
Simon Schama:
One of the other anniversaries, the Treaty of Rome, now do you think, sort of, the European identity we have makes it harder to keep the Union, or harder to defend the Union, because a Scot would say - well Denmark, why not actually?
Prime Minister:
It is an interesting question but I think that all the time what you are trying to do is to use your alliances to achieve collective strength to achieve a greater power and influence in a world where today you will have China and India, within 20 years, I mean each of them with a population, what, 20 times the UK, each 20 times the UK, whose economies will, in time, surpass those of America. Now I think that our ability to still project power, weight and influence depends on those alliances and unions. And so my point is if you take a sort of secessionist view and you split apart in the Union, or you split Britain apart from Europe, you just weaken your collective strength, or the strength you get from being part of that bigger collective. Which is why I say the Union is actually to the benefit of England, never mind Scotland, and why it is in the interests of the whole of the UK to be a strong part of the European Union.
And I just have a, partly based actually on a reading of history, I have a completely clear view of this today after 10 years in office, which is that we have two great alliances, one with America, one with Europe, and you keep both of them strong and you don’t give up either because you know if you chart our history over a long period of time from the world super power with an empire through to the modern day, well the question is how do you through that very changing set of circumstances for our country still maintain the maximum power and influence, and particularly in an interdependent world you need that power and influence to get your way, so how do you do it? The answer is you do it through alliances. You give up those alliances, or put them at risk, or place them in jeopardy for reasons to do with what in the end is a very narrow mentality, you know it is just …
Simon Schama:
I take the point. I mean weirdly the reason why I deeply am a passionate defender of the Union is I like ethnic messes really, I like to be mixed up, I don’t want things to be kind of boiled down to their hard little nut-like tribal allegiances. But it is sort of hard in the end to bring reasoned argument if it is just going to be a matter of tribal sentiment.
Prime Minister:
Yes it is true, but in the end what is the sentiment? And I think you have got to distinguish between patriotism and pride in your country and then a feeling of grievance against some other institution you are part of that is the cause of all your problems. I mean this is why I am as against Euro-scepticism as I am against separation within the Union, they are just to me old-fashioned emotions. Indeed one of the reasons why I think we have been able to take forward the Northern Ireland peace process in the way that we have is that over time it is not that the border doesn’t matter, either to those in the Irish Republic or certainly to a significant number of people in Northern Ireland, but it is just that over time people start to appreciate, well we can have a relationship across this border.
Simon Schama:
Yes exactly. It is the recognition of kinship within a political boundary, even if your kin have differences and arguments I think actually.
Prime Minister:
Yes, correct.
Simon Schama:
That is really, one does wish that would apply to the Middle East, but all sorts of other things intervene.
Prime Minister:
But in time they should get there. I mean the most striking thing about the Middle East is that in the end Israel, and Palestine, and Lebanon, to take the three countries where there has been conflict and destruction in the past couple of years, they have a huge common interest those three countries. If you leave aside their political and ethnic and religious differences they have got a complete common interest in having a strong economically prosperous common area between them.
Simon Schama:
That is right, but another kind of sentiment is the intensity of purist religious faith which came along. Did you actually think, this isn’t a question I thought I would ask you, but when you took office actually that you would be dealing with fundamentalist religion? I tell you, when I was growing up as a kid our history teacher, a fantastic man, it was confusing because he looked just like Voltaire, but he said: "Well boys, we don’t know what the rest of the 20th century has in store, but we do know that two things that are on their way out as political forces are nationalism and religion."
How wrong - so much for history - how wrong can you be? But that has become … which is why it is nice this week to reflect on the abolition of the slave trade which we are commemorating and remembering, because that was a moment. I was very struck by reading some of the early literature about how inconceivable it was without actually the force of evangelical feeling, without Christian feeling. And I was trained, old lapsed Jew that I am, to believe that anything else actually is the real answer - class interest, the sugar trade declining, which it wasn’t - except the sense in which slavery and the slave trade were a violation of God’s ordinance, that actually we are all entitled to saving grace, including professors and Prime Ministers. And it is wonderful to reflect on that as something which was benign and indispensable.
