I haven't written anything on this blog for some time, but I have been feeling so distressed over the last few weeks, watching my country completely lose its mind, that I felt I needed to express myself somehow. There's a lot I could talk about, but in this post let me focus on something which happened on 7th June, 2020: the statue of the 17th Century English merchant Edward Colston was toppled and thrown into Bristol Harbour by Black Lives Matter activists.
A bit of background information first of all. The statute was erected in 1895 to commemorate Colston's philanthropy. So, it has been there for 125 years. He was an important figure in the history and of Bristol. He used his wealth to support schools, hospitals, almshouses and churches. Charitable foundations inspired by him still survive to this day. There are many streets, landmarks and schools named after him, not to mention the Colston bun! But he was also heavily involved in the slave trade. Now, I am not going to pretend that that was anything other than what it was. During his involvement with it, the Royal African Company is estimated to have transported around 84,000 African men, women and children, 19,000 of which died during the crossing, because of the horrific conditions they were kept in.
Of course, this is an ugly stain upon the history of our nation and upon the character of Edward Colston specifically. But that doesn't mean, and I think most people agree, that it's ok to topple his statue. You don't get to destroy something just because you don't like it. The fact that they did this, and that the police just stood by and let them do it, is so deranged it beggars belief. Honestly, it doesn't matter how much you dislike something, you have no right to do that.
Where does it end? There are plenty of historical figures connected with slavery. Let me give you a few examples of other people connected with the Colston's company. It was found by Charles II and his brother, the then future James II. Are their statues going to be next? English philosopher and physician John Locke, said to be the father of Liberalism, was an investor in the company. Although Locke did change his stance on slavery later on, but forgiveness isn't usually all that abundant from the extreme left, so maybe his book will get burned, who knows? And Samuel Peypes, the famous diarist, who gave us so much information about the great London plague of 1665 and the Great fire the following year. Are we going to see a baying mob taking sledgehammers to his bust in Seething Lane next? I am not really being facetious here. It really wouldn't surprise me if all of those men were future targets, the mentality of the BLM protesters being as they appear to be. Absolutely no historical figure is safe, as the lists of other possible targets has made clear.
Edward Colston's statue needs to be put back up, at least in the first instance. A message needs to be sent to the mobsters that such acts of criminal vandalism are not acceptable and will not be tolerated.. If you move it to a museum straight away, the message it sends is that the way to achieve the removal of objectionable icons (or rather what they find objectionable) is to engage in this kind of behaviour. We have already seen the cenotaph vandalised, Winston Churchill's statue in Trafalgar Square deface with graffiti calling him a racist and a hammer and sickle painted on the statue of Sir Robert Peel. We should never reward such behaviour by capitulating, but unfortunately, that seems to be what everyone is doing at the moment.
Once Colston's statue is restored, then the people of Bristol could debate whether to keep it there. What is to be done would be entirely a matter of their democratic will, but it would be my hope that they would vote to keep it in the city centre. The idea of removing memorials to people because they had character traits that are distasteful to modern sensibilities seems absurd to me. Edward Colston died in 1721, just over a hundred years before slavery was abolished in this country. In Western modern societies, it is an obvious given that enslaving people is morally evil, and we struggle to comprehend how it could ever have been considered good. But that is not how it was for most of human history. In Colston's day, and for thousands of years prior, worldwide, the widespread belief was that it was part of the natural order. This does not excuse people like Edward Colston, but to judge him by the standards of the 21st century is questionable at best. Despite everything, the man had a social conscience. The reason he was given a statue was because of the good he did for the city of Bristol and the positive impact he had upon it, not because he was a slaver. The way people are going on, it is though his statue was put up specifically to glorify and celebrate the slave trade!
History is history and should be presented warts and all. Most of the time when we study history, we are not going to find heroes and villains; we are simply going to find people. Flawed people, often living very different lives to you and I and holding to many values we would find objectionable today. If you are going to take down statues and monuments to people who don't conform to 21st century, politically correct morals, you are going to end up with nothing left before 2010. This madness needs to stop, or historians hundreds of years from now will look back at early 21st century Britain and blush with embarrassment at how backward, simplistic and oversensitive we were.
