Readers respond to Kojo Koram’s article about the Tory preoccupation with dictating our national story
Kojo Koram provides a useful corrective to the common, narrow perception of culture he describes (Here’s what the right gets wrong about culture: it’s not a monument, but a living thing, 16 August), but the “fossilised version of British culture” he identifies is not easily separated from the equally prevalent narrow, prescriptive notions about history that underpin it.
Too many people (and “culture war” fantasists in particular) approach history as an indisputable account of the past, when in fact historical understanding is a continual work in progress. This misunderstanding of history, both as a discipline and as an account, helps to entrench the view that culture is something fixed and unchanging and just as frequently invokes the equally problematic notion of “tradition” as a supposed trump card in arguments about both culture and history.