Statues and Empire

I once had an idea. Take pictures of all the statues in Edinburgh and then research their stories. Who are these people? How did they come to prominence and who is it that thought so highly of them that they raised the funds necessary for a statue, often in a prime location? Then I was going to stick it all on an app and flog it to Edinburgh’s many tourists as a series of walking tours. Naturally I did nothing of the kind and, with the current demonstrations in support of Black Lives Matter, I am kind of glad the effort necessary was put into other projects. Another side of me wished I had done it because I would have been in a prime position to give an informed view on whose monument is based upon the fruits of slavery. 

There are many that say you don’t need statues to tell history. For the history of the individual who is being commemorated, that is perfectly true. We don’t need statues of either Hitler or Stalin to tell their stories. But they are terrible examples to hold up. For one thing, both were being honoured in life as part of a totalitarian cult of personality. Their statues were built on order of the state. The case of Edward Colston, whose image in bronze was torn down by demonstrators on the 7th of June 2020, is far more interesting. That particular statue was not erected until 1895, one hundred and seventy years after Colston’s death. There was no state directive to be obeyed, no one was impelled by the threat of force to do this. What Colston’s statue is is hard evidence that the values of late Victorian Britain held up someone who had build their fortune upon the trading of mass human kidnapping and enslavement as someone whose virtues outweighed these crimes.
Of course, I am looking at Colston’s statue through the eyes of a 21st. Century liberal. It is quite possible that those who erected the Colston statue did not either know of his links to the slave trade or, if they did, that they did not care nor even regard it as a crime at all. 

Now, before I continue, am I outraged that Colston’s statue took a dip in the River Avon? Not particularly. I certainly don’t think anyone should be charged with criminal damage for this. It is clear from media accounts that there was a long-standing local campaign to have the statue removed and that parts of the Bristol establishment consistently vetoed its removal. Throwing that statue into the river is totally understandable. What worried me is what comes next.

“What comes next” has already started. The weekend of 13th of June has seen violence on the street as far-right activists have appeared on our streets “to defend the statues”. The recorded fact that these people throwing straight-armed Nazi salutes and punches at the police who were actually defending The Cenotaph and Whitehall cannot be mistaken for anything else but intimidation, designed to keep Black Lives Matter supporters off the streets. 

A bit more of a genteel example was the gathering in Poole, Dorset, to defend the statue of Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouts movement.  Anti-colonial campaigners would point out that Baden-Powell was charged with the illegal execution of Matabele prisoners of wars. He was acquitted of any crime but that might well have been a reflection of values of the day and that the the prisoners were black, for they were certainly shot. Baden-Powell’s statue was also a possible target because of his encouragement of the Hitler Youth movement and recorded admiration for Mein Kampf. This did not stop B-P ending up on the Nazi’s infamous “Black Book” list. The truth is always more complicated. The Scout movement has, and continues to do, much good in the formation of young people across the globe. 

So what is at risk here is a proxy war between racists and human rights campaigners, with a new battlefield being over lumps of carven sandstone and moulded bronze. There has to be a better way and there is. It is called education and it is at the heart of Black History Month. It is a profound criticism of history teaching in the United Kingdom that there has to be a Black History Month at all. The British Empire is fundament to 19th Century global history but is only part of the picture.
Naturally one has to be selective about the history taught to children, purely based upon time available but one has to worry about the flow and material. While I was studying my A level in the subject (The Cold War is already being taught in some current syllabi) I pretty well just got modern history 1880 until 1945. There was also options on the Late Anglo-Saxon period and the Norman invasion. All good stuff but apart from the naval arms race in response to German demands for “A Place in the Sun”, empire did not really feature. My daughter’s more recent exposure to history education in Scotland, covered the medieval wars of independence from England, The Scottish Enlightenment, World War Two and the US Civil Rights in 1960s America. Upon checking the BBC Bitsize GCSE history site, the AQA board specifically teaches empire, and OCR teaches immigration. The rest do not. 

Black History Month is more that British and Empire history and that is fine. A lot of black history is British history too. Whether it is the slaves, sugar, tobacco and cotton triangle between Britain, West Africa and the Americas, or the plantation of people from the Indian continent into East Africa, it is really history that everyone in the UK needs to know about. Fortunes were created which went to build up cities like Bristol, Liverpool, Glasgow and London. Individuals were glorified which brings us back to the statues. 

