UNDER the heading "Multiculturism not new" (Letters, October 16), your Unison NEC correspondent asks which version of British history Lord Tebbit wishes to be taught in our schools.

He then lists three periods in our history from the Middle Ages, (carefully chosen for political reasons), ignoring that our nation's story goes back hundreds of years before then, and includes invasion and suppression of the indigenous population of the day. Vikings, Norsemen, Romans, Normans, here long before the English, are still the fall guys for present ills, hence devolution to put things right!

I would suggest that our children should be taught about all these periods to the present day - openly and honestly, which teachers are prepared to do without interference.

Hopefully, their pupils will come to recognise the past has much to do with what is happening now and appreciate the mistakes that were made have often resulted in a better future.

Moreover, they are descendants of numerous multicultural societies, unless, like Pooh-Bah in The Mikado, they are of pre-Adamite ancestral descent, and can trace their ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule!

J TARBUCK, The Crescent, Cherry Tree, Blackburn.

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