The debate over how we teach the British Empire has become one of the most polarising arguments in modern British education. Some insist the empire was a force for progress – ushering in parliamentary institutions, the rule of law, global trade and modernity. Others emphasise its violence, exploitation and the long shadow it casts over current-day inequalities.

What is striking is not that these views exist, but that arguments about empire increasingly sit within wider disputes about national identity, race, belonging and how Britain understands its past. We ask students to understand one of the most complex forces in world history, yet we are too often urged to present it as a single story.

This is why Parallel Histories, where I am the CEO, is launching a new eBook series on the British Empire. We believe that contested history should be taught as contested. The empire is not a morality tale with a single lesson – it is a vast, contradictory and deeply human story. To teach it responsibly, we must teach it from both perspectives – its architects and its subjects, those exercising power and those living under imperial rule, its beneficiaries and its victims, its triumphs and its traumas. These are competing claims that must be tested against evidence. The task is not to weigh benefits against harms, but to test competing claims about how empire was justified, how it was experienced and how it should be understood today.

The British Empire was never one thing. It was a global system that spanned continents and centuries, shaped by millions of people with competing motives and experiences. To reduce it to either a celebration or an indictment is to flatten the past into propaganda. Students deserve better.

From the imperialist British perspective, the empire was often justified as a civilising mission, a commercial enterprise or a strategic necessity. Many believed they were spreading law, order and modernity. Some saw it as a source of national pride and global influence.

From the perspective of the colonised, the empire could mean dispossession, racial hierarchy, economic exploitation and cultural suppression. It could also mean collaboration, adaptation, resistance and the forging of new identities under pressure.

When students encounter these perspectives side by side, something powerful happens – they begin to think critically. They learn that history is not a set of answers, but a set of arguments. They learn to weigh evidence, question assumptions and recognise bias – including their own. They learn that people in the past, like people today, acted from mixed motives and lived with unintended consequences. They test claims against evidence, look at sources, draw inferences and confront contradictions between different interpretations.

The current debate about the empire often collapses into a tug-of-war between nostalgia and condemnation. But the real problem is not about which side wins – it is that students are rarely shown that there are other sides at all.

When we teach only the positive story, we risk producing students who cannot understand why the empire remains a source of pain and anger in many parts of the world. When we teach only the negative story, we risk producing students who cannot understand why the empire was supported by so many at home and abroad, or why its legacy is still defended today.

In both cases, we produce citizens who are poorly equipped to navigate the complexities of modern Britain – a country whose multicultural fabric, global relationships and political debates are all shaped by imperial history, and shaped by the decisions we the British took after the end of empire. A single story creates fragility. Parallel stories create intellectual resilience.

Our approach is simple but transformative: we present students with competing historical narratives, each grounded in primary sources, and ask them to interrogate both. We do not tell them what to think. We teach them how to think. Students investigate the evidence from one perspective and argue from that position, and then switch to do the same from the alternative contested perspective. The strength of this process is that it requires students to weigh evidence and test conclusions.

In our British Empire programme, students encounter British politicians defending imperial expansion as a moral duty alongside Indian nationalists describing the economic devastation of colonial rule. They read about African leaders negotiating between collaboration and resistance, and Caribbean voices reflecting on slavery, emancipation and identity. British soldiers, missionaries, merchants and administrators explaining their motives in their own words, alongside anti-colonial thinkers articulating visions of freedom and self-determination.

Students then analyse and debate from these perspectives – not to endorse them, but to understand them. They learn that history is constructed, contested and alive. This method does not dilute the truth – it deepens it. It does not avoid controversy – it equips students to handle it. It does not impose a narrative as much as it empowers students to build one.

We live in a moment when public discourse is increasingly polarised, when social media rewards outrage over understanding and when young people are bombarded with simplified narratives about complex issues. Teaching contested history through parallel perspectives is not just an academic exercise – it is a democratic necessity.

When historical judgements become markers of political or cultural allegiance, enquiry becomes harder. Parallel Histories separates scrutiny from allegiance: students argue from one interpretation, switch to the competing interpretation and then reach their own judgement.

If students cannot grapple with the contradictions of the past, how will they grapple with the contradictions of the present? If they cannot understand why people disagree about history, how will they understand why people disagree about politics, identity, or justice today?

The British Empire is not just a chapter in a textbook. It is a living force in our national story. To teach it honestly, we must teach it in full. The question is not whether the British Empire was good or bad. The question is whether we trust students enough to let them decide for themselves.

