My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dearing. I have to admit to a professional fascination for discussing history teaching. I started life as an historian, and I studied it at university in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In those days, it was really quite straightforward; there was a narrative. I studied English history and European history, which are of course entirely separate and totally unconnected. The only course we had on extra-European history was entitled, "The expansion of Europe". It was about how Europe had taken over China, India and all the other places, and it all fitted together. One of the problems that we must recognise is that that all fell apart in the 1960s, and we cannot put it together again. Part of the reason why all the history that my children learnt at school was about the Vikings, the Tudors, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler is that we have not yet managed to put it back together again. I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, that we cannot leave it to the curriculum working party to devise a new key stage 3. We must have a much broader debate.

Since I left university, I have learnt much more about medieval history than the rather dreadful stuff that I was taught at the University of Cambridge. I intend, as my retirement project, to write what I hope will be a useful little book on how the development of the 12th and 13th-century Yorkshire economy was intimately linked to Florentine banks. The monks, after all, sold their wool crop to Italian bankers until the English Crown of Edward I bankrupted the Bardi and Peruzzi banks. The extent to which 12th and 13th century European economic integration caught England and Scotland up in itself is something that I had simply not begun to understand, because I was taught by good old-fashioned English Protestant historians.

When we talk about history, as the Government have begun to say, we are of course talking about identity, citizenship, Britishness and British values. We recognise, as the noble Lord, Lord Luke, said, that we need a story—a narrative. The reason popular history is so alive and academic history in so much trouble is that academic history cannot agree on a narrative. That is what people most like.

Linda Colley said in the Guardian the other week that we need,

"a standardised, chronological history of Britain [which] should become part of the national curriculum [because] . . . schoolchildren need to learn. For how can they grow up to be British citizens if they haven't a clue how Britain came to be what it is?".

We will leave aside for now the question of what Britain is; the question of which bits we remember and which bits we prefer to forget is the battleground now. We remember bits of our past and do our best to forget others. The great argument in Bristol the other month was how far Bristol should remember that it made its prosperity trading in slaves, or whether it should slide over that bit and pretend it was all about wine. When Ministers talked the other day about the need to have a British national day, I spent an interesting half hour trying to think which national day we should celebrate. Would it be Trafalgar, or Waterloo? I fancy the cutting off of King Charles's head myself, but others might disagree. How about the Bill of Rights in 1689? That is a Protestant festival and Catholics are extremely unhappy about it. Trying to choose a national day immediately makes us partisans of one or other view of British history.

The noble Lord, Lord Luke, takes, as I was taught it in the 1960s, the "conservative" view of British history—that history is about great men, heroes and villains. The "radical", more popular, progressive view already in the early sixties was that we need to talk about the common stream, the common people, and social and economic change as it affected most of our ancestors, not simply our masters. Linda Colley's narrative is different from the one that Niall Ferguson or Andrew Roberts would give. Roberts is now setting out to write a new history of the English-speaking peoples to demonstrate that Britain has absolutely no connection with those nasty people across the Channel, but is intimately connected with the Canadians, Australians and, above all, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans. David Starkey's view of British history is different again from that of the noble Lord, Lord Morgan.

As for our views on Europe, I have had a professional life dealing with European Union enlargement and we have had arguments with all the potential applicants about how they are the last European state, and the ones behind them are clearly not Europeans. This demonstrates that world history is a battleground. Can we agree on a history of Islam, of Iran, or of China?

On the point of my noble friend Lord Addington, film gives you the illusion of evidence. I can recall seeing various pictures of the Sino-Japanese war in which the same film was used to illustrate entirely opposite points of view. The illusion of evidence is worsened by factoid history. For reasons you will understand, I find "Braveheart"—immediately adopted as standard history by the Scottish National Party—one of the most appalling mistakes in entirely misrepresenting Scottish history and that of my distant family.

We need a cross-party consensus, not a Government initiative, let alone one by the curriculum authority. We need an open debate. I am glad that the Royal Society of Arts is planning a series of lectures this autumn, which a number of people will be contributing to on precisely what sort of history we need. We need a commission—or a working party or whatever—with representatives of a range of different views. This is not something the Government can do on their own.

We need to teach the history of the last century, and of our own last 50 years. That is the most difficult. I heard a senior Conservative MP this morning say to a group of visiting Russians that Britain was lucky not to have experienced problems of post-imperial angst or nostalgia, as Russia had. At which point somebody said, "What about Suez?". What about the defence of the trade routes to India for 25 years after we gave India independence? We need to debate what our national past is, but in order to do that we must recognise how difficult that is. We need a cross-party approach to construct a more inclusive national narrative, which we desperately need, and to place British history in its broader European and global context.