Prime Minister:
Yes, I think that is very interesting. I think the two interesting things about the slave trade and the abolition are first the point that you make that it was actually intervention of individuals in the history, it is the sort of refutation of the Marxist analysis that we are all sort of, or one version of it, that we are all kind of predetermined in what we do, or that it is all to do with class and the forces of production and so on. This was very much about individuals, as you rightly say, taking a very strong view. And the second thing is the length of time it took because of the seeming reason of the argument against doing it, which prevailed in many quarters over a long period of time and with people thinking, you know people who were not necessarily, incidentally, badly motivated or badly intentioned or motivated by reasons of profit, and this is a very interesting thing to me about discrimination generally, that I think what is fascinating, and this is where I think history can help you learn the lessons of how political change comes about.
Because I think for example in relation to the discrimination against women, or gay people, or people from ethnic minority backgrounds, there was a time when conventional wisdom, absolutely solidly, would have said these things were absurd examples of political correctness, that they didn’t understand the proper world, and there was massive resistance to doing any of these things. And yet now we look back in the year 2007 and say well how could people possibly have thought the opposite? And I think it is a very interesting example, the abolition of the slave trade, of how, by the combination of particular individuals, and by people refusing to accept that what is conventional wisdom today must be conventional wisdom tomorrow, that this progress was made.
Simon Schama:
It happened, we still, I mean it eludes me, you remember what the majorities were like at the end - they were huge. When Fox got up in introducing the resolution in June 1806 he got a majority of 114-15 or something, and then when it carried after he had died the following year was 283-16. It was gigantic. And every time Wilberforce, 1799 I think was the last time, what had happened between was the war - it doesn’t quite explain it, every time Wilberforce introduced it he was, I mean he got closer but it was knife edge or blistering defeat. So something really weird happened in that the great and good … I mean it was very interesting, there was a change of Solicitor Generalship and Samuel Romilly became Solicitor General and he gave the most vitriolic attack on people who could conceivably call themselves Christian and countenance something so iniquitous, detestable and inhuman. So there was, exactly as you say, a kind of change in the threshold of embarrassment in some way actually and in shame.
Prime Minister:
And I think because people rehearsed the argument, and rehearsed the argument, and rehearsed the argument and then finally you know just bit by bit this happened. I mean actually something very similar happened in an issue less important but in the 1790s over the debtors prisons and so on when they imprisoned people for debt, where there were attempts made to change the law and then the law didn’t quite work and get through, but then eventually it did because people said well look OK, now we are, and you know bit by bit the airing of the argument made the change.
I think this is interesting more generally too. I think what is fascinating as well is if you look back at the Second World War and the period before the Second World War, I think one of the things that is most instructive and most difficult for my generation and younger to comprehend is how and why it took so long for people to wake up to Hitler.
Simon Schama:
Yes. Yes.
Prime Minister:
It is incredible when you read what was going on in the 1930s, and this is why I think history is so fascinating, I mean you have always got to draw, you know you can overdo the lessons of history, but one of the things that is really interesting to me is when you go back and you read the debates at the time, when the facts were there about what was happening to Jews in Germany or Austria, and you know people were still saying well … you know…
Simon Schama:
Well it didn’t happen, and this isn’t really an explanation but it may be a stage towards it that everything was sweetness and light and there were perfect liberal democracies and suddenly there was Hitler. There was the spectacle of all sorts of hideous tin pot dictatorships, including the Italian one, which people got used to and shrugged their shoulders, because it is none of our business and it doesn’t matter and life is hard out there and he makes the trains run on time and so on.
