Anglo-Dutch free trade alliance reminds us what the EU is for

Whilst his MPs are squabbling in the House of Commons about the European Union Bill, the Prime Minister is on the continent making friends.

The Guardian reports that David Cameron, "in his first major EU initiative since becoming Prime Minister", is attempting to create an internal free market area with the Dutch.  This would permit professional and service workers to work throughout the European continent.  The article is just a bit amnesic: Cameron's biggest initiative on the European stage to date has been to limit the increase of the EU budget from 6% to no more than 2.9%, in concert with the French and Germans.  The more cynical might observe that an even bigger achievement has been simply not to cause a row.

That is by the by, for the crux of the matter - an Anglo-Dutch free trade alliance - carries intriguing historical overtones.

England and the Netherlands spent a lot of the seventeenth century coming to nautical blows over the issue of who ruled the waves - and therefore international trade.  The Dutch could not find a way to defeat Cromwell (who could, but Death himself?) but generally they came out on top and in 1667 their raid of the English fleet at Medway ranks as one of this island nation's worst humiliations.

The great French Annalist Fernand Braudel wrote, "history may be divided into three movements: what moves rapidly, what moves slowly and what appears not to move at all.”

The Dutch navy may have been fleeter of foot by the broadside, but moving slowly alongside beneath the swifter current of events was the burgeoning dominance of international finance and trade by the City of London and the nascent British Empire.

The prompt for both of these phenomena - warfare and mercantile superiority - were the Navigation Acts.  These laws, first passed in 1651, were designed to protect English colonial trade with European rivals, particularly the Dutch.  Some historians say that they were a crucial part of the eventual British dominance of world trade and the City's financial preeminnce.  Also pivotal was the accession of William of Orange to the English crown in 1688, which swung the attention of Dutch financiers towards London.

It is oft proclaimed that Britain was at the vanguard of free trade and liberty.  There is some truth in this, if your history books begin with the Pax Britannica.  For much of Britain's rise to global prominence had been on the back of protectionism and naval power.  The Navigation Acts were only repealed in 1849, by which point Great Britain ruled the waves.  Liberalising trade routes did not level the playing field, so much as give British traders more markets to buy and sell in.

With the benefit of hindsight, the respective tales of Britain and Holland could have been quite different.  Both relied on a strong navy to project power and an early mastery of trade and finance.  On the latter count, the Dutch were certainly the superiors.  They even contested similar regions of influence, such as North America, the Caribbeean, the Cape of Good Hope and south-east Asia.  Eventually, Britain came out on top, but it could have been different.

Now Britain and Holland appearto be joining forces to remind their fellow Europeans what the EU is for: liberalised markets for free trade in goods, services and personnel.  Many Conservative MPs have a keen taste for history - not least Bill Cash, who I know to be writing a biography of free trade campaigner John Bright.

Although a free trade alliance between Britain and Holland may seem out of step with the historical record, it sends a message that the European project has lots its way in a search for political, as opposed to economic, union (the clue ought to have been in the title, really).

This, then, is a timely reminder to dissatisfied eurosceptic MPs - particularly those in the new intake - that their Prime Minister has the right idea about Europe.  An idea more nuanced and pragmatic than they might like, perhaps, but this really ought to be a European adventure on which leader and party can see eye to eye.

History's place in the National Curriculum risks being an unnecessary reprisal of 'Greatest Britons'

A review of the National Curriculum begins today and Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, appeared on the Today programme this morning to talk about the "essential knowledge" that pupils must acquire, which includes certain great historical figures.

Martin Sewell writes over on Conservative Home about the "lamentable" fact that the only historical figures who "specifically appear" in the National Curriculum are Tory MP and anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, and the prominent African slave activist Olaudah Equianau.

Sewell offers Mr Gove a predictable list of great men and women who he "would prescribe were [he] in the Education Secretary's position."


His list was in no particular order but I am going to rearrange it chronologically, as this is how government advisor Simon Schama intends history to be taught, and what Mike Baker argued for in the Guardian earlier this week.

