In praise of statue-toppling

I couldn’t disagree more with Sir Keir Starmer (it was ‘completely wrong,’ ‘it shouldn’t have been done in that way’) or with Boris Johnson (‘if people wanted the removal of the statue there are democratic routes which can be followed’). No, there was something magnificent about the sight of the Bristol mob throwing into the harbour the statue of a man whose trade was notorious for throwing sick slaves with no monetary value into the sea. 1890s Britain raised that statue. 1890s Britain — the decade in which my grandparents were children, for heaven’s sake — had only just closed the slave market in Zanzibar: and if you want to know more about that stain on our fairly recent history, read Alastair Hazell’s enthralling, horrifying The Last Slave Market: Dr John Kirk and the Struggle to End the East African Slave Trade.

If we’re entitled to feel pride at the achievements and virtues of our forebears, why should we not feel shame at their sins? If there is significance in erecting monuments to those we admire, who can deny the significance of tearing down monuments to those we don’t? Be honest. The sculpting of a massive representation of Sir Edward Colston for public display was not an exercise in either history or biography, it was a salutation plain and simple. And if 1890s Britain was free to raise a monument to a man whom many of the residents of Bristol wished to salute, 2020s Britain should be free to raise two fingers to a man whose memory their successors hate. Toppling that statue was not an attempt to ‘erase history’, as disgruntled conservatives like to mutter. Of history: ‘The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, /Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit / Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, / Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.’