Being American, I had no idea that the BBC's official line was that black people had always been in Britain. That seems ahistorical nonsense. Why is the BBC promoting ethnonationalism? “The very first Britons were black” and “every single British person comes from a migrant”. What’s more, “Britain has been a mostly white country for a lot less time than it has been a mostly black country”. These are some of the claims made in a new children’s book entitled ‘Brilliant Black British History’. (The book, incidentally, is published by Bloomsbury – which cancelled Nigel Biggar’s meticulous work on the British Empire because of concerns about “public feeling”.) You might be tempted to dismiss such claims as the eccentric writings of a single, black-British author with no real influence. Yet the book is already a number one best seller – having received plaudits from numerous black public figures, as well as the Guardian newspaper."