• Alfred the Great
• William I
• Henry VIII
• Elizabeth I
• Oliver Cromwell
• Thomas Paine
• Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson
• William Wilberforce
• Robert Owen
• Sir Winston Churchill

It is a perfectly reasonable and comprehensive list, spanning the period from the 9th to the 20th centuries and incorporating great leaders (political and military), thinkers and campaigners.

Yet the problem with Sewell's list is that it is unnecessary.  As Prof Colin Jones (president of the Royal Historical Society) writes today at the Guardian's Mortarboard Blog, "the current syllabus deliberately eschews naming 'great' individuals, on the understandable assumption that teachers already know about key figures."

I have been learning, reading and writing about British history for the better part of two decades and I have either covered (at school) - or had the opportunity to cover - each historical figure on his list.

Sewell states his aim as highlighting names "that would, of necessity, carry any teaching discussion into related areas - so that, inevitably, anyone studying these would encounter other important names, ideas and events."

Well it works the other way around, too.  Study the English Civil War and you shall encounter Cromwell.  Study the Tudors (as schoolchildren do ad infinitum) and you cannot miss Henry VIII, nor his most successful daughter.  And so on.


Where Sewell is correct is to describe the present situation as "lamentable".  Historical understanding, in spite of the popularity of history documentaries and the presence of history books on bestsellers lists, is deficient in Britain.  We have become a country in love with history but with no knowledge of the past.


The place to remedy this is in schools and the Government should start by putting in place a broad, chronological curriculum to follow (I await the contributions of Simon Schama and Niall Ferguson with interest).  Don't elect any individuals above others - that means removing Messrs Wilberforce and Equianau too, however valid their elevation might seem to trendy apologists.

The curriculum should not be about which famous figures we explicitly study or not.  The debate about where history sits in a National Curriculum, if conducted like this, will become nothing more than a gratuitous reprisal of the Greatest Britons series.  If we want children to learn about and be proud of our island story then teach them the story, not a roll-call of fashionable canonical 'greats' whose names sell biographies.

On the Coalition's first Christmas, some advice from Sir Winston Churchill

It is Christmas, so I am home with the family in sylvan, snowy Sussex.  For the next few days, I will be living out a life of repetitive, traditional bliss.  Ah! a chocolate.  Another glass of Chasse-Spleen 1983?  It would be a crime not to.  Darling, do have some more turkey, it will only go to the dog.  If you insist.

Another Christmas tradition is to peruse my parents' bookshelves for something to lose myself in, beside the drawing room fireplace, in front of the tree.  This year, I am re-reading Churchill's history of the Second World War: a collection of six volumes so imperious in composition that it garnered him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.  The opening paragraphs of Chapter II in the first volume, The Gathering Storm (1948), deserve to be quoted at length.  To contextualise, Churchill was at the time a Liberal MP and Secretary of State for the Dominions and Colonies.

The party stresses which the Irish Settlement had created inside Mr. Lloyd George's Coalition were growing with the approach of an inevitable General Election.  The issue arose whether we should go to the country as a Coalition Government or break up beforehand.  It seemed more in accordance with the public interest and the decencies of British politics that parties and Ministers who had come through so much together and bore a mass of joint responsibilities should present themselves unitedly to the nation.  In order to make this easy for the Conservatives, who were by far the larger and stronger party, the Prime Minister and I had written earlier in the year offering to resign our offices, and give our support from a private station to a new Government to be formed by Mr. Austen Chamberlain.  The Conservative leaders, having considered this letter replied firmly that they would not accept that sacrifice from us and that we must all stand or fall together.  This chivalrous attitude was not endorsed by their followers in the party, which now felt itself strong enough to resume undivided power in the State.

By an overwhelming vote the Conservative Party determined to break with Lloyd George and end the National Coalition Government.  The Prime Minister resigned that same afternoon.  In the morning we had been friends and colleagues of all these people.  By nightfall they were our party foes, intent on driving us from public life.

The passage follows a chapter on the disastrous fallout of the Treaties of Versailles, Trianon and St-Germain, the fallacy of German (or in Chuchillian  parlance, "Prussian") reparations and the failure to stop rearmament.  Reading it now, it wrenches you abruptly from a dry history lesson to the immediacy of Liberal-Conservative coalition politics.  The relevance of Churchill's prose is breathtaking.

