CULTURAL REVOLUTION PART (TWO)
More statues may go as councils bow to the demands of slave row activists
THE campaign to radically overhaul Britain’s town centres intensified yesterday as more local authorities bowed to pressure to review their links to slavery.
Scores of statues and memorials could be removed and public buildings, pubs and streets renamed following days of Black Lives Matter protests.
Momentum is growing after the statue of slave trader Edward Colston was thrown into a harbour in Bristol. Business minister Nadhim Zahawi yesterday said he did not believe there should be statues of ‘ any slaver’ and that they should be taken down if the majority supported their removal.
Critics accused Liverpool University of waging a ‘woke war on British history’ after it agreed to rename a building which commemorated four- time Liberal prime minister William Gladstone due to his family’s links to slavery.
Protesters continued to target other statues, daubing ‘murderer’ at a memorial to colonialist Sir George Somers in Lyme Regis, Dorset. In London, Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital said it would review whether to remove a statue of its founder Sir Thomas Guy, but would not change its name.
Sir Thomas made a fortune as a shareholder of a company which sold slaves, and used it to build the hospital in 1721. Statues of Queen Victoria and Sir Winston Churchill were targeted earlier this week.
Campaigners linked to Black Lives Matter have called for around 60 statues which they deem racist to be toppled. Even Nelson’s Column is on the hit list. Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson was opposed to the abolition of slavery. Some 130 Labour-run councils agreed to assess the ‘appropriateness’ of monuments and commemorations in their areas. In Bristol, the city council announced a commission would review its ‘true history’.
Bristol mayor Marvin Rees said the Colston statue would be retrieved from the harbour and put in a museum, alongside placards from Sunday’s protests. A statue of 18th century slave trader Robert Milligan was removed on Tuesday from the docks he founded at West India Quay, East London.
Officials in Plymouth said they would rename a square named after Sir John Hawkins, considered the first English slave trader, after a petition hit 15,000 signatures.
Another called for a statue of Sir Henry Stanley to be removed from the centre of Denbigh in Wales. The council said it would review the request. Organiser Simon Jones said Stanley – best-known for finding lost explorer Dr David Livingstone – was ‘brutal’ to Africans and shot black children from his boat to calibrate his rifle sights. He said: ‘A statue to a man like that has no place in Welsh society in 2020.’
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has ordered a review of statues and street names in the capital. A spokesman for Guy’s and St Thomas’ said of its statue: ‘We recognise and understand the anger felt by the black community.’
London Metropolitan University said it would drop the name of Sir
John Cass from its art and architecture because of the education reformer’s links to slavery.
Liverpool University’s decision to rename Gladstone Hall followed complaints from around 1,300 students. Gladstone, who was born in the city, was one of Britain’s most prominent reformers. His father owned plantations and opposed the abolition of slavery. Tory MP George Freeman tweeted: ‘This isn’t war on today’s racism, it’s a mad woke war on our own history – which should be a source of insight, debate and learning.’ Laurence Westgaph, a historian and PhD student at the university, said Gladstone was ‘a great humanitarian’ who had opposed slavery, adding: ‘Deleting his name removes the chance to debate. Wiping historical references from the landscape does not do anything to cure racism, we need to talk about them.’
Dr Adrian Hilton, chairman of the academic council of the Margaret Thatcher Centre, said the university’s decision was ‘intellectually barren’. Liverpool City Council has previously made a formal apology for the city’s role in the slave trade and its mayor Joe Anderson signalled he would be in favour of renaming some streets.
Business minister Mr Zahawi said any removal of statues should be done democratically, and without violence. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘My opinion is any slaver should not have a statue, but I wouldn’t be breaking the law to take statues down.’
He said Britain should be able to examine its history ‘warts and all’ without ‘self-loathing’ or forgetting ‘the good things we’ve done’.
Labour MP Hilary Benn called for an end to the vandalism of statues, after the memorial to Queen Victoria was attacked in Leeds. He said: ‘I don’t think we should be commemorating slave traders. But let’s have that debate in a proper way, and not by acts of vandalism like this.’ In Lyme Regis, protesters in their 60s are said to have cheered as they vandalised the statue of Somers, who claimed Bermuda as part of the British Empire in 1609.
Meanwhile a petition called on Wetherspoons to rename the Elihu Yale, a pub in Wrexham, North Wales, named after a 17th century merchant linked to slavery.
In Edinburgh a statue of Sir Henry Dundas, who opposed abolition, was defaced. Protesters also placed a traffic cone painted black – with a black power fist symbol – on the head of a statue of the Duke of Wellington in Glasgow. It is often adorned with an orange cone.
‘Intellectually barren’