It's a great pleasure to take part in this debate, chaired by a distinguished historian herself. For me, history is a living thing. The continuum in which we live is a vitally important part of my imagination, and I'm constantly reflecting on the events of today in their historical context. Therefore, the teaching of history is vitally important. As Mick Antoniw said, a minute ago, history is dead politics, but actually, history is a living thing and the politics of previous generations is also a living thing today. We see this in the debate that has arisen as a result of the Black Lives Matter protests and what's been said about slavery and the role of the British empire and all that. So, it's vitally important that, when history is taught, it is taught in an objective way, or as objective a way as is possible.

I strongly support the petition on a common corpus of knowledge of the history of Wales. I studied Welsh history in school, and history then was taught in perhaps a rather different way from the way it's taught now, but I think it is very important for people to learn about their place in the history of their nation. You can't, I think, understand the events of today without having some real understanding of how we got where we are. As the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville said,

'as the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity'.

And I think that is a basic truism. But the teaching of history is itself, in some ways, a political act, or could be a political act, and we have to be careful, therefore, not to allow history to be used as a weapon of political propaganda, even though that might be subconscious. I think the second petition on the British empire displays a lack of understanding in its fullest sense of the role that the British empire played. It's vitally important, therefore, that we teach both sides of historical controversies. History is a chequerboard; it's got black and white squares on it. To have a full understanding of what happened in the past, we have to revive the controversies that have surrounded the events and movements that we are teaching about.

The British empire was, in many, many ways, a force for good, and the role that Britain played, as Mark Isherwood said, in the suppression of the slave trade is a vitally important part of nineteenth-century history. I think what the petition says, that Britain, including Wales, benefited from colonialism and slavery for centuries, overstates the economic importance of slavery. It was actually marginal in the economic development of the United Kingdom, and, of course, most of the British empire never had slavery at all: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India—great tracts of the world. The slave trade was fundamentally a transatlantic trade, and slavery, of course, has been endemic in all civilisations up to the modern day, all around the world. So, the idea that the British empire came in and enslaved people who were otherwise living in free, democratic countries is, of course, preposterous.

So, we have to see the events of the past in the context of their own time, and we have to understand the minds of the people who were making history at that time against the context of those days. Therefore, many individuals who were regarded as great men in their days we now regard as flawed, in many respects, but we need to teach the good with the bad and the bad with the good, so that's vitally important as well.

Britain, through its empire, which of course covered a quarter of the globe at its zenith in the 1920s, introduced to those countries the rule of law, incorrupt administration. It gave these countries the English language. India was unified as a result of its incorporation into the empire. Modern India would look very different, in geopolitical terms, from what it does today, had it not been for the British empire. As I said a moment ago, we suppressed slavery and we gave these countries the cultural gift of democracy, which was the successor to the British empire. And also, we promoted the economic development of large parts of the world, which supplies the wealth that, of course, the populations enjoy today. So, there are lots of good things that Britain was responsible for. Slavery was a stain, obviously, but we played an honourable part in its suppression.

Black history is important, but I think we have to keep it in its context and in proportion as well, because mass immigration into this country, of course, is a very, very recent phenomena. And even today, the 2011 census tells us that Wales had a population that was 96 per cent white, 2.3 per cent of Asian origin and 0.6 per cent black. So, yes, of course, everybody, whatever race or ethnic make-up that they are, wants to know the history of their own people, their own forebears, and I think that's an important and necessary part of any history curriculum, but I don't believe that it should dominate everything.

We need to teach the history of Wales, we need to teach the history of Britain, and we need to teach the place of Wales and Britain in the world. And if we do that in a constructive, objective way, but encourage people to understand that history is not a fact, because ultimately, all history is myth, in a sense; we are constantly reinterpreting the events of the past. What we need to teach people is that history itself is a problem that, probably, there is no hard and fast solution to. It teaches you how to analyse events and motivations and to understand that history is actually what is written by historians, but it isn't necessarily what happened at the time.