There are, of course, dissimilarities - not least that our present Prime Minister is not a womanising Welshman, nor a Liberal or, for that matter, a Whig (careful now, Mr Lawson).  Perhaps, I trivialise.  Yet in a week that David Cameron has given his clearest endorsement yet of some kind of electoral pact in 2015, and the Government campaign in Oldham East & Saddleworth leans weightily in the direction of a Liberal Democrat gain, it is worth highlighting for its mere message that 'we have been here before'.  Not just in the mundane 'Liberals always split' narrative that we are used to reading, but from a very personal, involved viewpoint about what it is like to operate at the heart of a political coalition.

At its most fundamental, Government at the top succeeds and falls on personalities.  For illustration, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were co-authors of New Labour  in Opposition and co-practitioners of New Labour in Government, yet as a result of their irreconcilable personal mindsets the TB-GB's paralysed their administrations (even after Blair departed, stage right).

One month ago, Sir John Major urged the sort of accommodation that Churchill  suggests ought to have taken place in 1922.  It is encouraging that the present incumbent isn't deaf to such advice from two distinguished former Prime Ministers.

It is traditional at this time of year to have to spend time with friends and family you rarely see, for better or for worse.  Sometimes this is a joyous occasion,  yet for others it is one fraught with frayed tempers and stressful endurance.

The coalition family is spending its first Christmas together, and this week internal bickering behind family members' backs threatened to provoke terminal breakdown.  Instead, that family is sticking together.  They don't all like each other and they certainly don't always agree.  Yet they have chosen this course willingly and for honourable, upright reasons, they shall see it through.  If that culminates in an agreement in 2015, however formal or informal, it will not be for lack of contemplation.

It is very evident that this Prime Minister possesses the "chivalrous attitudes" that others in the Westminster playground appear to lack.  Dr Cable might be shorn of a couple of baubles this Christmas, but it is the Barclay brothers who will be receiving a lump of coal.

The Daily Telegraph just refuses to understand its irresponsibility

The Daily Telegraph's latest invidious political intervention is both embarrassing for the Liberal Democrat ministers involved (but not shocking) and another sad indictment on what is left of what is erroneously referred to still as our 'quality' press.

Their only motive can be to injure (and so kill off) the Coalition. Why else reveal in an underhand fashion what we all know to be so? Ministers do, have done, and always will disagree privately. It shows poor judgement to mouth off to strangers about internal Government politics but the predictably shrill reaction has princpially addressed Government 'splits', not the behaviour of Messrs Davey, Moore, Webb and Cable.

The search for internal splits in this Liberal-Conservative coalition is laughable. For who can remember a Government more united in opinion, direction and purpose than this? The Labour Governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown fail utterly on that count, as did John Major's before them and Margaret Thatcher's. It seems counter-intuitive, but coalitions can forge stronger bonds than single parties, by virtue of shared pains in reaching an accord.

What this little (soon to be as irrelevant as One Direction) episode brings to my mind, however, is less about Government unity (it remains very strong) than the rabid, vicious and insatiable appetite for criticism of politicians by the media and the public, regardless of truths and good intentions. It is criticism for criticism's sake; destructive and irresponsible.

It calls to mind the words of Sir Robert Peel, writing to the free trade campaigner Richard Cobden, shortly after the repeal of the Corn Laws in June 1846:

Such a position as mine entails the severest sacrifices. The strain on the mental power is far too severe... But the world - the great and small vulgar - is not of this opinion. I am sorry to say they do not and cannot comprehend the motives which influence the best actions of public men. They think that public men change their course for corrupt motives, and their feeling is so predominant that the character of public men is injured, and their practical authority and influence impaired.

The Liberal Democrat and Conservative politicians who have joined together in Government have done so against many of their insincts, enduring "the severest sacrifices", because it is the right thing to do. Their actions and private thoughts since do not betray "corrupt motives" but the desire to work together in the national interest.

The Daily Telegraph's reaction to this is to injure the arrangement and impair its practical authority and influence. In these present circumstances, it is an arrangement far more conducive to sorting out our country's problems than a minority Conservative Government. We either like that, or we grin and bear it.

Regrettably, it is something that decision makers at the DT, in Peel's words, "do not and cannot comprehend".