Peter Risdon

It’s depressing, really. Just as New Scientist has been overrun by political zealots, so History Today finds it increasingly difficult to leave the daft, reflexive bias of the New Right* behind. A case in point is this piece titled Mr Cameron returns to the seventies. It begins:

“This afternoon, the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill will be debated during its second reading in the House of Commons.”

One of the purposes of this bill is to redraw constituency boundaries so they are of more equal size than at present. At the moment, constituency irregularities favour the Labour Party.

The HT post continues:

History Today contributor Tristram Hunt criticised the bill in yesterday’s Financial Times describing it as ‘a bill that places utility above tradition, separates people from place and past, and ruptures the unwritten constitution in order to hold a coalition together’.

Tristram Hunt is a Labour MP. I can find no trace of him objecting to the imposition of unfamiliar European regions on people who feel of their county, nor of his protests when Labour ruptured the unwritten constitution in an attempt to gerrymander permanent Labour majorities in Wales and Scotland while allowing Labour votes from those places to affect the majority-conservative English.

Tristram Hunt is a Labour MP. That’s more relevant to the reader of the HT post than his status as an occasional contributor. The magazine gives the impression Hunt’s objections are scholarly, when they are in fact political.

History Today has failed to provide relevant disclosure. They also refused to pass my extremely polite comment pointing this out, ensuring that new readers might remain unaware of Hunt’s lack of detachment on this issue. The headline about the 1970s can only be intended to be disparaging to Cameron.

Geoffrey Elton used to argue that history is a bulwark against tyranny, because it cultivates the habits of questioning, interrogating prose for bias, refusing to believe what you are told. He’d be hard pressed to make that argument today.

*These inveterate defenders of incumbents and of established institutions, these unapologetic diverters of cash from ordinary people to the elite and their underclass dependants, cannot reasonably be described as left wing.

Norm uses the word democracy here. It’s an excellent coinage. He could define it more elegantly than I, but it boils down to the idea that the country should have policies decided by public demonstration.