The teaching of our history in Welsh schools matters. The past informs the future; a loss of the past would mean the most thoughtless of ages. History teaches us that 'Welsh' means British. Both England and Scotland are named after their invaders. However, the Britons remained. Wales is named after the term used by the invaders—meaning 'foreigner' in their language—to describe the Britons across our islands, who referred to each other as fellow countrymen and women, 'Y Cymry'. We hear of the iron ring of castles built in north Wales after Anglo-Norman conquest, but we hear little of the 100,000 fellow Britons who had died in the attempted genocide in northern England by the Normans—the harrying of the north—two centuries previously.

The first petition we're debating refers to the Glyndŵr rising. We hear of his dream of a Welsh Parliament, two Welsh universities and a Welsh free church. However, history also teaches us that he previously dutifully served the last Plantagenet king and joined the army that king led into Scotland, before rebelling against the first king since the Norman conquest whose mother tongue was not French, in a plot with Mortimer and Percy to divide the kingdom into three parts.

The first petition also refers to the drowning of Capel Celyn, which belongs to every community in Wales. However, history teaches us that this is also part of a wider British experience, where communities were flooded when the Rivington reservoirs were constructed to supply water to Liverpool a century earlier.

Myths tell stories about the early history of a people. There are those who believe that the destiny of mystical Britain—Albion, Alba, Alban—is waiting to be awoken as a spiritual leader of the world. According to the twelfth century The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the exiled Brutus of Troy was told by the goddess Diana,

'Brutus! there lies beyond the Gallic bounds

An island which the western sea surrounds,

By giants once possessed, now few remain

To bar thy entrance, or obstruct thy reign.

To reach that happy shore thy sails employ

There fate decrees to raise a second Troy

And found an empire in thy royal line,

Which time shall ne'er destroy, nor bounds confine.'

Although commonly dismissed now, Geoffrey of Monmouth's work was regarded as fact until the late seventeenth century, and the story appears in most early histories of Britain. The teaching of black and POC UK histories in Welsh schools matters. From one of the first black people to have lived in Wales, named John Ystumllyn, brought to Wales in the eighteenth century and believed to have married a local woman, to the likes of Shirley Bassey, Colin Jackson, Cardiff's current mayor, and the former mayor of Colwyn Bay, Dr Sibani Roy, the BAME population of Wales has made significant contributions.

Most societies have exploited slave labour at some stage in their history. This is also true of Wales. A slave chain discovered on Anglesey made to fit five people can be dated to the Iron Age, about 2,300 years ago. When the Romans invaded, they brought their own slaves with them, slaves from nations across the Roman Empire in Europe, North Africa and the middle east. After the Romans left, the British tribes enslaved those they defeated in battle. The transatlantic slave trade flourished from the early sixteenth century until 1807, when the British Parliament passed an Act to abolish trading slaves within the British Empire. Campaigns to stop slavery had been started by black and white people more than 30 years before the Act was finally passed. The British abolition movement got under way in earnest in 1787, when Thomas Clarkson founded a committee to fight the slave trade. One member, William Dillwyn, was an American Quaker of Welsh descent. Campaigners had been laying the groundwork by publishing documents about the cruelty of slavery. One of these was William Williams of Pantycelyn, who wrote the hymn 'Bread of Heaven'. In the 1770s, a number of former slaves published their life stories, and Williams was the first to translate one of these into Welsh. Although Britain was the pre-eminent slave trading nation during the eighteenth century, and illegal British slave trading continued for many years after the passing of the 1807 Act, the Royal Navy's role in the suppression of the transoceanic slave trades represents a remarkable episode of sustained humanitarian activity. However, illegal slavery still continues in many parts of the world today, even in Wales. As Martin Luther King said,

'I have a dream…let freedom ring'.