The chairman of Britain’s new Commission for Equalities and Human Rights (a name that sets off loud warning sirens) is proposing that Britain rewrite history to ‘reflect other cultures’.

Parts of British history need to be rewritten to emphasise the roles played by other races and religions like Muslims, a prominent race relations campaigner has said.

Trevor Philips, the chairman of the new Commission for Equalities and Human Rights, said the history of Britain did not properly reflect the contribution of other cultures. Rewriting the country’s history would demonstrate to Britons in the 21st century how other groups apart from Anglo Saxons shaped the nation.

And which “other groups apart from Anglo Saxons” is Phillips most concerned about? Take a wild guess.

He told a fringe meeting at the Labour conference: “We may need to revisit our national story – we want to rewrite that story to tell the whole story.”

The rewriting should start with the story of how the English fleet led by Sir Francis Drake fought off the Spanish Armada in 1588, he said. The important role played by the Muslim Turks, who delayed the sailing of the Spanish fleet so that the English ships were better prepared, had been airbrushed out of the story however.

Mr Phillips said: “When we talk about the Armada, it was the Turks who saved us because they held up the Armada after a request from Elizabeth I. Let’s rewrite that, so we have an ideal that brings us together so that it can bind us together in stormy times ahead in the next century.”

As Orwell spins in his grave like an Iranian centrifuge, here’s another look at that history Phillips wants to “rewrite:” The Monkey Tennis Centre: Rewriting the history of Britain and Islam.

Unfortunately for Phillips’ theory, the suggestion that the British and the Ottoman empire were allies in the conventional sense, and that as a result Britons and Muslims have some kind of shared heritage, is absurd.

Around the time of the Armada the Ottomans were battling Spanish and other Catholic forces in the Mediterranean; in 1571 the Ottoman navy suffered a crushing defeat at the Battle of Lepanto. Historians are divided over what, if any, bearing Ottoman activity had on the plans of the Armada, but any alliance between the Ottomans and Protestant England would have been one purely of convenience against the common Catholic enemy.

However, although he may not realise it, Phillips is at least in the ballpark, both historically and geographically, if he’s looking for an account of interaction between Muslims and Britons that doesn’t tend to be taught in British schools – albeit one that might not serve his purposes particularly well.

As Ottoman influence in the Eastern Mediterranean declined in the late 1500s, successive emperors sponsored the Barbary pirates of North Africa, who had already been plundering the coasts of Europe for 100 years. Between the beginning of the 16th Century and the early 1800s between one and two million Europeans were captured and sold into slavery by these Muslim raiders, including several thousand Britons; clearly the Ottomans forgot to tell their proxies that we were their allies.