In a country with a long history, there’s a target for everyone

I am, family tradition has it, a descendant of a slave trader who repented. John Newton wrote the words to Amazing Grace. Actually, family tradition is probably wrong, because he had no direct descendants. But there are enough Newtons in my family tree who, like John, became clergymen, for me to feel that we may be distant cousins. Either way, the slaver-turned-abolitionist occupies a special place in my heart.

Proud as I am of John Newton’s redemptive story, I feel conflicted over the fate of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol, not because it shouldn’t have been taken down. It should. By legal means, and a long time ago. That it wasn’t is a failing on the part of our society.

What concerns me is that we’ve just endured a long-running saga of public outrage against Dominic Cummings who allegedly broke the law governing lockdown. Or might, according to Durham Police, have done so.

So, by cheering on those who dragged Colston’s statue off its plinth and chucked it off the harbour front, clearly in breach of laws against vandalism, are we not a little inconsistent when we pour shit over Cummings for appearing to break the law on another matter? Do we now pick and choose which laws we obey?

But Cummings is small beer. There are bigger fish to fry.

Once we’re done with the effigies of Bomber Harris, Winston Churchill, Cecil Rhodes, Robert Clive and every other historical figure with aspects of their careers of which we’re not proud, what’s next? Do we go after the monarchs who presided over the deeds of their subjects? Queen Victoria, George III, Charles II, even as far back as Edward I, who decided to rid his country of its Jews?

And when all the offending statues have been cast down and thrown into the nearest water, do we then go for tombs and gravestones? Plenty of them to be found in Westminster Abbey. And once desecrating graveyards becomes a fashion, perhaps there will be another bunch of people who will smash up Jewish cemeteries and daub paint over Muslim gravestones? Oh, wait a minute, we’ve been there before, haven’t we?

After that, how about offending artefacts in the British Museum, and portraits of bad people in the National Portrait Gallery? And how about banning books we don’t like?

In a country with two thousand years of recorded history, you could say that there’s a target for everyone, from Julius Caesar the Gaul-slayer onwards.

None of this takes away from the fundamental righteousness of removing Edward Colston from his plinth, and in the United States taking Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis from their places in the hearts of the cities where their effigies stand.

But those decisions need to be taken in accordance with the law. And if those responsible for public monuments can’t be persuaded to remove images and statues that are offensive to large numbers of their communities, then they should be shamed into doing so, by peaceful persuasion, non-violent protest or even the ballot box.

And I don’t buy into the objection that by confining the statues of people like Colston to a museum, we are erasing or re-writing history. But one of the problems of mass protests is that they tend to allow no nuance. You’re either right or wrong, virtuous or wicked, with us or against us.

But history is all about context, about competing viewpoints, about understanding a world which isn’t the one we’re living in today. Unless we believe that there are certain timeless values that don’t change from one era to the next, we will never understand why those statues were erected in the first place.

Each generation defines its world as it sees it, and bequeaths another layer of perception to the next. What the statues of Colston, Lee, Churchill and Clive teach us is that we should never be so arrogant as to assume that reputations are forever. That for me, is the joy of history, and why destruction will never snuff out nuance and reflection, even if it’s the signature of an age.

So by all means, let’s take down the statues that are offensive to our age, but let’s preserve them and put them in places where they can be seen in context, even if that context – and therefore potentially their location – changes from one generation to the next.