No whitewashing

THE calls to remove statues and change street names has at least given people some understanding of Scotland’s role in the slave trade.

Scotland benefited disproportionately from the transatlantic trade in people. Relative to population, Scots owned more slaves, more plantations and had a higher share of the trade in plantation goods such as tobacco and sugar than England or most other European countries.

Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville, a leading figure in government from the 1790s to the 1800s, believed that slavery should be abolished in three stages over a decade, but many historians say his interventions cost thousands of lives.

Glasgow’s street names, such as Glassford Street, bear testament to plantation owners who accrued massive sums of money off the back of slave labour.

Let us have interpretation boards and plaques that provide information on the role of these individuals in this barbaric practice.

Let us use this as an opportunity to embed slavery in the school curriculum and erect a monument to mark it, not forgetting the role of countless individuals in its abolition.

However, what we cannot do is to whitewash, to sanitise our history, by removing the statues and street names of those whose views we find abhorrent now.

If that were indeed a route we were to go down we would have pretty little left.

They are testament to our past, a reminder, warts and all. Alex Orr, Edinburgh