Not all statues are worthy of preservation but how is that to be judged? Some would say take them all down, others keep ‘em all up. Others say preserve them in a museum. None are perfect solutions and the museum solution could end up costing a lot of money. I have a possible compromise which does not lead to destruction. Monuments dedicated to those directly in the slave trade should be removed. Space for them can be made in a local park - not in a prominent place - and the monuments displayed together with explanations of their history. The history should be the good, bad, downright monstrous and why others thought these people worthy of honour. Such a grouping can be used to educate school parties as part of British and Empire history: that should be part of the history curriculum. The freed up spaces in our city centres can be used to honour later generations.

What of the really famous figures? Nelson who married into a rich plantation family in Nevis and defended the slave trade? Wellington defeated Napoleon but he gained his military experience in India. According to Elisabeth Longford, the sacking of Mysore in 1799 brought the young Arthur Wellesley a £50,000 share of the spoils (equivalent to £5.7million today), paid by the East India Company. This was all legal. Wellesley himself was concerned with the common soldiery looting, having several flogged and four hanged. Churchill was prime minister during the 1943 Bengal famine as supplies were shipped to feed Britain and our armies. Did Churchill set out to kill three million people? Almost certainly not but appears to have been callously indifferent to their fate.  These histories should be known but for their service to the nation, the honour also remains.

The key does remain with education and I suggest that even the controversial monuments have their role in this. Statues erected willingly by choice, as opposed to those erected by totalitarian regimes, have their place. It just may not be where they were originally placed. 

The real issue is that the people of the United Kingdom, all of us, are going to have to face up to our own history. There are times when it was not honourable, never mind glorious and victorious. Some of time we were the downright bad guys and, in terms of human rights, sometimes not so bad. The important thing is that we are taught it, as Cromwell might have said, warts and all. 

The History We Are Never Taught at School

Every nation teaches history as a group of selective highlights, usually (but not always) to show the home nation in a respectable, or even an heroic, light. This is natural but rarely sufficient for an educated person to make an informed decision later on in life. For example: the exam syllabus I was taught in the 1970s covered history from the 1888 until 1945. It wasn’t bad; at least we covered the German imperial ambitions (A Place in The Sun) and how that ambition led ultimately to the First World War and that, in turn, to World War Two. It was very Euro-centric but it at least mentioned Empire. Plus, it was not an optional choice: we had to take it. When I was fourteen I hated studying history but the medicine that was forced down my throat then stood me in good stead later on in life. 

My daughter, Miss V, didn’t even have to study history to exam level in Scotland. Her school restricted pupils to sitting no more than six subjects at National Five. The Scottish exam syllabus was thus: The Scottish Enlightenment of the 18^thCentury, World War Two and the US Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Before then, there was coverage of Scotland’s medieval wars with England. Scottish-centric certainly but not exactly offering coherent themes. 

Why is this important today? Several reason that has arisen in the past twenty-four hours that make it rather so.

The first was a tweet by Paul Lomax “I think my daughter’s primary school is missing the point of Black History Month.” accompanied by the following section of the school letter. Paul indicted in following tweets that he did not wish to identify the school but wanted to

Extract from a school letter

raise it as an issue with them; that is fair enough. I applaud him for raising the topic. My own tweet replied thus: “I suspect you are right. The feedback from the parents suggest that some of them certainly don’t get it: possibly they resent their children being “forced” to learn about Black History? The teachers seem not to understand that Black History is everybody’s history.” It is this point I wish to expand upon. 

Much of Black History is not European history. The rise of the Mali Empire, Great Zimbabwe or the Kingdom of Ghana are three such examples. From the 17^thCentury onwards, Black History, European and British history became increasingly entangled; the reason being through colonialism and slavery. Black History Month is necessary because these are issued that are not usually addressed in the school curriculum. Many of the fortunes that led to the great buildings of port cities such as London, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow and the great factories of Manchester, Leeds and Bradford were built on the wealth of sugar, tobacco, and cotton. The farming labour was carried out, in the main, by slaves who originated from West Africa. The Asante Kingdom was deeply involved in this trade. British history, Black History and European history has been fundamentally intertwined for over three hundred years. Black History is British history too, but without Black History Month, this period would not be taught at all in our schools. 

The main reason being is that this is a period of British history that is, frankly, bloody awful. As a nation we should be ashamed of this period in our past but how can we be if most people do not know about it? I consider myself reasonably (self) educated in history but, it was only through the recent works of historian Afua Hirsch, that I became aware of how deeply Lord Horatio Nelson, Britain’s greatest naval officer, used his position to support the Caribbean slave trade; having married into one of the major slave-owning families. Little wonder we don’t hear anything of Francis Woolwards of Nevis (aka Viscountess “Fanny” Nelson) and everything about Nelson’s mistress, Lady Emma Hamilton. 

