Yesterday, I complained about the amount of screen time which was spent wallowing in the emotion of the funeral of George Floyd. I also suggested that his death was not the only, or the worst, example of gratuitous racist violence on the part of the police. But whether it was the appropriate trigger or not, I am glad that it was pulled and released the pent-up anger over racial injustice not just in the US but throughout the Western world. The USA may have a beam in its eye, but we have more than a mote, as Richard Thompson points out.
So it is not surprising that anger erupted in Bristol, culminating in the toppling and dumping (the demonstrators did not pause to consider the pollution of the river) of the Edward Colston statue. Bristol, along with Liverpool, prospered as a result of the dreadful triangular trade. Mark Pack writes of the failure of democracy in this matter; there was clearly a popular demand for the statue to go, but the authorities refused to move.
John Redwood takes a conservative stance.
Each generation has difficult decisions to make about the built and artistic inheritance. I think it is right to conserve sufficient of the past so all interested can see examples of the buildings for themselves, and can find likenesses of the leading figures that helped shape the UK of their day, for better or worse. I have never thought I should with like minded people be able to win an election and then purge our cities and galleries of memorials to those we oppose. My disliking Marx cannot change the historic importance his thinking has enjoyed, nor wipe out the millions of deaths carried through in the USSR and elsewhere by following his ideology. I fought my battles against Marxist social and economic thinking with my pen as a young man. I never suggested defenestrating his statues.
[A pedant points out that since none of the disputed statues are indoors, they can hardly be defenestrated.] Redwood goes on:
I share the hatred of many of slavery and enforced occupation of a country by a military power. I have always resented the way the Romans invaded our country, placed it under a brutal military control, and made a market in slaves to give the senior Romans a wonderful lifestyle. It has not made me want to remove all the Roman statues of the thinkers and leaders of the imperial and colonial government which enforced this system on us. I do not deny that alongside their belief in slavery and military rule they also produced some important academic work and technology. The Romans who delighted in the torture and cruel death of animals for sport were good at building large structures. We can debate what if anything they did for us without throwing their statues into the nearest river or sea.
Well, speaking as a fellow-descendant of the original occupiers of these islands (I am one of the Little People, after all), I tend to agree with him in principle. However, there is a difference between recognising the intellectual achievements of great Romans in their own time, and honouring a man purely for enriching himself and his favoured city on the back of a long-outlawed practice, reviled by most in the country. As Mark Pack points out:
Colston died in 1721. The statue went up in 1895. Those who put it up knew fully of the evils of the slave trade. Slavery had already long been illegal in Britain at the time they decided to honour Colston.
In a typically closely argued piece, Cen Phillips reinforces the message:
The argument for removal is a very simple one. We should never forget the Holocaust, but when we seek to ensure that is the case for future generations we do so by building specific Holocaust memorials, not by preserving statues of Adolf Hitler that were originally erected in his honour, and depict him as a 'hero' to be adored and celebrated. We don't make the Jewish community walk past public celebrations of those who ripped their families and their communities from their homes, forced them into slave labour and murdered them in almost inconcievable numbers. We just don't. It's very obviously not OK, and it still wouldn't be OK even if we wrote a little note on the side saying that perhaps he wasn't such a great bloke as the depiction of the statue would suggest. Why would anybody think it's OK to keep doing that to Black British people? It just isn't.
So, I am happy that Colston and Milligan are taken off the streets, even if they are preserved in a Black Museum.
Cecil Rhodes' statue is probably another that should be removed from public view, but the case is more marginal For all the ill that he did in his lifetime, he did found the Rhodes Scholarships, from which for decades now young people of colour have benefited. Nelson Mandela was content to use the legacy of Rhodes. According to Chris Patten, "he said, looking at a photograph of Cecil Rhodes, ‘Cecil, you and I are going to have to work together now.’".
I despair of Liverpool University, though. They wish to erase the memory of the founder of modern Liberalism by renaming Gladstone Hall on the basis of a partial reading of history. Gladstone is accused of having ultra-conservative views throughout his life and that he spoke out against abolition because his family benefited from slaves on its plantations.
Hoping to put the record straight, I turn to Roy Jenkins' biography of the Grand Old Man. John Gladstone, WE's father certainly did make his money in the West Indies.
He did not trade in slaves, even before the slave trade was outlawed in Britain in 1807, but the plantations he owned operated on slave labour throughout his time as a West Indian magnate.
There is no doubt that John Gladstone's money launched the political careers of WE and his brother Tom. But this was at a time when it was necessary to have a private income in order to be a Member of Parliament - MPs did not receive an annual salary until 1911. Gladstone was not the only prominent figure to benefit from inherited slave money. Sir Robert Peel, a wealthy cotton merchant, fathered the reforming Robert Peel. They were certainly not the only MPs to benefit in such a way and money from the plantations also went deep and widely into the middle classes.
Certainly, Gladstone did repay his father by using his first major speech to oppose the Slavery Abolition Bill of 1833 and then voting against the Bill, as did brother Tom. But that was his only concession. That he was no white imperialist was shown by his next significant speech, opposing the Opium Wars. Later, he opposed military adventures in Sudan and South Africa. In 1860
he described slavery as “by far the foulest crime that taints the history of mankind in any Christian or pagan country.” He had changed. Towards the end of his life he cited the abolition of slavery as one of the great political issues in which the masses had been right and the classes had been wrong. He thought it was a taint on national history and politics. His change was a move towards a profound commitment to liberty and perhaps this quote exemplifies his shift: “I was brought up to hate and fear liberty. I came to love it. That is the secret of my whole career.”[from the Hawarden Library's very Gladstonian response to the current iconoclasm.]
As to "ultra-Conservatism", there is a clue in the title of the party whose third prime minister WE Gladstone became and which he dominated for the latter half of the nineteenth century: Liberal.
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