Poor old Mary Seacole, a good-hearted, kindly person, has been the sad victim of fanatics.
Long after she was dead, zealots used Mrs Seacole in their bitter campaign to abolish Britain and replace it with a multicultural nothingness.
Their target was Florence Nightingale, steely, Protestant, patriotic, self-disciplined and authoritarian.
They wanted to expel Miss Nightingale from the national pantheon.
They chose Mary Seacole, a jolly hotelkeeper and herbal healer, as their weapon.
Mrs Seacole did not reform the hospitals first of Britain and later of most of the world. She did not re-found nursing as a profession.
She was not remotely the equal of Florence Nightingale.
But because she was non-white, nobody dared to resist. They were scared of being called ‘racist’. So Mrs Seacole was put in the history books, as long ago as 1992.
Then she was turned into a national heroine and went into the National Curriculum.
Personally, I doubt that Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, has the power to remove her from it. Opposition to his plan is already brewing.
If you think this sort of thing is just a paper battle, you are sadly wrong.
In 1999, delegates at the conference of the Health Service union Unison voted overwhelmingly for a motion that deemed Florence Nightingale an ‘inappropriate role model’ for modern nursing, as her image ‘represented negative and backward-thinking elements’.
Mary Seacole was said to have ‘matched, if not exceeded’ Miss Nightingale’s achievements.
More... Click here to debate with Peter HitchensThe end of old-style nursing, scorned by our new rulers as ‘backward-thinking’, has a lot to do with the hijacking of poor Mary Seacole by radicals.
More from Peter Hitchens... PETER HITCHENS: We set Syria ablaze... Now we're hurling in explosives 01/06/13 The horrific killing of a soldier in London does not deserve the attention it is still getting 25/05/13 The Great Innocence Robbery: The awful abuse of girls in Oxford is just the latest consequence 19/05/13 Wondering how they ignored a kidnapper in Ohio? Well we're ignoring something MUCH bigger 11/05/13 PETER HITCHENS: Fruitcakes and closet racists? Cameron's talking about YOU! 04/05/13 PETER HITCHENS: Fanatical fools trying to blow us all up? They're the least of our problems... 27/04/13 PETER HITCHENS: What 'decriminalise' really means is: we're giving junkies a drug den next door to you 21/04/13 PETER HITCHENS: Let's remember Maggie for what she really was... a tragic failure 14/04/13 PETER HITCHENS: Miliband shoots at a footballing fascist - and scores an own goal 06/04/13 VIEW FULL ARCHIVEThis rewriting of history, to influence the present and the future, is what happens when revolutions take place. In George Orwell’s 1984, the ruling socialist party proclaims: ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.’
When I was growing up, we were still taught our national history as a story and as something to be proud of. A dedicated campaign, beginning in 1960, changed all that.
Old-fashioned narrative history books were thrown away. Confusing pamphlets full of conflicting ‘sources’ appeared, designed to suggest there was no true version of events and above all that what your parents had been taught was wrong.
I hear again and again of fragmented jumping about – children who have been taught about the Romans, the Tudors and Hitler, but with very little in between.
In secondary schools, many pupils give history up at 14, though it is compulsory up to 16 in most continental nations.
This matters. A country whose young know no history (and even the Eton-educated Prime Minister seems vague about Magna Carta and seems never to have heard of the 1689 Bill of Rights) is like a person with amnesia roaming the streets, the easy target of every sort of fraud and crook, ready to swallow the stupidest propaganda. And so we are.
If you have ever wondered how it is that modern politicians survive and prosper when they are so obviously mediocre and incompetent, now you know why. Hardly anyone realises how bad they are, because they know no better.
The person who knows no history remains forever a child, unable to see when he is being fooled and robbed.
TALK ABOUT REALLY GETTING IT IN THE NECK I find David Attenborough’s lecturing tone increasingly annoying. And the music in his new BBC Africa series is intrusive and needless. But if you didn’t see the fight between two giraffes last week, hurry to iPlayer. It gave new meaning to the expression ‘getting it in the neck’. Crime statistics - a job for the Fraud SquadI long ago accepted that this country’s police are just another nationalised industry, infused with political correctness and run mainly for the benefit of the employees.
So I take no sides in the current battle between Home Secretary Theresa May (a hopeless wet liberal) and the Police Federation (which grows each day more like the public sector unions of the Seventies).
But I just can’t take seriously new figures which claim to show crime has fallen while police budgets have dropped.
This is not because I think the modern police prevent crime. They would if they went back to proper foot patrols, but they won’t.
As long as they sit in cars and offices, suing each other for sexual harassment, police manpower has about as much influence on crime as does the number of Morris dancers or the membership of the Mothers’ Union.
What I object to is the claim that crime has fallen. It’s our standards of justice that have fallen.
This week we learned the prison population has actually dropped, thanks to soft sentencing, early releases, mass tagging, plus the granting of bail to almost anyone accused of anything less than mass murder.
As I showed a few weeks ago, the police, prosecutors and courts have ‘reduced’ crime by reclassifying thousands of major crimes as minor, and ignoring crimes that would once have landed their culprits in prison.
But it’s worse than that. Thanks to Dr Rodger Patrick, a former senior copper, now an academic, I have learned of the many methods used by police forces to reduce recorded crime.
There’s a full account of this on the Peter Hitchens Blog, but in summary it goes like this.
The public are actively discouraged from reporting some crimes.
Police officers get convicted criminals to own up to various past offences (perhaps not entirely truthfully) which are then classified as solved.
People are charged with crimes even though police know the charges won’t stick and will be dropped. These are also listed as ‘cleared up’.
Multiple crimes in one street are recorded as one episode. Thefts are recorded as lost property.
Officers are moved away to easier tasks, where detection and clear-up are more likely.
In short, it’s like any centralised, Soviet-style system. Any politically sensitive statistic will be manipulated.
Of course, all the police need to do now is to massage the figures the other way, to prove that Mrs May’s ‘cuts’ are increasing crime, or that crime has gone up under the new elected commissioners.
I wouldn’t believe that either. It’s going up because the country is run by pig-headed Left-wingers who refuse to recognise they’re wrong.
Hindley: The cold, scheming truthGood to see that not everyone was fooled by Myra Hindley’s disgraceful, scheming attempt to get herself released. If she’d been truly sorry, she’d never have dared. Prison papers record an official reporting that she was ‘cold and calculating and devoid of emotion, able to smile or cry as the need arose’.And part of her pose was to keep up with the news by reading, yes, The Guardian. It's good to see that not everyone was fooled by Myra Hindley’s disgraceful, scheming attempt to get herself released
