Should we target statues of antisemites? It’s a balancing act
THE TOPPLING of the statue of the slaver Edward Colston into Bristol harbour earlier this month has thrown a harsh and much-needed light on some of the darker aspects of British history.
But as the debate about statues, street names and blue plaques has widened to enmesh the likes of Sir Robert Peel, William Gladstone and Winston Churchill, it has threatened to become a new front in the nation’s culture wars.
The deep vein of antisemitism which has coursed through our national story illustrates the complexity of how figures from 1,000 years of history should best be remembered and memorialised.
Take, for instance, Edward I, who is memorialised in High Holborn and at the site of his death in Burgh-by-Sands in Cumbria.
But, as the historian Simon Schama has recounted, Edward’s edict of 1290 also earned Britain the dubious distinction of becoming “the first country in Christian Europe — or anywhere for that matter — to expel its Jews as if they were a contagious disease”.
It is not, however, necessary to dive into 13th century history to find individuals who have rich achievements to their names but attitudes towards Jews which range from the unsavoury to the utterly odious. And some of those figures hail from quarters which — at least before the Corbyn years — might have been unexpected.
In his recently published AntiSemitism and the Left, the journalist and author Ian Hernon offered a multitude of examples which underline the problems likely to be encountered by those who seek a neat division between history’s heroes and villains.
There are few figures in Labour’s history more revered than its first parliamentary leader, Keir Hardie. But in his anti-imperialist opposition to the Boer War, Mr Hardie voiced deeply unsettling views. In 1900, for instance, he argued that Britain had been led into war by “half a dozen financial houses, many of them Jewish, to whom politics is a counter in the game of buying and selling securities”.
And Ernest Bevin, one of Britain’s greatest Foreign Secretaries, told the Labour Party conference in the Mandate’s bloody last months: “There has been agitation in the United States, and particularly in New York, for 100,000 Jews to be put in Palestine. I hope I will not be understood in America if I say that this was proposed by the purest of motives. They did not want too many Jews in New York.” It hardly needs saying that those words were uttered barely two years after British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen.
How, though, do we balance that record against Mr Bevin’s undoubted contribution to the defeat of Nazism as a leading member of Mr Churchill’s War Cabinet and his pivotal post-war role in the founding of Nato and helping to resist Soviet expansionism?
The history of the Conservative party is replete with similar dilemmas. Only last November, the former Prime Minister, Theresa May, unveiled a statue in Plymouth to Nancy Astor, the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons.
But, as some media reports covering the event suggested, Lady Astor also has long faced accusations of being antisemitic and a Nazi sympathiser.
Campaigners for the statue — which now figures on the “Topple the Racists” list — have sought to address the charges against her. Dr Jacqui Turner of Reading University argued she “needs to be considered in the context of the period in which she lived”.
Others have records which are still more complex. Arthur Balfour is justifiably celebrated for his role in helping to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. But 12 years before the issuing of the Balfour Declaration, he led a government which enacted the 1905 Aliens Act and decried the “undoubted
Edward I, who expelled the Jews
evils that had fallen upon the country from an immigration which was largely Jewish”.
David Lloyd-George was similarly sympathetic to the Zionist cause. His replacement of Henry Herbert Asquith as Prime Minister in 1916 — a man who was decidedly hostile to the cause of a Jewish homeland — is acknowledged by historians as helping to pave the way for the Balfour Declaration. And yet, out of office in the 1930s, Lloyd-George visited Germany, met Hitler and, on his return to Britain, publicly praised the Fuhrer as “the greatest living German” and “the George Washington of Germany”.
Politicians are not unique. Examples from the literary world are numerous and well-documented.
Indeed, as Jonathan Freedland wrote in a review of Anthony Julius’ account of English antisemitism: “The writer, major or minor, untainted by Jew-hatred was the exception, the one infected by antisemitism the norm.” Mr Freedland added, “even the record of secular saint, George Orwell, is not clean.”
Like Mr Orwell, to whom a statue was erected outside the BBC’s New Broadcasting House in 2017, many are memorialised across London and the country.
Last year, Westminster Abbey ignored calls from the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism not to honour PG Wodehouse with a memorial stone. He was, it said, a “literary genius who has long been considered to be amongst Britain’s greatest authors, but he was also an odious antisemite”. On its website, the Abbey omits or brushes aside the objections. Mr Wodehouse is hardly the only alleged antisemite honoured in Westminster Abbey: so, too, for instance, is TS Eliot.
The coming weeks will no doubt see much heat, but perhaps little light, generated as the country wrestles with questions to which there are few easy answers.
Bevin played a key role in the defeat of Nazism