The history is bad enough, we don't need the monuments

Pulling down statues? Oh, it’s a controversial question in Britain today.

The Prime Minister has said that removing statues of celebrated men of the past is in effect lying about our history. But, like so much that Johnson says, that’s simply false. The history is there with or without the statues. No one is suggesting rewriting it. Statues aren’t about recording history, they're about honouring people who helped make it.

Why honour those responsible for some of its most shameful moments?

The demand to rid the country of statues to our most discreditable historical figures comes chiefly from the Black Lives Matter movement. I support their general aims, and in particular their desire to free ourselves of those blots on the urban landscape, though I would like to see it go a little further.

Edward Colston's statue drowned
Black Lives Matter protestors dump slave trader's monument

Would I have backed the tearing down and dumping in Bristol harbour, of the statue of Edward Colston? I don’t know. It might have been better to have the City Council remove it by democratic decision. But, in purely pragmatic terms, it’s probably easier for Councillors not to put it back in place, than it wold have been to take the initial decision to get rid of it.

Maybe the protestors did the Councillors a favour.

Certainly, the streets of Bristol are cleaner for not having the statue there. I remember clearly the shock I had on seeing it for the first time. I hadn’t previously known anything about him, far less that he had a public monument. Discovering that he did left me speechless. How, I thought, could we honour a man who was a major figure in the Transatlantic slave trade? He may have been a benefactor to Bristol, London and other places, but some at least of his wealth came from slavery. Doesn’t that mean that whatever worthy cause he funded, and however much he gave, what he was handling was the filthiest of dirty money?

Let’s be clear. The slave trade in which Colston prospered believed that men and women could be treated as cargo. It took 12-12.8 million free men and women, captured either in slave raids or as a result of African wars in which Europeans had no legitimate interest, and transported them across the Atlantic. Between 1.2 and 2.4 million of them died on the voyage, the conditions were so inhuman.

Once in the West Indies or Americas, they were reduced to they status of cattle. They had no protection against rape, torture or murder. A white slaveowner had the legal right to do what he liked to a slave with whom he was dissatisfied, or with whom he wanted to satisfy a desire.

The justification for slavery was that the enslaved, for the most part black Africans, were less than human. So the institution set out deliberately to dehumanise them.

How can anyone who played a leading role in this business deserve a statue, simply because he endowed some schools, hospitals and almshouses? Should Berlin erect a statue to Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer, on the grounds that he put up some fancy buildings?

The Black Lives Matter movement exists precisely because whites have still not fully emancipated themselves from the attitudes that legitimised slavery. The slogan  is needed because at some fundamental level, we live in societies which don’t think black lives matter enough.

Getting rid of statues of slave traders, of those who resisted the end of slavery, or of those who felt they could treat some people as inferior to others, will contribute to emancipating us all from those shameful attitudes. So I support the movement wholeheartedly.

However, I would like to see the movement go further still, at some time, without distracting from the top priority today, bringing to an end the undervaluing of black lives. I have longed for years to see at least one additional statue removed. It shocked me the first time I saw it just as much as the Colston statue later did. And I saw it a lot, as I was a student for four years at King’s College London and the statue is in the Strand, not far from the College.

It is the statue of Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris who headed the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command during World War 2.

Bomber Harris's statue in the Strand

The principal actions of Bomber Command were mass air raids on German cities. They were sometimes masked as aimed at ‘military targets’, but it’s hard to see how carpet bombing the whole of Cologne, Hamburg and Dresden, could possibly be necessary to hit the few, if any, legitimate military targets they contained.

Dresden after the bombing
A legitimate military target? Seriously?

More honestly, if still euphemistically, the raids are sometimes defended as action to ‘break the enemy’s morale’. In other words, it was hoped they would batter the German population into withdrawing its support from Hitler. That’s military action to obtain political change. And that means action directed against a whole population, and therefore against civilians. 

There’s a name for that. We call it terrorism.

My father served in the Royal Air Force during that war. Indeed, he was a Navigator in a bomber. But he was never in Bomber Command, serving instead in 101 Squadron, which dropped supplies to resistance fighters, towed gliders or dropped paratroops.

Leonard Beeson
Bomber Navigator but never a terror bomber

He often said he was relieved that he’d never taken part in any of the raids on cities. He was forever grateful that he had, by good fortune, avoided being involved in terrorism.

So it shocks me that we still have a statue to the main architect of that terrorism in one of the great streets of the British capital.

The key issue today is to teach us all that Black Lives Matter. So let’s get rid of the statues of the slave trade traders and deniers of freedom, today.

But tomorrow? Perhaps we can move on and learn to stop honouring our terrorists either. After all, we need to remember the role these people played in history, but we don’t need to honour them with monuments.

Bristol and reminders of colonialism

Bristol, in the West of England, has a distinctive accent with, as a particular characteristic, a tendency to add an ‘l’ to words that end with a vowel. “Africal,” they apparently say there, “is a malarial areal.”

It was fun to be there this weekend, partly because we saw friends I liked already but whom I shall miss even more after the wonderful time we’ve just spent with them. But the visit was also a success for allowing me at last to get to know the city well: I’ve been there at least a dozen times, but usually on fleeting visits, for work, turning up in the morning and clearing off again in the evening.

Not this time. We walked around the place, we sat on the top floor of an open-top bus like any tourists, we even took a boat trip around the harbour. Boat tours are particularly striking because they give such a lovely view of a city, from below, but also in the case of Bristol, because they show the might of the city as a port. It was seagoing trade that made Bristol great, as it did those other fine cities, Liverpool in north west England, or Nantes in western France – and predominantly in the same kind of trade: slaves. So many suffered and died in the past to make some wonderful cities today.

Edward Colston commemorated in Bristol
as a humanitarian and philanthropist
Thanks for a fortune made by enslaving Africans

What struck me most, though, was the guide on the bus, who spoke with the unmistakeable local accent. Though what touched me about that accent wasn’t hearing it there, but the memory it evoked of a time I heard it once before.

For many years, I travelled regularly to Northern Ireland for work. It was the time of the troubles and, though I never witnessed an attack, the atmosphere was strongly moulded by the threat: police stations were fortified, police looked like soldiers, soldiers were out doing police work. I became friendly with a particular taxi driver who regularly picked me up from the airport and ran me back at the end of my trip, and he would show me around the place too, including some districts which he entered with some reluctance, and left with equivalent alacrity.

One night, as he was driving me back to Aldegrove, Belfast International airport, out in the country south of Belfast, we were stopped by an army patrol. At least, I assume it was a patrol, though we only saw one soldier.

It was dark and the road was deserted. As he came over to the driver’s window, the soldier, helmeted, flak-jacketed, with a machine gun on his hip, looked the model of the arrogant warrior. But then he crouched down and we could see his face. He must have been nineteen. And then he spoke.

It was that accent. Bristol. Pure and round and unmistakeable.

And all I could think was, “what on Earth are you doing here? Young, totally uninvolved in these troubles, from a place not that many miles away but in a different world, policing an emergency in which you have absolutely no interest. Out on a dark road, at night, a figure of oppression to the opponents of a power exercised by people you’ve never met, and a target yourself.”

I’ve never felt the tragedy of colonialism more strongly.

British soldiers at a Northern Irish roadblock in 1988
Doing a favour to few, least of all themselves