The Guardian view on the ‘Colston Four’: taking racism down
The decision by a jury in Bristol to acquit the “Colston Four” of criminal damage, following their role in the toppling of a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in June 2020, is a welcome sign that Britain is changing. In the 17th century Colston was one of Britain’s wealthiest slave traders. It speaks volumes about what Bristol’s Victorian civic leaders valued when they decided to erect a monument to Colston in 1895, almost a century after the slave trade was abolished (decades before slavery itself). Just 12 years earlier, a second statue of William Wilberforce, who campaigned for slavery’s abolition, was erected in his home city of Hull. Yet in the south-western English port, whose wealth was built on the flesh trade, it was seen as fit to honour Colston with a monument, and a plaque describing him as “virtuous and wise”.
The prosecution should never have been brought, and perhaps would not have been had the home secretary, Priti Patel, and other ministers, been less vociferous in their condemnations of the protests, which culminated in Colston’s statue being dumped in the harbour. It is far from clear that this use of the state’s resources was in the public interest. Six other activists were dealt with via a “restorative justice” route, including voluntary work.
Objections to the Colston statue, which occupied a prominent position in Bristol’s centre, were longstanding, and part of a wider, local movement to remove tributes to the slave trader from the city (including the renaming of its main concert hall). That feelings among a section of the public finally boiled over was because of the passionate objections to racial injustice aroused by the Black Lives Matter demonstrations following the murder, less than two weeks earlier, of George Floyd.
The verdict is not, as one of the defendants herself pointed out, a green light to “start pulling down all the statues in the UK”. Colston was a particular person. His monument belongs to a specific time and place – and is now in a Bristol museum, thus demolishing the idea that taking it down was an effort to “erase” the past. What the jury’s decision shows is that members of the public are more than willing to think about the messages embedded in our built environment, including monuments – so many of them Victorian. They accepted the defence’s case that it was the presence of the statue, and failure to update the plaque, that constituted a moral – if not a legal – offence.
Reckoning with the past is difficult. Britain was once an empire that governed vast areas of the world. Astonishing levels of greed and cruelty are part of our history, along with a religiously motivated “civilising” mission that sought to export Christianity across the globe. Everyone who cares about knowledge should support efforts to increase public understanding of all this. In organisations across the country, including the National Trust, good work is being done.
Yet up to now, the government has set its face against anything that might make heritage less celebratory, condemning as “woke” all attempts to place artefacts such as those that fill British country houses (and city squares) in a broader context. Its repressive police bill seeks to increase prison sentences dramatically for those convicted of criminal damage (at present, the maximum for causing damage worth less than £5,000 is three months).
Statues are symbols, and tackling racism requires more than moving them. But acknowledging historic injustices is part of building a more equal society today. Rather than complaining about the way in which the law has been applied, as some ministers have done, the government as a whole should think again. Britain is better off without Bristol’s monument to Colston.