The state has failed Gen Z, I’m amazed they’re not MORE angry | UK | News

Revert headlines claiming young Britons would not fight for their country caused a wailing and gnashing of teeth among sections of the commentariat. Polling last month suggested half of Generation Z – those born between the mid-90s and mid-2010s – saw the UK as a “racist country” while just one in ten would defend it if it came to war. Military and political figures described the YouGov findings as a “wake-up call”, while pundits fell over themselves to blame decades of high immigration and failing community cohesion plus a vogue for “Britain-bashing” in schools and academia.

One of the UK’s best-known historians, David Olusoga has never shied away from difficult truths; indeed he feels passionately that the very point of history is challenging preconceptions to foster a broader understanding of our national story. “Rewriting history is not an attack on history, it’s the job of historians. It’s what we do to expand the horizons of what we know,” he tells me as he offers another explanation for the figures. “This presumption that every other generation was bursting with a sense of patriotism, and that’s why they served – I think that’s historically ignorant. They often did so out of a financial sense. They did so because it was a way of seeing the world. One of my ancestors fought in the Scottish Highlanders Regiment. It was that or being a landless labourer.”

Neither, he says, should we point the finger at recent attempts, sometimes condemned as “woke”, to take a more rounded view of Britain’s endeavours. “It’s such a self-serving interpretation of that survey to say it’s to do with being honest about our history,” he continues. “It’s taking information and deploying it in culture wars.”

So why are young people such reluctant patriots, especially against the background of a rising threat from a resurgent and bullying Russia, already brutally on the march in Ukraine, and an expansionist China? “There are lots of reasons, one is that it’s an alien idea. It’s been three generations since we had a mass army. It’s also the case that most people have no contact with the Army,” Olusoga explains. “When I was a kid, one of the places I went many times with school was the Museum of the Durham Light Infantry.

“It was a pivotal moment in my life, seeing the maps of the Western Front where the Durham Light Infantry had fought and realising they named their trenches after the streets of Newcastle and Gateshead. These boys had gone to the same Victorian red brick schools I was studying in. It was an amazing moment of communion. But that museum and most of the regimental museums have now gone – the Army is this distant thing.”

Olusoga, 55, who lives in Bristol with his partner of 20 years and their daughter, believes we are at a “hinge point”, simultaneously frightening and exhilarating, as we witness the withdrawal of America as the guarantor of world peace and stability for the past 75 years. His overriding conclusion – that the state has failed in its social contract with young people when we may need them the most – is difficult to disagree with, whatever other civic and cultural aspects might be in play. “In the First World War, the idea was that we were going to create a ‘Land Fit For Heroes’, as the phrase had it. People would come back and their lives would be better,” he continues.

“Equally, during the Second World War, the idea we were going to build the welfare state was absolutely central to people’s contract with the nation for risking their lives. If I was 19 today, the fact I will never be able to buy a house, that as a result I may never be able to have a family, and will spend the rest of my life working to pay rent to someone from an older generation – that social contract is so poor, so one-sided, and then to risk your life on top of that…”

Olusoga, Professor of Public History at Manchester University and presenter of hit documentary series A House Through Time, adds: “I’m amazed young people aren’t more angry. The idea you can mobilise a nation to then come back and work on zero-hour contracts in a flat owned by somebody else is crazy. Every generation that’s gone to war has demanded a better deal.”

Born in Lagos in 1970 to a white British mother and a Nigerian father, Olusoga’s family moved to Gateshead so his dad could attend university. He credits Airfix models and Action Man with helping foster his love of history. We’re talking today about his brilliant new podcast Journey Through Time, co-hosted with Professor Sarah Churchwell, 54. He smiles: “I wanted someone cleverer than me. Sarah is incredibly bright and energetic.”

Their new podcast is produced by Gary Lineker’s company Goalhanger, which is also responsible for hits like The Rest Is History, and James Holland and Al Murray’s wartime pod, We Have Ways of Making You Talk. The pair aim to tell stories we “don’t know or have forgotten”. “People find this hard to believe, but there’s still thousands of stories on the margins that people don’t know well,” says David. “We’re going to take famous events and reveal the social histories behind them – what it was like to be alive at that moment.

