Michael Gove, using history for politicking is tawdry

By Tristram Hunt

For The Observer, Saturday 4 January 2014

Two days after Michael Morpurgo, author of War Horse, published a beautiful essay calling for this year's First World War commemorations to "honour those who died" and "celebrate the peace we now share", Michael Gove has delivered the government's response. In an essay for the Daily Mail, the education secretary announced that the 1914 centenary should be about "battling leftwing myths that belittle Britain" and denouncing historians who "denigrate patriotism". It is shocking stuff.

There was always a fear that the timing of the Great War anniversary, alongside the May 2014 European Parliament election and the rise of Ukip could undermine a dignified response to the events of 1914-18. Yet few imagined the Conservatives would be this crass. The reality is clear: the government is using what should be a moment for national reflection and respectful debate to rewrite the historical record and sow political division. In the very paper that so grotesquely called into question Ralph Miliband's wartime service in the Royal Navy, the education secretary has sought to blame "leftwing academics" for misrepresenting the First World War.

His thesis is a bowdlerised version of historian Max Hastings's argument that the conflict was a necessary act of resistance against a militaristic Germany bent on warmongering and imperial aggression. Any talk of "lions led by donkeys" or "we are all guilty" of relativism is to betray the sacrifice of Flanders, Somme and Jutland, Gove wrote. The commemorations, argued Hastings, in the Mail last summer, "should seek to explain to a new generation that World War I was critical to the freedom of Western Europe".

So, first of all, some history. Much of Hastings's case is an update of the scholar Fritz Fischer's 1961 work, Germany's Aims in the First World War, which fully laid the blame for the war on the German lust for European and colonial power. Few on the left would wish to defend Kaiser Wilhelm II against such charges of militarism. "First cow the socialists, behead them and make them harmless, with a bloodbath if necessary, and then make war abroad. But not before and not both together," was his advice to his chancellor, Bernhard von Bülow, in 1905. The British left responded to such fascism by largely supporting the war effort. Appeals by trade union leaders to oppose German aggression, particularly against Belgium, led more than 250,000 of their members to enlist by Christmas 1914, with 25% of miners volunteering before conscription. Typical was John Ward, one of my predecessors as MP for Stoke-on-Trent and the leader of the Navvies' Union. To "fight Prussianism", he raised three pioneer battalions from his members and, commissioned as a colonel by Lord Kitchener, led them to battle in France, Italy and Russia.

Contrary to the assertions of Michael Gove and the Daily Mail, the left needs no lessons on "the virtues of patriotism, honour and courage". However, modern scholarship also suggests that Fischer underplayed internal opposition to the kaiser's ideas within the German establishment. What is more, the historian Christopher Clark has suggested that Serbia deserves significantly more blame for the spark of June 1914, while US scholar Sean McMeekin has even argued that Russian attempts to break up the Ottoman empire played an incendiary role in the fallout from Sarajevo. In Clark's judgment, other nations were just as imperialistic as the Germans and any attempt at a First World War blame game is futile. Whether you agree or disagree, given the deaths of 15 million people during the war, attempting to position 1918 as a simplistic, nationalistic triumph seems equally foolhardy, not least because the very same tensions re-emerged to such deadly effect in 1939. In the words of Professor Richard J Evans: "Propagating inaccurate myths […] is no way to create a solid national identity."

None of which is to belittle the significance of the First World War – its heroism, military engagements or social and cultural consequences. Indeed, the events of 1914-18 proved one of the prime motors of social change in modern British history. The growing impact of the state on production, employment and welfare soon came to affect most aspects of the lives of UK citizens. Culture and technology at all levels were transformed by the war and colonial frontiers redrawn, with Irish independence signposting the future decline of empire. The Representation of the People Act in 1918 saw a tripling of the electorate and the creation of a mass democracy with the enfranchisement of women over 30 and working-class men. And so, in the words of the curator and historian Nick Mansfield: "The key role of working-class people and their struggle for a different society and its outcomes needs to be given full attention if we are appropriately to commemorate the many lives lost."

That is surely the point. This year's anniversary events need to reflect and embrace the multiple histories that the war evinces – from the Royal British Legion to the National Union of Railwaymen to the Indian, Ethiopian and Australian servicemen fighting for the empire. And, in Britain, we know how to do it well. The 2007 commemorations on the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade were brilliant exercises in historical understanding, community participation, scholarship and reflection. As a result of numerous exhibitions, events and publications, we were able to understand much more about slavery in 1807 but also Britain in 2007.

To the government's credit, it is using the £50m commemorations fund to revamp London's Imperial War Museum and to offer school visits to the battlefields of northern France. Sadly, the Tories have decided to use this year's anniversary to sow division with ugly attacks on "leftwing academics". Meanwhile, in Berlin's Theater des Westens, the theatre where the kaiser sat, War Horse is being performed each night. Between the government's partisanship and Morpurgo's play, I know which is more likely to generate the kind of reflective understanding of the meaning and memory of the First World War that its history so desperately deserves.

[I suppose that no one should really be surprised that an sitting right-wing government in need of a future election victory should talk up the 100th anniversary of WW1 as something to do with patriotism, honour, duty and heroism and inevitably blame those historians, supposedly on the left-wing, of calling such things into question as they write books and articles about the killing fields on the Western Front. No doubt there were many individual acts of heroism - there could hardly fail to be in such a titanic struggle across so many battlefields and so many years. But as the historian quoted above rightly said, to couch the whole sorry event as a heroic fight by the allies against German imperialism is extremely simplistic at best. To ignore the repeated stupidity of mass attacks against prepared positions which resulted in the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands of men merely compounds the original crime for which, as far as I know, no one was held accountable. All wars are horrid by their very nature but WW1 took this horror to new heights. To turn our focus away from such things makes their repetition all the more likely. Long may such things be resisted with the evidence of what really happened in the mud of the many European battlefields.]