My Lords, I have a certain feeling about this debate as the first time that I received a letter of complaint from one of my own political party was after a debate on the teaching of history. That was about 17 years ago. It was the first time that I have inspired such a thing from my own party, although it will probably not be the last.

Everyone has an opinion on history and the way we use it. The degree of informed opinion depends on who you are talking to because it is impossible to be an expert on all of history. We tend to go to the bits we like, remember them, stand on them and forget about the rest. I have a little saying that all nations worth their salt can drown in their own sins. We can all choose the example of the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, who did not like to be reminded that we fought a war against the most populous nation on earth, which was militarily badly organised, to sell it hard drugs. That is probably something which the rest of us could do without having in our historical bag, but it is there.

What brought me to this debate was the idea of citizenship and what we are going to do with history now. The guidelines on the teaching of citizenship, for example, deal with human rights and responsibilities underpinning society and the basic aspects of the criminal justice system, and how they both relate to young people using history. You can go through selecting which bit of history you want and of course come up with examples.

If one assumes that we should be where we are now if there was not a better alternative, the Marxists, the Whig historians and so forth will say that it was part of the process or that we would have got here; others will say, "No, it is chance". Lord Russell, one of the great revisionist historians of recent times, would probably have had a considerable amount to say about what did happen. There is no inevitability about it happening. Why should we be here? The minute we start to look for moral justification about the present and what has gone on before we are on very shaky ground. Where do we go from here? Why does this have to happen? I do not know.

The noble Lord, Lord Luke, mentioned Magna Carta. One interpretation of Magna Carta is of a group of armoured heavies with hereditary backing demanding their rights under the existing system, which were being infringed by a monarch who was getting a bit above himself. Simon de Montfort carried on that argument. Such people started parliamentary democracy. It is fanciful to think that some of these great Anglo-French nobles who were fighting with other Anglo-French nobles over recently conquered territory would be interested in the outcome of elections. They had recently taken over from the Danes as the rulers of the English territory—another way of looking at us. Yet, people will justify that line of logic. We must always be very careful about how we use the past to justify the present.

The noble Lord, Lord Parekh, talked about Germany. We had the German royal family, and still do. Just because Germany has one blip in its history does not omit everything else, but people think that.

On the teaching of history, World War II was the first great war conflict to have large quantities of film and sound made of it, so we have a better record. We are only just coming to the end of personal recollections of what went on in that conflict. So we all have an over-emphasis. You will always have over-emphasis in periods of history that will colour the perception of what is important for the historians writing at a given moment. They will always think that their experience is probably the most important—the culmination. So, if we use history in education, first, the accuracy of what we say is totally subjective; secondly, if we state that we are going to look at history, we must of course look at everything that has gone on, which means that you will always have questions; and, thirdly, there are no right answers to historical questions as you are talking about the interpretation of events and about the record that is currently accepted.

The interpretation will go on and on. When I was doing a history degree Lawrence Stone and Hugh Trevor-Roper were arguing bitterly on what was seen to be the establishment argument. New arguments will be brewing now, and so it will carry on. We should always be very careful about how we look at this subject because tomorrow's truth may not be one we recognise.