“For example, we’re going to do a couple of shows on The Great Fire of London. Now we all have some idea of Pudding Lane and Pepys’ diary. But that was a days-long event, you could see it marching across the city. How do people get out of its way? How did they take their belongings? What was lost? What was saved?”

Olusoga’s enthusiasm is palpable. “We’re going to use newspaper accounts, diaries, court reporting, prison records, police records… the voices of people who were there at the time. So it’s history not of parliaments and palaces, it’s history on the street, in the home, as a lived experience.”

The series kicks off with the story of the Black Tom Island explosion in New York Harbor in the summer of 1916 – one of the biggest blasts ever in the pre-nuclear age and a terror attack that helped create new security agencies in the US. “I’ve spent my life studying history, yet I’d never heard about it. It was one of those stories where I did a double-take on the page: ‘Did I read that correctly?’” he says. “The Black Tom depot was where munitions, ammunition, TNT, dynamite and artillery shells being sent to the Western Front were loaded onto ships.

“On the night of July 30 it exploded. The blast ripped through Manhattan, smashing window in skyscrapers in Times Square. Glass fell from the sky like rain. It even blasted shrapnel into the Statue of Liberty.”

The result of sabotage by German spies, led by Franz von Papen, who would later as Chancellor disastrously open the door to Hitler because he thought he could control him, is an astonishing tale largely forgotten.

Future episodes include the remarkable story of Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president in the US in 1872; the Great Storm of 1703, the most violent weather event ever recorded in England; and the scandalous murder of architect Stanford White, a crime that exposed the dark side of America’s Gilded Age.

They’ll also revisit the Great Exhibition of 1851, where Britain put its industrial might and insecurities on display; explore the true story of Bass Reeves, the formerly enslaved man who became one of the most legendary US Marshals of the American West; and uncover the lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read – two women who defied the British Empire to become pirates in the Caribbean.

Given the ubiquitousness of books, documentaries, and even podcasts, isn’t it tempting to think we might have reached peak history? “The British appetite for history is something I keep underestimating,” he chuckles.

“We are a country where history is recreation. Our top visitor attractions are museums, galleries, ancient cathedrals and stately homes – not water parks. But we’re also a country where there’s an appetite for a broader, deeper understanding of history. A lot of my work is saying, ‘I know you know this, but there’s also this element’.”

He points to the popularity of genealogy sites as proof of the wave of interest. “I was looking at Find My Past and discovered a member of my Nigerian family I didn’t know had come to Britain in the 1930s and studied at university. It had his arrival and his departure, it had him living in Brixton. “I thought I was the first person in my family to live in Brixton, but I missed that by 70 years. He was there in the 1920s. It’s magical. When the 1921 census was published, I saw the actual census returns from my great-grandparents who obviously I’d never met. In my great-grandfather’s case, the address at which that document arrived was where I lived as a kid.

“I know the room in which that document was signed 50 years before I was born. I know the hallway where it would have fallen through the letterbox. I was deeply moved by the power of a bit of paper.”

Olusoga, who listens to podcasts while walking his two Irish rescue greyhounds, George and Jasmine, in the fields outside Bristol, believes it is this “democratisation” of history that, in part, has helped boost its modern popularity.

“Thomas Carlyle and others said history was just a series of biographies of great men and that idea lasted a long time. We’re now at a flowering of two or three generations of historians who disagree,” he explains.

“Of course they’re still important. The idea you could tell the 20th century without Churchill and Roosevelt, Hitler and Stalin, is ridiculous but it is also so many more people. That expansion of history is one of the reasons it’s become even more popular.

“It’s one reason millions of people engage with history, because they see themselves in a way they didn’t when it was just Gladstone, Disraeli and Napoleon.”

• Journey Through Time is available now to listen to and watch on all podcast platforms and YouTube