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How 'multiculture' fanatics took Mary Seacole hostage

By Peter Hitchens

PUBLISHED: 00:02, 6 January 2013 | UPDATED: 00:02, 6 January 2013

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The end of old-style nursing, scorned by our new rulers as 'backward-thinking', has a lot to do with the hijacking of poor Mary Seacole by radicals

The end of old-style nursing, scorned by our new rulers as 'backward-thinking', has a lot to do with the hijacking of poor Mary Seacole by radicals

Poor old Mary Seacole, a good-hearted, kindly person, has been the sad victim of fanatics.

Long after she was dead, zealots used Mrs Seacole in their bitter campaign to abolish Britain and replace it with a multicultural nothingness.

Their target was Florence Nightingale, steely, Protestant, patriotic, self-disciplined and authoritarian.

They wanted to expel Miss Nightingale from the national pantheon.

They chose Mary Seacole, a jolly hotelkeeper and herbal healer, as their weapon.

Mrs Seacole did not reform the hospitals first of Britain and later of most of the world. She did not re-found nursing as a profession.

She was not remotely the equal of Florence Nightingale.

But because she was non-white, nobody dared to resist. They were scared of being called �racist�. So Mrs Seacole was put in the history books, as long ago as 1992.

Then she was turned into a national heroine and went into the National Curriculum.

Personally, I doubt that Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, has the power to remove her from it. Opposition to his plan is already brewing.

If you think this sort of thing is just a paper battle, you are sadly wrong.

In 1999, delegates at the conference of the Health Service union Unison voted overwhelmingly for a motion that deemed Florence Nightingale an �inappropriate role model� for modern nursing, as her image �represented negative and backward-thinking elements�.

Mary Seacole was said to have �matched, if not exceeded� Miss Nightingale�s achievements.

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The end of old-style nursing, scorned by our new rulers as �backward-thinking�, has a lot to do with the hijacking of poor Mary Seacole by radicals.

This rewriting of history, to influence the present and the future, is what happens when revolutions take place. In George Orwell�s 1984, the ruling socialist party proclaims: �Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.�

When I was growing up, we were still taught our national history as a story and as something to be proud of. A dedicated campaign, beginning in 1960, changed all that.

Old-fashioned narrative history books were thrown away. Confusing pamphlets full of conflicting �sources� appeared, designed to suggest there was no true version of events and above all that what your parents had been taught was wrong.

I hear again and again of fragmented jumping about � children who have been taught about the Romans, the Tudors and Hitler, but with very little in between.

In secondary schools, many pupils give history up at 14, though it is compulsory up to 16 in most continental nations.

This matters. A country whose young know no history (and even the Eton-educated Prime Minister seems vague about Magna Carta and seems never to have heard of the 1689 Bill of Rights) is like a person with amnesia roaming the streets, the easy target of every sort of fraud and crook, ready to swallow the stupidest propaganda. And so we are.

If you have ever wondered how it is that modern politicians survive and prosper when they are so obviously mediocre and incompetent, now you know why. Hardly anyone realises how bad they are, because they know no better.

The person who knows no history remains forever a child, unable to see when he is being fooled and robbed.