You can’t judge the people of the past by standards of the present

Scarcely had the statue of Edward Colston been pulled from its plinth in Bristol and thrown into the harbour than there were cries of “Rhodes next!” Cecil Rhodes is an old target and you have to feel sorry for Oriel College, Oxford, which yesterday faced a fresh protest against the statue of him still standing high on its college wall.

The Rhodes Must Fall protests back in 2016 were, for many people, the first experience they had of the Left’s desire to tear down statues of historic figures.

At the time, Chris Patten, Oxford’s chancellor, spoke against the statue’s removal and, combined with a great deal of pressure from donors and alumni, Oriel chose to leave it where it was, taking the view that it was to be regarded as a historical not a political statement.

That, sadly, has proved to be far from the end of the tale. Since the horrific killing of George Floyd by a white policeman in the US, the spread of indignation has widened far beyond protests about police racism and brutality in the United States. In days, the Black Lives Matter campaign, which started in the US in 2013, began driving wide-ranging activism in the UK, too. The toppling of Colston has sparked a whole new area of activism as statues of other historic figures have come into the campaigners’ sights.

Should Oriel change its mind in the present clamour? Is something new and important being said?

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has called for the removal of all slave trader statues in the capital, and announced a commission to “diversify” London’s public landmarks. A new website set up by Left-wing activists called “Topple the Racists” has suggested that statues of William Gladstone, Robert Peel, Lord Kitchener, James II and even Francis Drake ought to be removed. The all-must-fall mindset was epitomised by graffiti added to the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square denouncing him as a racist.

Colston was certainly someone to whom black lives did not matter, but he was only one of a great many merchants in 17th and 18th-century Bristol busy in the slave trade. That trade was abolished well before the late 19th century when Cecil Rhodes was active in achieving British territorial dominance in southern Africa. Churchill’s views on race would not be acceptable in the modern era. I’m sure the same is true of most of the other people on the activists’ list.

However, we cannot simply erase our uncomfortable past. It must be a part of our future, too.

The common theme of present campaigning is the modern legacy of such history in the lives of modern BAME Britons. Campaigners claim with passion that they have been treated as though their lives do not “matter”. There are certainly questions to be addressed here. But I think it is wrong to suggest that tearing down statues will help.

Where is all this heading? A recent campaign to “take racist Churchill off our currency” shows the shape of things to come if we do not make the case that it is important to learn from our history rather than simply erase it. It is deeply unfair to judge the people of the past by the standards of the present. Nobody would pass such a test – not even today’s protesters, some of whose morals will surely seem just as evil to future generations as slavery does to us.

Gill Evans is emeritus professor of medieval theology and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge

read more at telegraph. co.uk/opinion