Mr Nuttal's Turkey, and a defence of history on a Saturday

How so it possible for a party that claims to be pro academic selection to permit its education spokesman to come out with such drivel. Especially since he says he taught history at a university, according to Wikipedia. Lets just turn to his comment on Turkey; "I will say it again: Turkey is not culturally European and it should never be allowed to join the EU." Now over looking the irony of Ukip’s defence of ‘Europe’ which isn’t that ironic, on one level, the tweet refers to the idea that Turkish society is alien to European society, but how true is this? We know that historicaly, it has been at the forefront of the continents cultural identity well before 1483, being central to the Byzantium Empire, which our intrepid historian would surly claim is part of European history. Then there is the small thing of the fact that the Ottoman Empire was a major player in the diplomatic scene in late 19th, early 20th century Europe. Is our historian trying to deny BASIC empirical evidence on Turkey’s relations with its western neighbours, to advance a political point? Why does this matter? Well in one way it doesn’t, it’s ONE tweet from ONE politician. BUT in fact it DOES given that UKIP claims the third largest support of any political party, and yet its deputy leader, who contantly emphasises his background in history, can legitimately come out with a bastadised interpretation of history, and no one gives a toss. How serious this is can be gaged from the local election results in France this week. There, the populist Right’s re-emergence in Europe presents politicians with a situation where the use of history for the purposes of political argument is precarious at best. The fact is that within the history discipline, real practitioner’s work extremely hard for ages on a particular thesis. They certainly do not just ‘tweet’ a given historical argument as if it were law. Just slamming some conjectural narrative filled by a concern for a particular contemporary issue on to a historical explanation would fail at GCSE History level, so why does it pass for politics? The real role of the historian therefore today , must be to demonstrate the fundamental difference between academic discourse and political rhetoric. They need to show that the craft that they engage in is not just about adavancing any old argument, it is concerned with explaining how the apparent truth of historical facts in reality as reflecting a particular kind of logic.