Thank you very much for calling me. This is a very important subject and the use of words carries huge significance. In the English language, we talk about 'history' as if it was a male-dominated business. Obviously, 'herstory' is just as important, whether we're talking about the history of women's suffrage in Wales and the struggle we had to go through to get it or whether we're talking about much wider issues.

I think, in the context of this specific petition, it is a contemporary theme and it's really sobering to understand that the failure to have any sort of reconciliation after the American civil war still has massive implications for events going on in the United States today, which allows some citizens to have utter disregard and complacency about the suffering of other citizens that we in this country find really quite extraordinary.

But I think we cannot criticize others without looking to our own history and our failure to look at the history of the British empire, which I think very much fuels a lot of the resentment felt, quite rightly, by black citizens of our country. It was founded on slavery, and yet we continue to romanticise the British empire, glamorise it. We still give people who have performed extraordinary services, public services, medals that contain the words 'member of the British empire', 'commander of the British empire', 'British empire medal', which is an utter anachronism to today's society and clearly something that we have to address.

It's equally inappropriate that on Remembrance Sunday we sing, 'Send her victorious, happy and glorious' about our monarch as the national anthem of the UK, particularly on Remembrance Sunday, when we are commemorating the horrors of war. But I also think that we have to look in great depth at more contemporary issues, for example the Windrush scandal, which has yet to be resolved. People who were refused to be allowed work, refused benefits, and, in the worst cases, deported from this country, have still to receive compensation, and many of them are now dying. How scandalous is that? 

We really do need to re-evaluate our history in light of contemporary problems, and nowhere is that more obvious in this week of all weeks than in relation to climate change. What we do in this country has an impact on people living on the other side of the world, and it's really important that we take these responsibilities seriously and amend our behaviour in solidarity with people who we have never met and are never likely to meet, but who suffer because of what we do and the way in which we burn up the resources of the world. So, I think these are excellent petitions and I look forward to seeing the outcome of them in the way we treat history in the new curriculum.