How the National Maritime Museum is trying to decolonise Lord Nelson

I spent Christmas in Turin, with its superb and often neglected museums that are a particular delight because they are uncontaminated by preaching about the evils of European colonialism. It is not that I have no moral perspective on how the creators of empire across four millennia have acted towards their subjects. But the use of objects in museums to tell a distorted picture in the interests of supposed Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, infused with Critical Race Theory, is a betrayal of what museums are supposed to do. Museums are not political tools, as the Museums Association, with its rants against racism and colonialism, seems to think. Racism is indeed a great evil. But it is essential to look at the past through the eyes of those who lived then, realising that they operated according to different ideas about the world which, unsettling as that might be, legitimated behaviour we would deplore if it were exercised today.