Did Left-wing writer inspire them?
THE inspiration for the Historic England graphic appears to be a column written by Afua Hirsch, the Guardian’s former West Africa correspondent.
Last year she wrote an article under the headline: ‘Toppling statues? Here’s why Nelson’s column should be next.’
Miss Hirsch will also be a panellist in the debate, sponsored by the quango, which the graphic was designed to promote.
In the article she wrote that Nelson was a ‘white supremacist’ who ‘vigorously defended’ slavery. Complaining that the ‘colonial and pro-slavery titans of British history are still memorialised’, she said Nelson ‘used his seat in the House of Lords and his position of huge influence to perpetuate the tyranny, serial rape and exploitation organised by West Indian planters, some of whom he counted among his closest friends’.
Like in the US, where statues of slave owners have been taken down, Britain should ‘look again at our own landscape’, she said.
Miss Hirsch’s memoir, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging, has been lauded on the Left for documenting contemporary racism in Britain.
But in The Sunday Times, Tory MP and historian Kwasi Kwarteng wrote that she ‘overplays the idea that Britain is a racist, dystopian nightmare’. The book is ‘salted with self-pity. It’s hard to avoid the impression that it’s a letter of protest written by “a poor little rich girl”.’
The Mail’s Stephen Glover wrote: ‘It seems not to occur to the one track-minded Hirsch that the British naval hero deservedly has a place in many hearts. So far as she is concerned, the British Empire was exploitative and racist, and all other considerations must be blotted out.’
In the Times, reviewer Michael Henderson said: ‘Hirsch will not, one suspects, find much happiness in her lifelong struggle, even if that frightful bounder Nelson is toppled from his column, as she hopes he will be.’