Zareer Masani

Statue wars: what should we do with controversial monuments?

A 'Rhodes must fall' protest in Oxford (Getty images)

Robert Jenrick’s pledge to protect monuments and statues from mob iconoclasm with new laws and powers is very welcome. It’s an issue on which the Government has been quiet in terms of legislation, even if the Prime Minister made clear last summer that ‘we cannot try to edit or censor our past’.

Now that the initial wave of Black Lives Matter activism has subsided, it’s essential to stop left-wing councils from renaming our streets, removing public monuments or, worse still, hanging a badge of opprobrium on them. There is more going on here than many realise: Policy Exchange’s History Matters Project, which is chaired by Trevor Phillips, has so far documented more than 160 cases of history at risk of erasure, from statues to street names, and parts of school and university curricula.

As Jenrick points out, much of this has been rushed through without democratic consultation or due process. The toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol began the wave of assaults, removing a figure who, whatever his considerable faults, did more than anyone else to fund the city of Bristol. His ownership of slaves was cited as the justification, regardless of the eighteenth century context in which slavery was ubiquitous, with African, Arab and Indian slavers leading the way. This, of course, doesn’t make it right. But it is vital that we see all historical figures, Colston included, as figures of their time, not ours.

Yet Colston is far from alone in being erased. The British Museum demoted the statue of its chief benefactor for similar associations. Guy’s Hospital followed suit, and Oriel College, Oxford, caved in to mob pressure to back the removal its statue of Cecil Rhodes, the Southern African magnate who had endowed so much of Oxford.

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