Something ugly has erupted in Middlesbrough. Nine people are dead after two separate incidents days apart – first a high-speed crash on the weekend, then what appears to be a deliberate arson attack on a family home. Police strongly suspect that both events were gang-related. Around 200 extra officers have been sent to the city to aid investigations and quell the growing sense of anarchy.

And right on cue, the excuses have started. I’ve already seen Labour and Green politicians talking about deprivation and a lack of opportunities for young people. What bloody lack of opportunity?

On Friday, I stood beside the flowers left for PCs Matthew Blades and Tom Clough – two victims of the weekend’s head-on collision. Barely 200 metres away is Boho X – the gleaming, 60,000 square-foot global headquarters of games developer Double Eleven, packed with ambitious young people working in a global industry. Clustered around it are dozens of vibrant small businesses, cashing in on the opportunities the world presents.

Teesside has enormous industrial investment, booming businesses, apprenticeships, great colleges and one of Britain’s biggest digital sectors. But we’re being told that our underclass is violent and criminal because society hasn’t provided enough career options.

Total bollocks. I spent four years as the mayor of Middlesbrough, and many more working with charities in our poorest neighbourhoods. I’ve seen the worst of poverty, addiction and genuinely awful childhoods.

I’ve also seen something our political class avoids acknowledging: people are behaving appallingly because we’ve allowed them to. They discover that breaking the law doesn’t cost them anything, that intimidation works and that police are stretched. Even if they are arrested, the courts are clogged for years ahead and prisons are already full. Then we’re astonished when they become more brazen.

The high-speed crash appears to prove this observation. Four of the five drivers of the car that caused the collision had pleaded guilty to a combined 37 offences. Yet none of them had ever seen the inside of a prison cell.

As mayor, I massively expanded CCTV because residents desperately wanted action against crime. Criminals arrived with industrial grinders and cut down the camera masts, so we strengthened them. So they used vehicles to ram them instead.

This wasn’t a cry for help. It’s contempt for law and disrespect for those who comply. And the people suffering from it aren’t MPs on nice streets or Guardian journalists. They’re cleaners, warehouse workers, bus drivers and their kids. Their lives can be made unbearable. Literally.

I’ve met residents too frightened to talk to me near their own homes. Some were even too scared to contact Crimestoppers anonymously. Where is the national outrage about them?

Instead, whenever criminality becomes impossible to ignore, Britain conducts another national therapy session about the criminal. What happened in his childhood? Was he excluded from school? Do we need another youth club? Stop it.

Of course circumstances matter. I’ve spent years helping homeless people, addicts and ex-offenders, and I’ve seen people turn their lives around. But sympathy or empathy before punishment is wrong. This approach has emboldened the people who are wrecking lives and communities.

The working classes work when they can. They pay taxes and obey the law. And we leave them to watch a minority deal drugs, intimidate neighbours and create chaos around them.

The truly compassionate response is to protect the victim. That means enough police to make getting caught a likely outcome of committing a crime. We need courts that swiftly judge and punish offenders while the crime is still fresh in everyone’s minds. And we need enough prison cells to keep dangerous and prolific criminals locked up.

Prison works for the simplest reason imaginable: it separates a criminal from his victims. He isn’t intimidating his neighbour, burgling someone’s home or recruiting another youngster into dealing drugs.

Here’s the most important thing about what’s happening in Middlesbrough: this isn’t really about Middlesbrough. My hometown isn’t some uniquely dysfunctional hellhole. Most people here are doing exactly what people everywhere do: working, raising families, building businesses and getting on with life. My 83-year-old mother still gets the bus into town and volunteers on the local council estate. She experiences no crime. That’s Middlesbrough, too.

What’s different today is that Middlesbrough has exposed something Britain has preferred not to confront – namely, the nationwide existence of small and poisonous groups, living outside the social rules that everyone else accepts. We’ve indulged them, coddled them and now we’re paying the price.

Don’t blame Middlesbrough. Look at the criminal underclass we’ve allowed to develop across Britain. Stop asking what society failed to give them and start asking why society tolerated them.

Andy Preston was mayor of Middlesbrough from 2019 until 2023.

‘You never get a second chance to make a first impression.’

‘Better to be overdressed than under.’

‘Clothes maketh the man.’

