I must say I was rather disturbed by the language of Siân Gwenllian in introducing this debate, because she seemed to me to see the teaching of history not as something that is nuanced, complex, requires interpretation and isn't black and white, but merely as an opportunity to propagandise for her particular world view on an issue of modern-day complexity that requires very subtle and sensitive handling. And I'm sorry to say that the attitude that she seemed to evince in her speech is actually being followed, at the moment, in our schools in Wales.

I was recently sent, by a concerned parent from south Wales, some homework that was set for a seven-year-old child, about which this parent was very concerned. Because it had risen as a result of the George Floyd case and was based upon stuff that was published by Black Lives Matter. It included a photograph of a small child holding a Black Lives Matter poster, and various questions were asked that were to be answered. And then, the comment from the teacher at the end of it went like this, and I'm quoting here, because the child was asked to make a video:

'So, please put all your energy into this and make your speech count. This is such an important topic, it doesn't just happen far away in America, but it's true for our own friends.'

Well, now, this isn't education, this is activism, because if you look at the George Floyd case, and if there is evidence here of racism in the police forces in America, you will find that the picture is much more complex than the headlines would have us believe. The FBI statistics for 2016 show that 2,870 black people were murdered in that year, but 2,570 of the people who murdered them were also black. Three thousand, four hundred and ninety-nine white people were murdered, but 2,854 of those murderers were white. So, the overwhelming majority of murders actually take place by people of the same ethnicity in the United States. And if you take the figures between 2015 and 2019, black people accounted for 26.4 per cent of all those killed by the US police. Well, almost double that figure—50.3 per cent—were white. But, equally, whilst black Americans account for just 12 per cent of the population, they're responsible for 52.5 per cent of all murders, with the vast majority of their victims being black. So, if we're going to try to make out of the George Floyd case—[Inaudible.]—for racism in the whole of western society, I think that we're doing a substantial disservice.

Of course, if we relate this back to what has happened in history before, the same kind of slanting and distortion might take place. History has to be seen, if it's to be taught correctly, in the context of its time, and, as David Melding pointed out, Sir Thomas Picton, of course, he was a creature of his time. Slavery: nobody supports slavery today, and Britain was absolutely instrumental in the eradication of slavery in the western world.

Sir Thomas More, a great historical figure, canonised in my lifetime, believed in the burning of heretics. You know, should we remove all images of Sir Thomas More because he believed in barbaric execution? There's a movement to remove the statue of Constantine the Great from in front of York Minster cathedral. Constantine the Great was the man who made the Roman empire Christian, but, of course, the Roman empire was based on slaves, and Constantine the Great owned many slaves himself.

We have to have a sense of perspective. That's what history, surely, is all about. History should not be taught as a means of propaganda in schools. The teaching of history in schools should be inclusive, of course, and black and ethnic minorities do play a part, as Neil McEvoy has very convincingly pointed out in his speech, in our history, and that should be appropriately dealt with. But the whole history of the UK, of Wales and the wider world should be taught, including individuals who made history, whatever their ethnic background and whatever we may think, reading backwards retrospectively, of their behaviour with a twenty-first century view of it.

Slavery itself is a complicated subject to teach, because, yes, we know all about the American civil war and about the horrors of slavery in the south, but it's not just a case of whites enslaving blacks. There were 171 black slave owners in South Carolina in the census of 1860, and the largest of them was William Ellison Jr, who was himself a former slave, who had become a successful businessman, and he himself owned 63 black slaves. So, yes, history is complicated, and young people should be taught this, and what they should be taught most of all is to question what they're being told and how to differentiate between propaganda and fact. What is fact is itself a very difficult thing to determine in history—