Preserving Heritage and Statues in Cities

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Alan Mak.)

Today marks a year to the day since the name Edward Colston first crossed my consciousness, and no doubt that of many millions of others, when his statue in Bristol was ripped down from its plinth and rolled into the waters where I imagine his slave ships once docked, in the wake of the brutal racist murder of George Floyd in the US. Events in Minneapolis reverberated everywhere and copycat topplings ensued. In east London, a statue of slaver Robert Milligan was pre-emptively removed by Tower Hamlets Council before any damage was done, and in Brussels King Leopold, who oversaw genocide in the Congo, was dethroned. Confederate generals fell in Birmingham—Birmingham, Alabama—in Portsmouth, Virginia, and in New South Wales, Australia; place names that give a twist to UK geography. The felling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 proved memorable because statues confer respectability and are highly symbolic. Nearly 40,000 individuals have signed three separate petitions on the gov.uk website, so we can see that people attach a lot of significance to statues.

As for Colston, a man who made his wealth from trading in human beings and the enslavement of Africans, putting them in chains, he was once venerated as a benefactor to Bristol, with a school and even a type of cake named after him. Where is he now? No longer imposing in the city centre, his watchful eye over everyone, but horizontal in a museum, in a graffitied, defaced state. Apparently, when the council fished him out of the river, the damage done to his pedestal was so great that it could not take the weight of his standing on it. If we think about it, in some senses it is far better now that he is an educational tool, an exhibit furthering teaching, than a statue everyone walked past obliviously.

The incident of last year and its postscript is history. Colston’s latest chapter parallels how the statue of Viscount Falkland just outside this Chamber, off Central Lobby, has been missing a foot spur since 1909, because a suffragette chained herself to his feet, and in the melee before security and the police escorted her off the premises —crying “Votes for women!” all the way—the spur snapped off. That missing spur has, unintentionally, become a symbol of feminism, giving people like you, Madam Deputy Speaker, me and the Minister hope that we might one day make it into this place. It is always part of the Rupa tour—the unofficial tour I give when taking constituents around. I also show them the DIY plaque that Tony Benn screwed into place down in the dungeon, with the help, I believe, of our former leader, the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn). The plaque commemorates Emily Wilding Davison, another suffragette. It is fitting that, like that snapped-off spur, the spray-painted version of Colston was not restored to its former glory. These one-time acts of vandalism have become matters of historical record.

There is also that larger-than-life Churchill passed by all us MPs when we come into the Chamber. It was going a bit green, because too many Conservative MPs were rubbing it for good luck. It now has a “Do not touch” notice affixed to it. Hon. Members will remember that a year ago the statue of Churchill outside in Parliament Square was first boxed up and then heavily guarded—people said he was the most guarded man in England—for fear of his being attacked by Black Lives Matter protesters. Yet it was only a week ago that that statue had “Chelsea” daubed over it. Chelsea had won some championship or another, and Chelsea fans, who I think are normally associated with the political right—remember John Major and the headhunters—took advantage of the fact that security’s eye was off the ball. That shows how we can sometimes imbue these acts with too much significance.

I think that was an extra prompt, Madam Deputy Speaker, but anyway, the hon. Lady and I spoke beforehand.

I recently attended a meeting regarding the statue of Hans Sloane, the famous inventor of hot chocolate who was also responsible for advances in medicine. He was a son of Killyleagh in my constituency of Strangford. I find it incredible that his bust in the British Museum can be moved, especially considering the collection of 71,000 items that he bequeathed to the British nation, thus providing the foundation of the British Museum, the British Library and the Natural History Museum in London. The fact that his wife was connected to a Caribbean plantation was enough entirely to discredit anything else.

Does the hon. Lady agree that we must not seek to remove or dispose of our history, but rather should allow it to have its place and seek to address where we as a nation are going as a matter of great importance? I congratulate her again on introducing the debate and on the way she has introduced it.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. What an honour it is to be intervened on by him in an Adjournment debate. I think this is a first for me; we may have done this in Westminster Hall, but not here in the Chamber.

It is not the first time.

No, it is the latest of many for the hon. Gentleman. This shows that I do not come up in the draw very often. He makes a good point, and I would say that we should not remove such statues, but contextualise them. Busts and statues are maybe not what people would use to memorialise today. They do seem a bit so last century, or even the century before. I know that Mrs Thatcher, God rest her soul, did not like the statue out there, so they are not for everyone, but we should keep them because they are part of history and they need to be put in proper context.

Statues are perhaps less common now because, with the passage of time, we see what reputational damage can occur to individuals. Take Winnie Mandela or Cyril Smith or Prince Andrew or Jimmy Savile—we might have made statues of any of those individuals only for them to turn out to be not what they seemed.

I understand that the Bristolians resorted to direct action because all the official channels failed, even though they had been trying for years. The Minister will recognise that all local authorities have much more complex and overflowing “in-trays from hell” in their inboxes nowadays, so statue reappraisal is probably not top of the list of things for councils to do. For example, pandemic management is an unforeseeable that has occurred in the past 15 months, although many councils are now reassessing. The London Borough of Ealing is doing that. I say fine, so long as it is not a distraction from real reform. To be fair, demolishing racism is going to be a lot harder than deracinating statues.