Now I do not necessarily support Hirsch’s call to topple Nelson’s Column because of this but I do support a warts-and-all approach to history. The Black History movement highlights how little the 19^thCentury is taught in our schools. If it is covered at all, it ends with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, echoing the teaching of the Second World War. 

This second tweet, from Conservative and Brexit-supporter Christopher Howarth, who wrote “Re-joining the UK is the only way to re-unite Ireland and the British Isles. Brexit makes Irish EU membership less logical.”At first, and rather uncharitably, I put this viewpoint down to ignorance but I was wrong. Mr Howarth is an educated person who is quite aware of the history of Irish independence and the resulting civil war. This period is covered in Irish school curriculum but again is absent from most UK schools. What Howarth’s tweet shows is a disregard for history: British Brexit supporters simply do not care about the effect of Brexit on our nearest neighbour. If one looks deeper still, it may also give the reason as to why this should be. I see the process of the UK leaving the European Union as a major part of the ongoing process of undermining the EU by the far right. For most Conservatives, this means the breaking up of the EU for the benefit of unregulated trade. Now I don’t think the leaders of Brexit really do see the Republic of Ireland re-joining the United Kingdom except in during a private moment of erotic spasm (as Vince Cable almost said), but their logic is that anything that weakens the EU is good. The UK is Ireland’s biggest trading partner and the hope is Ireland will be prised away from the EU through a process of economic necessity. Hence Brexiters’ complete disregard for the Irish border. They have calculated that Ireland needs Britain more than it needs the EU. If hardship results or even violence is reignited, so be it: they simply do not care. 

As outlined above, the same logic will be used to either deny or campaign against a second Scottish referendum vote. It is easily countered though: neither nationalist camp really cares about the economic cost of their aims on normal folk so why should the SNP argue further when all they have to do is point to Brexit? 

This lack of concern is also the reason why the UK Conservatives in the European Parliament are supporting European far-right politicians like Hungarian leader Viktor Orban. The Conservatives MEPs are not being whipped into supporting Orban because they are seeking support for a Brexit deal. It is abundantly clear that the Conservative right want to leave the EU without any deal and hope to blame the EU for it, at least as far as British public opinion is concerned. The Brexiters want more though: they are actively working for the breakup of the European Union. 

“Those who know history are condemned to watch it being repeated.” This is the Labour Party this morning after shadow-chancellor John McDonnell’s announcement that, if the conditions should allow, that any second referendum concerning Brexit would not have an option for the UK to stay within the EU. There would be no point to any referendum then. I do not believe this is a fudge: it is a determination of the Labour leadership to uphold Brexit. Corbyn and McDonnell want to leave the EU, again regardless of the real economic cost. They may promise a softer Brexit but there is no Brexit that leaves us better off. What is worse though is that they are knowingly playing into the hands of the far-right in doing so. This morning, defenders of the Labour decision were online, claiming that they are merely defending democracy or that getting Labour on board with the People’s Vote is a sneaky Lib Dem plot to undermine Labour’s vote come the next general election. Some of them even blame the Lib Dems for bringing Brexit around up upholding the Conservative government. This is denial and deflection by Labour. The real architects of Brexit are the right wing of the Conservative Party and their schism party UKIP. The real architects of the crash and the austerity that followed are those politicians, both of the left and right, who in their arrogance thought they had controlled the boom-bust cycle of capitalism. 

Labour is playing a dangerous game. Their leaders are gambling that they can take what is effectively a right-wing coup and turn it into a left-wing revolution. I think they are focused purely on the UK picture and not what is happening more widely in Europe. Without taking the international movements into account, I think they are destined to lose. They will also lose closer to home as Brexit represents the SNP’s best chance to gain independence. The SNP do not care what happens to the rest of the UK, although they should, even if purely for selfish ends. 

Brexit is now coming. This Labour autumn conference was probably the final chance to stop it and that is now not going to happen. Brexit is only the first step to a much darker world. There is still much to be done to prevent that world coming to pass. To quote Bertolt Brecht: 

“If we could learn to look instead of gawking,

We'd see the horror in the heart of farce,
If only we could act instead of talking,
We wouldn't always end up on our arse.
This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.”

To live and see such times again.