The online battle for Scotland's true history

Remembering, Barclay laughed. “He was telling me I didn’t ‘get’ a piece of work I had written myself,” he said. “And he just wouldn’t give up. He even went to the library and got a copy of the book."

Scotland is now a decade in to almost endless constitutional politics. It is no secret that this can get nasty online. But it is not just our future we are squabbling about. Increasingly it is our past too.

Of course, there is nothing new in this.

Lots of different political movements have their own visions of history. Various dynasties and regimes have long indulged in fantasy genesis stories. For example, the Japanese royal family, officially, claims a line of succession dating back 126 generations to 600 years before the common era.

Yet the digital age and polarised politics means Scotland is now experiencing its first social media popular history wars.

This countless tiffs mean that, as Barclay, and others, are discovering, real historical scholarship is under attack for failing to please internet partisans. But the historians are fighting back.

Sometimes, as in Japan, the squabbles focus on assertions of ancient origins, with rival Scottish and British nationalists trying to claim their ‘nation” predates that of their opponents. This rarely has any basis in fact.

At other times Scotland’s role in the British empire and the horrors of slavery become contested and fraught, and, crucially, littered with fake history.

But what made Barclay gawk at his phone? Crazy claims made about Winston Churchill.

There is no shortage of legitimate criticism of Britain’s main leader of World War Two. After all, Churchill he had a long and often controversial career. He was an unashamed imperialist as well as an implacable foe of both fascism and Stalinism.

His legacy is increasingly politicised in England. His statue outside Westminster was this summer boarded up as it became the focus of some Black Lives Matters protests and far-right attempts to protect it.

However, in recent years three main false history stories have begun circulating online about Churchill and Scotland. Barclay, in this quarter’s edition of a history journal devoted to Churchill, the Finest Hour, set them out and knocks them down.

“The real, complex, and historically important Churchill is increasingly disappearing behind crudely mythologised versions erected by those who wish to defend a political position or a series of values, and those who wish to attack them,” wrote Barclay. “On the one hand there is the faultless secular saint; on the other, a villain for all seasons. Oddly, at both extremes, these positions can often be characterised as nationalistic.”

The first and longest standing myth about Churchill is a series of embellishments around the real events of the Battle of George Square of January 31, 1919, when striking workers clashed with police as they demanded a 40-hour week.

In various versions of this story pushed online Churchill locked Scottish soldiers in barracks and sent English ones - with tanks - to quell an uprising. Some social media users even describe fatalities.

“The Battle of George Square is perhaps the most mythologised event in twentieth-century Scottish history,” said Barclay. “The myth that ‘Churchill persuaded the Cabinet that troops, machine guns, and tanks should be deployed’ seems to have been invented by the Labour politician Emanuel Shinwell in his 1973 memoirs. He provided no evidence for any of these accusations, which indeed are contradicted by the War Cabinet minutes.”

Barclay has tracked myths about the Battle of George Square for some years. These include claims from the 40 years after the event that the troops sent were English, that tanks were there on the day and that soldiers were sent to break up the strike - which ended peacefully the next month.”

The story of George Square has changed over the years too as it became as much celebrated by nationalists as it was by the left. Barclay wrote: “The narrative has developed from one of ‘oppression of the workers by capitalists’ into one of an ‘English invasion’.”

The historian cited a tweet from this year when it was declared that ‘Churchill marched to Glasgow with cannons and soldiers to fire upon the strikers at George Square. If there was ever a bullying fascist, it’s him’.

He added: “I have been struck by the ways in which people are willing to invent new ‘facts’ or fabricate circumstantial detail to support their own version. Thus, if there were troops and tanks in Glasgow, logically it follows that they must have been ‘sent… to disperse protestors in George Square’ with ‘orders to shoot to kill’, resulting in ‘hundreds’ dead.”

Churchill looms large in other grievances, including a claim he was set to abandon Scotland to do a deal with Hitler - which appears to be a misrepresentation of one of Barclay’s own books.

Large number of people now appear to believe the war-time prime minister abandoned the 51st Highland Division at Dunkirk to protect English troops.

In fact, the division contained English soldiers as well as Scots, was 200km away and surrendered a week later.

World War Two looms large in the new history wars, and not just in Scotland. But Barclay stressed that it was not just Churchill was became the subject of myth.

War-time SNP leader Arthur Donaldson was detained briefly during the war after he opposed conscription. Type Donaldson’s name in to Twitter and you will see him - and this entire party, then small and sometimes eccentric - routinely accused of being Nazis. There is no evidence for this, Barclay stressed, and Donaldson was released without charge. “The idea that the SNP wanted to do a deal with the Germans is rubbish,” Barclay said.

That doesn’t mean to say that there were not a few nationalist sympathisers with Nazis in Scotland - or in the rest of the UK, which had its own fascist movement. “There were many more Conservatives than Scottish nationalists with these views,” Barclay said.

The far right is on the rise again globally. At the presidential debate in America last week Donald Trump was challenged to condemn a chauvinist group called the Proud Boys, whose founder, Gavin McInnes, is of Glasgow parentage.

McInnes, who styles himself as a comic commentator, is an aggressive opponent of Scottish independence but also pushes myths that white Scots - not just Africans - were enslaved.

“If Scots did grievance culture the way everybody else does, we’d get our own month,” he said last year. “Yes, we were slaves.”

This is another of the historic myths - often with roots in the darker recesses of the internet - which now populate Scottish social media.

The US alt-right has responded to the Black Lives Matter movement with stories of Scots and Irish people being exploited in the Caribbean. Some Scots - finding the reality of the country’s role in the slave economy hard to deal with - have echoed these sentiments They have equated the experience of enslaved Africans with that of indentured Scots Historians have found themselves forced to put the record straight on social media. One is Stephen Mullen, a leading scholar of Scotland and slavery. Like Barclay, he has taken to challenging online disinformation and misinformation. “There were fundamental legal and material differences between chattel slavery and indentured servitude,” Mullen said. “Firstly, chattel slavery was racialised and hereditary, whilst indentured servitude was quite often voluntary, well paid and non-transmissible to the next generation. “Secondly, chattel slavery was perpetual, whilst indentured servitude was temporary, usually lasting four-seven years.

While some indentures lasted for life, the system did not usually confer a lifetime condition.

“Thirdly, chattel slaves were treated as sub-human property to be bought and sold, whilst indentured servants had legal personhood.

“Enslaved people could not own property or give evidence in court, while many indentured servants possessed land and often went onto become slave-owners themselves.”

Mullen stressed Scots servants could have a hard time. “Indentured servitude was a grim existence, especially those forcibly trafficked from Scotland in the seventeenth-century, although even the lowliest white servant would have regarded themselves superior to black chattel slaves in the nefarious, racialised hierarchy of the West Indies.”

In an era of fake news, we now also have fake history. And, experts warn, this often deliberate disinformation is bleeding out of its social media home and affecting mainstream politics.

Barclay, concluding his article on Churchill myths, summed up the mood among some historians: “The polarisation of politics and society is perhaps seen at its most extreme on social media.

“It is here that the most blatant rewriting of reality, past and present, is being carried out. Populist nationalist politics, at both national and devolved levels in the UK and elsewhere in the world, thrive in an atmosphere in which trust has been eroded in traditional sources of information and in which expertise and specialist knowledge are denigrated.”