Too many people with feet of clay are up on pedestals

Do you know who I feel sorry for? The poor saps who decided this would be a good time to campaign for a statue of their Star Wars hero Ewan McGregor to be erected on the summit of Ben Nevis.

More than 20,000 people signed a petition urging the John Muir Trust to install a life-sized sculpture of the Crieff-raised actor dressed as Obi-Wan Kenobi on top of Scotland’s tallest mountain.

But their hopes were dashed in the week we all suddenly decided to sit up and pay attention to those bronze relics cluttering up our street corners with their problematic back stories.

“I’m afraid we’ll have to knock this idea down with a lightsaber,” a spokesman for the conservation charity responded gamefully on Monday. It could be worse. He could have booted the proposal right off its plinth and into the murky depths of Bristol harbour, along with the tarnished reputation of the city’s erstwhile MP Edward Colston, whose generosity as a benefactor was largely funded by the wealth he had accrued through the slave trade.

In case you haven’t been keeping up, we shifted from the pandemic terror phase of 2020 to the great racist statue reckoning on Sunday when Black Lives Matters protesters, energised by the police killing of George Floyd in the US and worn down by two decades of demanding the removal of Colston’s monument, took matters into their own hands and dumped him unceremoniously in the harbour.

The action kicked off a frenzy of reappraisals of our civic realms. A statue of slaveholder Robert Milligan was removed from outside the Museum of London Docklands on the back of a truck. Another, of imperialist Cecil Rhodes at Oxford University, is on a distinctly shoogly plinth and in Scotland, Edinburgh City Council is hoping a rewrite of the inscription on the statue of Henry Dundas, who as home secretary frustrated efforts to abolish the slave trade in the 18th Century, will be enough to prevent it from being Colstoned to the kerb.

Try as I might, I can’t muster the same sympathy for Edward Colston. Or his legacy, or his peers, or any of the commentators lining up to argue why all of this is A Bad Thing. We wouldn’t erect a statue to someone with his, let’s be generous, mixed record today; there’s no law stating that once in place a statue cannot be removed, so why leave it standing when the place could be given over to someone who has done more in the intervening centuries to merit recognition? Or better still, a nice tree.

This isn’t about erasing history. It’s about not being content to see it being airbrushed any longer. And, ironically, Colston’s statue may have done more to enhance our understanding of the slave trade this week than in all of the 125 years since it was erected. Having been retrieved from Bristol harbour on Thursday, it will be put on display in a museum, complete with spray paint, allowing his story to be told in a context more appropriate to the times we now live in than the moment he was placed on his pedestal.

So where will it end? Campaigners are reportedly training their sights on monuments across Scotland whose subjects have similarly dubious CVs. George Kinloch, who is commemorated in Dundee’s Albert Square, was a parliamentary reformer who helped extend the vote to the working man, but he was also a plantation owner.

And Henry Dundas has another monument at Comrie in Perthshire which is also coming under scrutiny.

Both have more strings to their bows than their links to slavery. There hasn’t been the same clamour for their removal over many decades that there was in the Colston case, but let’s at least discuss their legacies and tot up

whether their achievements outweigh their sins. And if the balance sheet comes down on the dark side, let’s think about how we present them in a light that reflects the times, or replace them altogether.

We’re rethinking our city centres as we consider how to stay safe in our post coronavirus world; so why not throw a few statues into the mix along with the 20mph zones and cycle lanes?

The Courier office in Dundee overlooks Albert Square. I’ve never seen anyone posing beside the statue of George Kinloch, or even Queen Victoria. The only creatures who give Rabbie Burns the time of day are the gulls. But I know if I glance out of the window there’s every chance I’ll see someone stopping for a selfie beside the bronze Oor Wullie sitting by the steps of the McManus Museum.

There’s another statue in Lochee that celebrates Dundee’s jute industry. Had it been erected a century earlier, it may well have depicted some captain of industry. But it was unveiled in 2014 and it features a female mill worker and a little girl. It’s a lovely thing. And it speaks of a city with a heart; which recognises its fortunes were built on the hard work of the ordinary citizens who walked these streets before us, as much as the jute barons in their mansions and carriages.

History isn’t set in stone. We’re living through a particularly tumultuous stretch of it now and maybe in our new normal we will re-examine our priorities and think harder about the face we want our communities to present to the world.

If the best we can do is the image of a long-forgotten slave trader, maybe it’s time for us to think a little harder. And if the good folk of Crieff are looking for suggestions, I think I know a group of Star Wars fans who will be delighted to hear from them.

Pictures: PA, AP and Shutterstock. Clockwise from top left: The statue of Edward Colston is dumped into the harbour in Bristol; an image of George Floyd is projected on to the base of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia; spray paint on a statue of Christopher Columbus in Miami and, inset, a demonstrator against the Cecil Rhodes statue at Oxford University.