Nearly a hundred of our current MPs studied history at university. That means that more of them than ever before have written and thought about the past during their higher education. They may act more wisely as a result, though knowledge of the past is no sure and certain guide to success in the present. As Edmund Burke put it, “you can never plan the future by the past” while underlining the importance of recognising that the dead, the living and those yet to be born are united in a great mystical partnership.
No Prime Minister in modern times has known less history than Tony Blair. It showed. In June 2003 he announced the summary abolition of the great office of Lord Chancellor which goes back nearly a thousand years and has had its constitutional position affirmed in innumerable statutes. He had to backtrack. If he had known something of the history of the Middle East, he might have handled the Iraq crisis differently. Belatedly he has now seen the light. In a radio interview on 10 August, he said that he wished he had studied history rather than law at Oxford.
Alistair Lexden discussed the uses of history to politicians in an interview on 11 August for the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘The Week in Westminster’ broadcast on Sunday evenings. Amongst other things, he argued that political debate –-particularly on the greatest national issues—would not serve the country’s interest properly if the historical dimensions were omitted. He cited the 2014 Scottish referendum as a case in point. The supporters of the Union hardly made mention of Anglo-Scottish achievements at home and abroad, in peace and war (when Scottish regiments have always fought so bravely alongside their brothers in arms recruited elsewhere) over the three centuries since the 1707 Act of Union.
Some extracts from the interview will be included in the Radio 4 programme which was broadcast on Sunday, 20 August. You can listen here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05cw9v7 (link will expire).