These phrases often cross my mind when putting an outfit together, probably because I heard them so often from my mother. She, like me, believes that clothes matter. Making an effort with your outfit, showing you’ve given some thought to what you’re wearing, how you’ve put it together, what matches, and what doesn’t, shows a level of respect for a situation. And, more importantly, for yourself.

I do wish some of these well-worn phrases would cross the mind of our scruff-in-chief, Andy Burnham. Not only are some of the prime minister’s clothing choices frankly hideous, what’s worse is that it appears to be a deliberate decision. A decision so important that he chose to announce it days before he was due to become prime minister. Far from discussing the myriad of problems Britain faces, Burnham chose to share with the nation that he plans on ditching his suit and tie for the vast majority of his work.

Burnham’s recent arrival in Ukraine showed that his lax dress code has gone too far. Earlier this week, His Majesty’s prime minister disembarked the train in Kyiv wearing a zip-up polo shirt better suited to a night in Wetherspoons than his first introduction to a nation – and an ally – at war. He may have been travelling, but would it have killed him to stick on a shirt and a smart jacket?

Maybe I’ve been radicalised. I often used to broadcast in a smart suit jacket with a shirt and pocket square, without a tie, thinking this was sufficient. But the combination of a partner who refuses to put the bins out without his hair being styled, and a TV colleague who once took me aside and asked why I don’t wear a tie on air, made me realise I was demeaning my job. And, more importantly, myself.

So I now broadcast in a tie. Every time. Why? Because sartorial standards matter. They matter for those on TV. They matter for those in important jobs. And they certainly matter for the man who has one of, if not the, most important jobs in the country.

Does Burnham think he’s cool not to think this way? Does he believe it’ll make him more ‘down’ with the ‘yoof’ vote? Labour believes 16-year-olds deserve the right to vote, so maybe it makes sense that their leader dresses like one?

Burnham isn’t alone in his poor style. Who can forget the hideous sight of Tony Blair in high-waisted jeans in a ‘casual’ meeting with former US president George W Bush?

Or the worst-dressed prime minister – in fact, the worst-dressed man in history – Boris Johnson? In a stained and ill-fitting suit, un-ironed shirt, unkempt hair, Boris often resembled having been dragged through a hedge backwards, forwards and then being beaten by it.

When did our leaders lose their sense of style? Remember Margaret Thatcher? She used to have Marks & Spencer open early to buy her power suits. The only time you ever saw her in anything other than a coordinated shirt and jacket with matching court shoes was when she was in the back of a tank. Which is exactly how it should be.

In your wildest imagination, could you picture her meeting a foreign dignitary in a t-shirt? She’d beat you with her matching handbag at the mere suggestion, and she’d be right to do so.

Even Keir Starmer made the effort with a suit and tie. Okay, it was Lord Alli who appears to have both chosen and purchased them, but at least Starmer’s clothing was more successful than his tenure as prime minister.

Burnham actually looks quite good in a suit, when he bothers. Can he not just bother a little more often?

Because I do judge people by how they dress. Not by the cost of their clothes – a wardrobe doesn’t need to be expensive to be suitable. I judge the effort made, against the occasion that requires it.

And I expect to be similarly judged. I want people to know I’ve put some thought into it. Yes, it’s a hassle to have an ironed shirt every day. To think whether my jacket and tie work together, or whether my pocket square is the right colour (I’m a fan of a slightly clashing pocket square). The shoes also have to work. Even the socks.

It’s about respect. As prime minister, you’re literally making decisions about people’s livelihoods, about their taxes, their social care, their health care, wars, infrastructure, the economy. You’re meeting other world leaders. You’re leading a huge team, many of whom look up to you.

Doing so in casual sportswear just doesn’t cut it. It shows a lack of respect for the people around you. More importantly, it shows a lack of respect for the office you hold.

And that’s much more important than any spin or focus group that might say younger voters don’t care about how you dress. Our prime minister should be showing younger voters why it matters, and why standards are important.

Andy Burnham is often accused of having much more style over substance. When it comes to his clothing choices, I really wish he did.

Cristo Foufas is a TV and radio presenter.

Reform UK’s pledge to prioritise British-born workers for social housing has proven predictably provocative. Announced this week, Reform has said that it would look to move working people under 35 and married couples with children up the social-housing queue. This comes hot on the heels of a previously announced policy to exclude foreign nationals from social housing altogether.