The danger really is ordinary people actually becoming routineised really, becoming kind of calloused in what would otherwise be their sensibility. I think that is probably how people, not many people saw what was happening in the slave forts off the coast of Africa, much less the way the auctions took the horrible scramble, teeth being yanked open, all they thought about and saw was prosperity coming our way, houses going up in Bristol and Liverpool. So it is very odd. So it is as you say sort of an extraordinary, the most remarkable thing a moral politician can do is to actually lower that threshold of shame and embarrassment to sort of make people, sensitise people to something which ought to shock them. That is sort of what Churchill did but he did it by a sort of fatalistic, ominous, grandiose, magnificent rhetoric saying the end is nigh and you had better sort of get used to it really.
Prime Minister:
But even in the late 1930s we were still facing a situation where people were basically saying …
Simon Schama:
Yes, a far away country which we know little …
Prime Minister:
People forget here, I mean when Chamberlain came back from Munich, I mean Downing Street wasn’t closed off in those times.
Simon Schama:
He was mobbed by cheering crowds.
Prime Minister:
I think I am right, I remember reading somewhere, it may be false … that he actually had to go out late at night.
Simon Schama:
Because there were so many people.
Prime Minister:
Yes, in order to, because they wouldn’t disperse until he did, and these are interesting lessons I think. And also I think if you look at the Sudan today, for example, you know there is something appalling going on but can you get everyone to wake up about it?
Simon Schama:
How do you think we can, or it is impossible, or we have done all in terms of making people feel …
Prime Minister:
No I think, I mean I think actually the world should be far more …
Simon Schama:
I know you were in Comic Relief but did you actually see some of the little films?
Prime Minister:
Yeah
Simon Schama:
They were very good actually. Billy Connolly wonderful, a desperately sad movie, a little tiny bit of film about Aids actually in Kenya, but there was a Darfur film which was beyond shocking actually.
Prime Minister:
Yes, which we should be doing something about. But you know it is only if it comes into, and I think this is really the point too, that part of this … you have got two things happening with the way that the modern media treats these things: on the one hand, I know politicians are often, and understandably and rightly in a way, alarmed at the degree of what we say is the sort of CNN, BBC determination of the agenda, right if they put the horror of what is happening in a particular part of the world front of the news for a couple of weeks, public opinion will be roused, the trouble is they have to decide to do it, and they decide to do it here, but they don’t decide to do it there or whatever so there is a sort of arbitrary nature in the way that the salience of issues is decided; but the second thing is that actually you should have with the modern communication, the ability to see what is happening and in fact you should reduce your ability as a public opinion to say we don’t know about it because …
Simon Schama:
Exactly … I think that is historical story telling, but actually weirdly the story telling of an image and what happens around an image can actually do that. In the anti-slavery movement it happened, if you go back to a shelf of books every one will have that famous image of the brooks where bodies are packed in like sardines, so there is no little, that image was pinned on vicars’ walls actually, it was absolutely everywhere, you couldn’t go almost into any self-respecting Methodist, Baptist house without seeing that image. Equally if you think about you know the burning child in Vietnam, that one image I bet, we don’t know who she was, but it did actually somehow concentrate people’s minds, they could not get it out of their head as a piece of atrocity and futility I think really. So that may be doing it but it is not an easy call.
Let me ask you on one other anniversary that we are remembering this week - the Falklands War actually. I want to ask you a naughty question which is just if you had been Mrs Thatcher - there’s a thought! - would you have done it? Because actually I tell you why because we have been talking about the complications of allegiance with the Treaty of Rome and with the Act of Union and both of those presuppose a kind of reasoned sharing of allegiance in some way, and the Falklands was an act of unequivocal assertion of British sovereignty. Do you think you would have done that?
Prime Minister:
Yes, yes I am sure. When I look back, I mean I was much, much younger at the time obviously but when I look back yes I have got no doubt it was the right thing to do. But for reasons not simply to do with British sovereignty but also because I think there was a principle at stake which is that you know a land shouldn’t be annexed in that way and people shouldn’t be put under a different rule in that way, and it is interesting because it was, we actually lost more people I think in the war in the Falklands …
Simon Schama:
266 people, astonishing …
Prime Minister:
Than we have lost in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Simon Schama:
It is astonishing, it is amazing.
Prime Minister:
It is astonishing.
Simon Schama:
And it was a scary gamble actually.
