When the defence lawyer urged the jury to be on the right side of history, he won the admiration of historian David Olusoga and Labour MP Clive Lewis. But I wonder how many other members of the public think it is ok for Britain’s legal representatives to allow their function to be so dramatically changed on the basis of claims of perceived hurt and hate? You would hope that historian Olusoga would be sensitive to the fact that in the past, when people claim to be on the right side of history, things have not always ended well.
Egged on and flattered by a culture where feelings trump reason, and victimhood is the preferred currency for social status and material gains, Jake Skuse, Rhian Graham, Milo Ponsford and Sage Willoughby might well feel like they are heroes in some fantasy liberation struggle. But the verdict shows that acts, which if committed by others at different times, or different others today, would be recognised and condemned as criminal, are now resoundingly praised by the law itself. Whether you think this is progress or regress, it shows that today’s self-styled warriors have little in common with genuinely inspiring radicals and freedom fighters of the past. The likes of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Mandela or, more recently, people of Syria, faced violent oppression and repression in real life. If statues were toppled it was part of a broader political struggle where the stakes were higher than hurt feelings. Symbolic gestures can be important, but not when they are substitutes for politics itself. People who disagree with the politics of King, Gandhi, Mandela, or who could predict the failure of the Free Syrian Army, can still find them admirable. I doubt the same could be said for the Colston Four.
Parents often see a budding Picasso in their toddler’s drawings, this is understandable, if mildly irritating. Now lawyers are joining the queue of adults who encourage the young to see adolescent rage as political radicalism. They are doing no-one any favours. They only fuel a validation of victimhood and feelings over reasoned politics. This is not a good basis for forging the kind of democratic politics and humane culture we need today. It also encourages an extension of adolescence, witness the ages of the Colston Four (33, 30, 26 and 22 respectively).
The activist Patrick Vernon conceded that while the toppling of Colston’s statue was essentially performative, it opens an important national debate. His view was that had the Colston Four been black, the verdict would have been very different. This may have been likely 20 or 30 years ago, but today, his conclusion misses an important change in the meaning and function of anti-racism. In the past, anti-racism was largely part of a struggle of people across lines of colour, united as equal citizens working out how to ensure the democratic ideals of equality and freedom were fulfilled. It appealed to people’s sense of universal justice and encouraged social solidarity. An accepted tenet of older anti-racism was that individuals are moral equals, even if our social status and political views differ.
Today, anti-racism’s meaning and function is very different. It is now an ideological weapon of choice for corporate HR departments and the elites who have power in our public social, cultural and academic institutions to render majority beliefs and opinions morally invalid: tainted by their association with a one-sided representation of Britain’s past. Today anti-racism sees Britain’s history and cultural tradition as gravestones – dead and silent whose only influence can be moral putrefaction. This is deeply disempowering because without recourse to cultural and intellectual inheritances, it is harder to get our bearings, and make better judgements about the world we have in common today.
It’s important to remember that there is a difference between history as a disciplinary subject, which should strive for the highest levels of impartiality or objectivity, and history as public memory or part of a society’s wider cultural inheritance, which has a different function and where political interests have a more direct influence. If our legal, intellectual, political, and cultural elites give a green light to the latter being decided on the basis of who feels they have suffered most in history, they are setting a dangerous and divisive precedent. They are sanctioning claims to status and/or material rewards based on criteria which cannot a) be properly contested, and b) attribute greater value to minorities in a country where the majority of people are white. How can this be anything other than deeply divisive, and encourage people to present and think of themselves in very passive terms (even if this ersatz identity is stridently asserted)? Aside from political and social depredations, it encourages a highly instrumental use of disciplinary history which cherry picks historical facts and presents them through reductive interpretative frames that distort our collective understanding of the past which, in turn, makes it harder to properly understand aspects of continuity and change in the present. If everyone went ransacking history proper to support their claims in the present, would we have a better society today? I think it very unlikely.
There is no crime in wanting to feel proud of, or at least have some positive feeling for, the country in which one lives. Such sentiments are not the preserve of jingoistic outdated John Bull figures, but rather are felt by many ordinary people who do not hate foreigners coming to Britain, or hate those who have already made their homes here. In fact, without some level of positive feeling for some aspects of where we live – whether it be the countryside, the rain, the fact that while Shakespeare belongs to everyone, he was formed in England, Thomas Paine, the Queen, liberal democracy or the rule of law, Winston Churchill or Kier Hardie – we would have little basis for solidarity among British citizens, let alone something positive capable of inspiring some level of loyalty or love in newcomers. Encouraging people of a country to hate their culture (which does not mean we can’t hate and condemn particular past actions and norms) is cruel thing to do: cruel for both existing and future citizens.
When QC Liam Walker confidently claimed that the continuing existence of Colston’s statue amounted to ‘continued veneration’ of his dastardly deeds, and the defendants claimed it was a hate crime, the tacit message is that if you don’t hate the statue in the way we do, you can only be racist. Who are the haters here? Most people I know are capable of a wider range of responses, not to mention self-control, than the learned QC or the passionate faux radicals credit them with. When Skuse claimed “I knew I was in the right…everyone wanted the same thing” he shows he cannot imagine an opinion different to his own. That of Christina Jordan, first generation immigrant from Singapore, for example, who says “I don’t need the Sages and Milos of our country toppling a 127-year-old statue because they think they should protect me from hurt feelings.” Protection and patronage are not freedom and equality, and lasting political and social progress in history has been made by people fighting for the latter.
An earlier version of this article appeared in the Daily Express (13 Jan. 2022)