Reform appears to have crossed a significant new line. Britain may already discriminate between ‘British citizen by descent’ and otherwise. But up to now, no major party has mooted creating two kinds of citizens – British-born and foreign-born – for the purpose of allocating public services.

Reform’s potential creation of ‘two tiers’ of citizenship could have drastic implications across the British state. After all, once a distinction is made for social housing, why stop there? Perhaps other rights, entitlements or welfare policies could be similarly affected. Even voting could be, in principle, restricted.

The unintended consequences could be just as impactful. The category of ‘foreign-born’ casts a wide net. It could apply to those who arrived as small children who consider themselves, and would be considered by others, totally British. It could even apply to children of British citizens who happened to be out of the country when their child was born. Both in theory and in practice, this policy proposal needs proper scrutiny.

But the underlying impetus behind Reform’s proposal is clear. It is a part of an attempt to undo the tremendous damage that has been done to the social contract in this country by the total devaluation of the concept of citizenship.

This devaluation has been carried out by successive governments, each deeply suspicious of, and often hostile to, patriotic and national sentiments – the very things that give meaning to a nation. Anything connected to the peculiarly British national experience – from the Magna Carta to the British Empire – has either been downplayed or denigrated. As a result, citizenship has been hollowed out, reduced to a legal, administrative category – open to anyone and not conferring any special rights or obligations. Just about the only special privilege open to citizens is the right to vote (and even this is extended to Irish and Commonwealth citizens who are in the UK legally).

At the same time, the state has actively devalued British citizenship by engaging in a de facto open-borders experiment. This has made a mockery of one of the most fundamental features of citizenship – the right to share in the decision as to who enters your territory. And it has practically undermined citizenship by making it available to increasingly large numbers of people.

Indeed, Britain has recently been handing out citizenship on an unprecedented scale. In 2024 alone, 269,621 people became British citizens – the highest number since the Home Office began collecting data in 2005. In 2025, 236,512 people became British citizens. Those numbers will likely rise further should any government set about reforming ‘indefinite leave to remain’ – a permanent resident status currently given to anyone who has lived here for five years or more.

Many British people now intuit that this mass devaluation of citizenship has changed the rules of the game – that being a British citizen ain’t what it used to be. They feel that newcomers are able to game the system. The stats substantiate this feeling. According to the 2021 Census, 48 per cent of household heads in social housing in London, and 19 per cent nationwide, were born outside the UK. That over half of these household heads are British passport holders and have lived in the UK for a long time does not diminish the sense of unfairness felt by many members of the general public.

It certainly doesn’t seem right that we have a social-housing system, especially in London, that seems to prioritise the interests of new or recent arrivals over those of citizens with deep historical ties to this country.

Indeed, local councils seem to be prioritising ever newer groups of arrivals for social housing. A regeneration project in Tower Hamlets is aimed almost exclusively at Bangladeshis. Even more incredibly, it is not just a regeneration project that happens to benefit people who happen to be Bangladeshi – the planning application is shot through with references to the supposed specific needs of the Bangladeshi community and has been ‘specifically arranged for Bangladeshi families’.

Britain is now in the position of trying to operate a national welfare state while becoming increasingly reluctant to say that the national community itself has any distinctive claim on it. That contradiction could perhaps be ignored when immigration was limited and ‘naturalisation’ was rare. It is much harder to ignore after an era of mass migration and historically high levels of citizenship grants.

It is in the context of the hollowing out of citizenship that Reform’s creation of a potential two-tier citizenship needs to be understood. We are facing a near-unprecedented challenge. Our political elites, by opening Britain’s borders and devaluing citizenship, have caused enormous damage. Undoing it is going to require us to think creatively, and we are going to sometimes need to step outside the straitjacket of recent policy.

Of course, we need to be very careful. The implications of such a policy, if handled badly, could be dire. But at the very least, Reform’s proposal should be the start of a widespread conversation about what British citizenship means and whether the policies of the past decades have cheapened or strengthened it. One thing is certain: the status quo cannot continue.

The Jason Arday saga unfolded like a fable: the allegations of plagiarism, staged racist attacks and fabricated achievements captivated the world before his tragic and premature death. In the weeks since, one thing has bothered me: the media’s relative lack of curiosity about the man who helped spearhead the crusade against him, Nathan Cofnas.

Cofnas is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University and a former fellow at Cambridge. His trajectory has been extraordinary. The Jewish-American academic built his early reputation dismantling Kevin MacDonald’s pseudoscientific anti-Semitic theories, arguing that sweeping evolutionary claims about Jewish power were methodologically dubious, heavily cherry-picked and fundamentally incapable of proving causation.