Prime Minister:
That is for sure. When you look back on it and you talk to the people who were there at the time, and as I say I wasn’t even in Parliament at the time, but I think it took a lot of political courage actually to do that.
Simon Schama:
But you wouldn’t claim, by way of collateral, that the end of the military regime … it clearly wasn’t an aim but it was obviously …
Prime Minister:
No, but it is interesting, if you wanted to see it, there may be some parallels in what happened in Kosovo later, although it is a different set of circumstances, but also in the end the military intervention in Kosovo brought down Milosevic. And the interesting thing is that when you stand up to that type of dictatorship, and Galtieri as it was at the time, the consequences then are severe for that dictatorship.
Simon Schama:
Especially in a Latin American Republic really … masses of muscle flexing
Prime Minister:
Yes absolutely.
Simon Schama:
And it is a very, it is interesting because although it is always looked at as if it was simply to do with the question of British sovereignty, and obviously that was the principal reason because it was British territory, but nonetheless even if you take it apart from that, it was perfectly obvious there was only one way you were going to get it back, and that was by military action, and it was perfectly obvious also that irrespective of the debate about the Falklands it was completely the wrong thing of General Galtieri to do and it was right to make it be reversed.
Simon Schama:
Yes, one doesn’t know how wars are going to turn out really …
Alas, we are coming to the end at last of the conversation, but I do want to ask you one other. Do you ever get the chance to enjoy history for fun as it were, and if so …
Prime Minister:
Yes I do, I actually read more than you might think. And I often do it by way of biography for example which is an interesting way to take in …
Simon Schama:
What have you enjoyed?
Prime Minister:
Well recently actually I have been reading Jenkins’ biography of Churchill.
Simon Schama:
That was wonderful.
Prime Minister:
And actually all Roy Jenkins biographies are fascinating.
Simon Schama:
You must … Mr Balfour’s Poodle is wonderful about House of Lords reform … fabulous book
Prime Minister:
Yes, that is very interesting.
Simon Schama:
It is a fabulous book.
Prime Minister:
But I also read …
Simon Schama:
Dilke. He actually wrote an amazing book, which was a very early book of his, about Charles Dilke about the Irish … very early, it was very, very good.
Prime Minister:
But I also read a lot of history about the early church and things which I find fascinating. I think it is one of the most interesting stories is how …
Simon Schama:
How that happened, I mean again a very sudden moment. I give
Gibbon which is an incredible difficult thing to do, to my students at Colombia really, and I say the only way you are going to get it is to actually read it out loud, and then they love it, they actually love the kind of musical weird operatic cadences
Prime Minister:
I tell you who is wonderful to read as well, and … Macauley, whether you agree or you disagree with some of the …
Simon Schama:
The gorgeous sonority of it.
Prime Minister:
I think as an example of how well the English language should be written, I think it is virtually peerless, I would say.
Simon Schama:
Yes. One last question then, Macauley really in his marrow was an optimist. Are you?
Prime Minister:
Yes, I would say I have to be in my job, but yes I am.
Simon Schama:
And I have to be in mine, surprisingly.
Prime Minister:
Yes I am, and I think if you look back there is much to be optimistic about. And I think what is interesting is that when people advance materially and when they are able therefore because they are not solely concerned with survival day, by day, by day, when they have the chance to reflect on the human condition they basically reflect in a way that is I would say less inclined to discriminate, more inclined to be in favour of principles of justice and equity. And you know it is, I think a fact, but you will tell me if I am wrong, that no two democracies have ever been to war with each other. Have they, or not?
Simon Schama:
No, damn, you are giving me homework and I think you are absolutely right. And Prime Minister as we end, a shaft of light, I have to tell you everybody out there, has come across the room. And they said actually of the vote when slavery was abolished actually that when the MPs got up suddenly a great burst of sunshine appeared behind the Speaker’s chair.
Prime Minister:
That is a good thought.
Simon Schama:
So on that note of sunny radiance we can close, thank you so much for the conversation.
Prime Minister:
Thanks.