What the right cannot abide is the idea that our history is the product of many races and creeds, just as our present is too.
A new report claims schoolchildren are being taught that Black people built Stonehenge, as part of ‘decolonised’ history lessons. And if that wasn’t enough, pupils are also being told that the Roman Emperor Nero married a trans woman, though the lessons reportedly leave out the detail that the individual may have undergone forced castration.
The ‘report’ being eagerly circulated by the Express originally comes from… who else, the Policy Exchange, a regular source for culture war headlines in the right-wing press. In 2024, for instance, the Sun championed a Policy Exchange report that claimed human rights laws were “negative and dangerous” to the UK.
This time, the Express is outraged over the alleged sidelining of “historic British military victories” like Waterloo and Trafalgar, as “woke narratives” supposedly flood classrooms. The report, Lessons from the Past, targets the book Brilliant Black British History by Nigerian-British author Atinuke, which it calls “controversial” for stating Britain was a Black country for 7,000 years before white people arrived.
Policy Exchange takes issue with the book’s claim that early Black Britons built Stonehenge, calling it “hotly contested” and “outside mainstream historical thinking,” yet taught as fact. The report also points the finger at Black Lives Matter for apparently pushing schools to include more material about ethnic minorities following the death of George Floyd in 2020, stating 83% of secondary schools had changed their history curriculum to “decolonise” it.
It also wails that fewer than one in five schools now teach the Battle of Agincourt, and just 11% include Waterloo or Trafalgar. It even provides a solution – a compulsory GCSE paper covering British history from 1066 to 1989. In the foreword, historian Lord Roberts – who was incidentally appointed to the Lords by Boris Johnson in 2022 – insists pupils must learn history in a way that doesn’t just “inculcate shame about our past.”
Yet amid the moral panic, the Express and the Policy Exchange seem to have overlooked actual science.
A recent study by the University of Ferrara analysed 348 ancient genomes and found that early Europeans, including those likely to have built Stonehenge, overwhelmingly had dark skin. According to evolutionary biologist Silvia Ghirotto, light skin tones emerged much more gradually than previously believed.
As the historian A.J.P. Taylor said, all history is written from the point of view of the present, but to recruit the amazing achievement of people five thousand years ago in building Stonehenge to today’s pathetic culture wars, is pushing it.
I suspect that people all those years ago had more important things to think about than skin colour and if the issue raises some interesting questions about the genetic makeup of stone age people in classrooms across the land, well it sounds more interesting than the history I experienced at school. What the right cannot abide of course, is the idea that our history is the product of many races and creeds, just as our present is too.
Left Foot Forward doesn’t have the backing of big business or billionaires. We rely on the kind and generous support of ordinary people like you.
You can support hard-hitting journalism that holds the right to account, provides a forum for debate among progressives, and covers the stories the rest of the media ignore. Donate today.