It is kind of simplistic to divide the world into heroes and villains because all complex characters, such as Churchill, had good and bad sides. History needs to be taught warts and all. We should not be blinded by hagiography, so we should teach, “We will fight them on the beaches,” and “their finest hour”, but also the Bengal famine and Tonypandy, rather than abridge or airbrush out one side.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) on securing the Adjournment debate. Gosh, that was wide-ranging! I think I would need an entire Front Bench of Ministers to respond fully to all the important points she made. If she will forgive me, I will use the short time left to me to concentrate on the bits that fall into my portfolio, which would be those that come under the topic of this debate, and to set out the Government’s position on statues in cities and the wider context she talked about.

The hon. Lady started by saying that the debate on how best to acknowledge and commemorate our past and history is complicated. It can provoke really strong emotions and, although we might sometimes disagree with each other’s positions, we always have to remember that everybody’s individual views are strongly and sincerely held and need to be seriously considered. That is because our history shapes who we are and what we value, and we are the poorer if we seek to deny that.

We believe that the right approach to statues and to other aspects of our history that are in the public realm—that are displayed publicly—however contentious, is, as the hon. Lady says, to retain and explain their presence, and present to the public their full story. Sometimes that is unpalatable, but it is important that we learn from it, as she pointed out; we cannot airbrush our past. We need to face up to it, however uncomfortable, and explain the history of those who are commemorated or marked within the contexts of the dominant norms of their time, and how those differ from the world we live in today and what we regard as acceptable. There are so many diverse opinions on the matter of statues. As she mentioned, for every statue on display that is deemed contested, there are at least two often conflicting opinions on what should be done, and there is often no consensus. The one thing I would like to try to reach today in this short debate is some kind of balance on this issue.

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Alan Mak.)

That brings us to the current debate about whether we should be removing statues, very often of men who were esteemed and well regarded in the past but, by today’s standards and values, built their wealth and fame on things that we now find morally repugnant, such as the transatlantic slave trade.

Last month, I visited the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. I found it disturbing and upsetting. Probably to my shame, it taught me some uncomfortable facts about our history that I did not know. But as a confident and progressive country, we should face those difficult facts squarely, not wipe them from the history books. Historic England, the Government’s adviser on the historic environment, agrees. It argues that if we remove difficult and contentious parts of our heritage, we risk harming our own understanding of our collective past.

How can we avoid repeating the errors of the past if we do not learn from them? Rather than erasing these objects, we have to seek to contextualise or reinterpret them in a way that enables the public to learn about them in their entirety, however challenging, uncomfortable and distressing that might be. The aim should be to use them to educate people about all aspects of Britain’s complex past so that the Britain of the future can be better, stronger and better advised.

Much has been said and written about contested heritage in the past 18 months or so. The aim is to take politics out of the debate and allow organisations to get doing what they do best: curating our national heritage for future generations. To that end, the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has established a heritage advisory board, which will oversee the development of guidelines that help decision makers in public and other organisations decide how to address the aspects of our heritage that have become controversial. The starting point is always that objects should be assumed to be retained in situ and contextualised in order that the full and comprehensive legacy of the deeds and actions of that person can be discussed, even if some of them are horribly unacceptable by today’s standards.

I totally agree with what the Minister is saying; I think we are at one on all this. We are talking about public space, place, purse, taste and all those things, so it is right to have these safeguards, but I wonder what she thinks of the 10-year tariff for defacing statues. A lot of women think that just looks really weird, and even the equality assessment says it will not result in one single more prison place. It just seems that that kind of thing is playing to the gallery. I wonder whether she has a view on that.

I am glad that the hon. Lady mentioned that. I am not aware that any of those kinds of sanctions have been handed out. That is a maximum sentence, and I am not sure that anything even approaching that has ever been dished out. When we measure it against the minimum sentence for rape, of course it seems obscene. Of course, the maximum sentence for rape is life imprisonment, so then it looks a little more understandable, but there is never any excuse for raping a woman, and of course human life and respect for each other should always take precedence over respect for statues and other man-made objects.

We have to be really careful about going down that track and making political issues out of something that is difficult. Really, what we are talking about here is memorials, and memorials do not just have historical significance. They are not just pieces of stone or marble; they are sometimes also very deeply symbolic, culturally or emotionally, sometimes to those who have died, and hold a huge importance to those who visit them. Thinking back to events around Parliament Square in 2020 and the pictures and reports of the violence and the vandalism at some of the protests that took place then, the public are very rightly concerned about the respect for memorials in those types of contexts, so we do have to take that into consideration.

In the past year, some in the culture and heritage sector have been subject to some really disturbing social media abuse because of the work of their organisations. There can be absolutely no justification for defacing statues and for damaging memorials and symbols of British history, but most importantly, while we do not always agree on the approach some heritage organisations take in dealing with controversial aspects, I absolutely condemn those who hide behind the anonymity of social media to make threats to the hard-working curators and heritage professionals who are simply doing their job. With my other hat on as Digital Minister, I am determined to tackle that via the online safety Bill, because nobody should ever be abused or attacked online simply because of the job that they do.