Who dictates how we see the past?

Three weeks ago, I received an SOS from a distressed citizen of Glasgow, urging me to protest against a recently installed display at the Kelvingrove Museum, ‘Glasgow – City of Empire’. Predictably, the exhibition falls over itself to clock every conceivable association between the city and slavery, inviting the visitor to envisage appropriate reparations. Scraping the barrel of shame, it complains of one of Glasgow’s greatest benefactors, William Burrell, that ‘his business partners exploited enslaved Africans’. Enslaved Africans? Burrell was a shipping magnate around 1900, almost 70 years after slavery’s abolition in the British Empire and at least a generation after emancipation in the United States.

As for the city’s world-leading role in the movement to abolish slavery in the early 1800s, and the Scots’ disproportionately high role in the British Empire and its century and a half of anti-slavery endeavour, the Kelvingrove has nothing to say.

So I dispatched an eight-page letter to Kelvingrove’s manager, and a shorter version to the Scottish Times. Replying to the Times, Duncan Dornan, who runs Glasgow’s museums, defended the display on the ground that it was designed through extensive discussions with ‘diverse communities’.

The same week, something similar happened in Portsmouth. A proposal to commemorate the Royal Navy’s role in ending the Atlantic slave trade with a statue on Gunwharf Quays was turned down by a property developer. Why? Because Landsec, the commercial owner of the Quays, had consulted their ‘employee diaspora network’, who considered the statue out of keeping with an ‘inclusive environment’, lacking ‘sensitivity to what is a very emotive topic and dark part of our history as a nation’.

In both cases, organisations at opposite ends of the country had given members of ‘diverse communities’ and a ‘diaspora network’ a veto over the public representation of Britain’s history.