He then went on to establish his own biological explanation for Jewish exceptionalism, based on a hereditary, above-average IQ in Jewish populations. Intentionally or not, this move flattered his own ancestry while edging close to granting scientific legitimacy to one of anti-Semitism’s oldest tropes.

Cofnas has since deployed theories of ‘race realism’ against black populations. In a display of pure hubris, he compares his banal ideas in ‘A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution’ – which advocates rolling back 20th-century civil-rights advances – to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a claim as absurd as Jason Arday’s wildest myths.

Across both mainstream and alternative media, interviewers have proved completely incapable of challenging Cofnas. On LBC, Nick Ferrari pressed him on his assertion that, in a meritocracy, ‘blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment’. Yet Ferrari flinched when Cofnas laundered the claim through a Harvard study on undergraduate admissions, which projected black enrolment dropping to 0.7 per cent under strict academic criteria and without a DEI leg up. This let Cofnas falsely attribute his own sweeping generalisations about race to Harvard itself.

Even within the national context of the United States, Cofnas’s defence collapses. Extrapolating the 0.7 per cent figure, referring to graduates at one elite Ivy League institution, to claim there would be no high-profile, high-achieving black people in a nation of 330million people is statistically unsound.

I do not deny the heritability of individual human traits. While studying education and economic development at the London School of Economics, I examined Nordic adoption studies showing that some children’s educational outcomes align more closely with their biological parents than their adoptive ones. Individual heritability is a documented scientific reality.

However, it is absurd to extrapolate narrow, localised datasets into sweeping pronouncements about billions of people based on race, especially when two populations in sub-Saharan Africa can share as much genetic distance as an African and a European – a point argued by Angela Saini in Superior: The Return of Race Science. What’s more, working in finance has taught me a fundamental truth: statistics are easily massaged, whether to cover up a bad balance sheet or to promote abject nonsense. Asserting an intrinsic biological hierarchy across entire continents based on sparse data from developing regions or a single Ivy League admissions projection is lazy at best and farcical at worst.

Crucially, the assumption that IQ tests measure raw intelligence independent of environment is fundamentally flawed, as Joseph Henrich has demonstrated. If we accept Cofnas’s rigid hereditarian logic, how do we account for the birth-order effect, where older siblings consistently score higher on IQ tests than younger siblings born to the exact same parents? Furthermore, the 20th-century surge in global IQ scores – the Flynn effect – was largely driven by expanded schooling, public health and cognitive enrichment, not by rapid genetic selection. To isolate a true biological racial IQ gap, one would need to control for every conceivable cultural, socioeconomic and environmental variable, a task that remains virtually impossible.

Indeed, every metric Cofnas uses to infer black cognitive inferiority – including lower test scores and higher crime rates – is routinely documented among white working-class populations in post-industrial Britain and America. If group-level disparities proved biological unfitness, Cofnas would be forced to conclude that the white working class is genetically unsuited for modern society.

White British pupils rank among the lowest-performing demographics in the UK, trailing almost every ethnic minority group. In fact, low-income ethnic minority students on free school meals regularly outperform white British children who are not economically disadvantaged. Some of the top-performing state schools in England educate a disproportionate number of black students, such as Katherine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School, Brampton Manor Academy and St Olave’s, to name a few. Across the Atlantic, historical precedents tell a similar story. Under Jim Crow segregation, black schools like Dunbar High School, in Washington, DC, regularly outperformed white schools despite receiving significantly less funding and facing systemic discrimination.

Do conservatives who uncritically endorse Cofnas’s claims about black capability also accept the logical conclusion of his framework, that white working-class families are also ‘biologically hardwired’ for failure? I should hope not.

Let’s be frank, there is nothing ‘real’ about Cofnas’s so-called race realism. If I’d submitted an essay with methodology this porous, my tutors would have picked it apart line by line. He has relied on flawed methodologies to construct a rigid racial hierarchy, one that conveniently places people of his own Jewish ancestry near the top and people of my black ancestry near the bottom. I worry about the broader ramifications of such appalling scholarship gaining mainstream currency – for Jews, for black people and for everyone else.

If our media class cannot dismantle arguments this banal and structurally unsound, we are leaving the door wide open for more batty ideas to permeate through society unchallenged.