Toppling Edward Colston was important and right

Two of the most useful things I studied at university were statistics and a history elective called "Public History". As the name suggests, it was all about how history is presented to the public, including statues. We studied the reasons why statues were erected, what statues are meant to achieve and how old statues stand in a modern context.

Statues are almost always erected as an act of celebration, to honour and remember people considered to have achieved great things. When we erect a statue of someone, we are literally putting them on a pedestal, we are forced to look up to them, whether we want to or not. When a statue is torn down, it is usually an event fuelled by anger, by the need to triumph over whatever it was that the statue stood for. 

In the case of Edward Colston, it stood for celebrating a man who trafficked human beings.

Between 1680 and 1692, it is estimated his company transported 84,000 men, women and children. But his apologists will claim that his statue was for his charitable work, so that somehow makes a man who treated the equivalent of almost the entire population of Bath as chattel a perfectly acceptable guy to cast in bronze for all the world to see. 

But even his charitable work was unsavoury. While there is nothing to be gained by closing down the schools he helped found, it is important to recognise that at the time, his philanthropy was tainted by his own High Church Anglican religious bigotry. He insisted that children of Dissenters be refused admission. Dissenters were the protestants who separated from the Church of England during the 17th and 18th centuries, including Quakers. The school rules included the expulsion of any boy who had been caught attending a church service outside the Church of England. Boys became apprentices upon graduation but could not be apprentices to Dissenters.

By the time his statue was erected in 1895, the act which abolished slavery in Britain had been in force for 61 years. This makes the morally lazy argument that we can't judge an old statue on modern values ridiculous.  

The other pathetic argument for leaving Colston on his plinth was that the statue should be removed by "democratic processes". Oh please. Sit down. Since the 1990s, there have been peaceful, polite campaigns to remove the statue. But, as Professor Kate Williams pointed out in a brilliant Twitter thread, plans in 2018 to put up a plaque to put Colston into historical context hit brick walls when some councillors objected to the wording and Bristol's Society of Merchant Venturers got involved because they didn't want any mention of the 12,000 trafficked children or the selective nature of his philanthropy. Pulling the statue down and throwing it in the river has been a bold, powerful, important statement. Sometimes being polite is a waste of time.  

But merely pulling down statues will not end racism in the UK any more than having two female prime ministers has ended sexism. Shadow justice secretary David Lammy suggested that these sort of statues should be in museums where the historical context can be discussed, where they will actually become a means of education rather than something for people to walk past and pigeons to shit on. Very few people ever learn anything particularly profound from a statue and they are not usually erected for pedagogical purposes. The notion that statues of racists need to stay put to educate people on racism is embarrassing.

And that brings me to my other useful university subject - that of statistics. When we look at racial inequality, the criminal justice system is quickly placed under the spotlight. By the government's own statistics, black people are stopped and searched way more often than white people - the rate for the whole population is seven in 1,000 people are stopped and searched but for black people, this is 38 per 1,000. For white people, the figure is four per 1,000. Last year, 27% of the prison population identified as an ethnic minority compared to 13% of the overall population. Before a case even gets to court, black men are 26% more likely to be remanded in custody at the Crown Court than white men. Once in front of the beak, black men are 53% more likely than white men to be sentenced to prison for an indictable offence.

Crucially, according to a 2017 Ministry of Justice review, young black people are nine times more likely to be locked up than young white people. That means that for first offences, young black people are ending up behind bars more often than young white people - and this is where the cycle of crime so often starts, with a focus on retribution rather than rehabilitation.

Simple changes such as only locking up first-time offenders for serious violent crimes, such as rape, murder and armed robbery, could help, along with eliminating custodial sentences for non-violent crimes. The money saved on keeping people of all skin colours in overcrowded prisons, which are not conducive to rehabilitation, could be invested into education, training and counselling for young and first-time offenders. The "broken window" policy of cracking down hard on first offences, no matter how minor, does not work.

Class plays a role in disadvantage too. It is naive and simplistic to think that Malia and Sasha Obama are not privileged while declaring a young white man on a council estate born into multi-generational unemployment is a shining example of white privilege. There are intersections when it comes to who holds the aces in the game of life, who will be able to reach their potential and who will fall by the wayside. But being born with black skin is still a lightning rod for prejudice on sight, for attracting the attention of police when you're minding your own business, for fearing being pulled over for a minor traffic offence, and being a target of hate. 

Policies which encourage investment in high quality comprehensive education so that "rough schools" are not permanently accepted as being rough because that's just the way it is will help the white kids who are disadvantaged as well as the black kids. The same goes for investing in high quality, affordable social housing, ensuring equitable access to healthcare and allowing greater access to higher education. And so and so forth - the policies that will help black people help society as a whole. Why would anyone object?

And while we're at it, Priti Patel could easily put an end to all Windrush deportations and ensure that every family affected receives compensation.

Pulling down the vile Edward Colston was an important moment in history, along with the powerful image of a black woman taking her place on his empty plinth to address the crowd with a megaphone, but even if every statue of every slave trader is rightly removed, there is still so much that needs to be done to improve the awful statistics.

Image credit: Prachatai/Flickr

Moving on from Cummings going to Durham with the Dompologists

The Dompologists came out in force as soon as their hero was busted. Apparently, Dominic Cummings going to work on what should have been his first day at home for a 14-day quarantine; driving 260 miles non-stop to Durham with a child in the car while he and his wife were both possibly contagious so they could be near the person who was their only childcare option; the person who was the only childcare option apparently incapable of travelling alone to London if required; being tragically unable to ask a single friend or family member in London to drop off groceries or medication during quarantine; being unable to pay for a grocery or medication delivery service despite having a pretty good combined household income; driving his child to hospital in Durham with his wife while still possibly contagious; driving to Barnard Castle on his wife's birthday with his wife and child in the car on a 60-mile round trip to test his eyesight; not sharing the drive home with his wife even though she can drive; his wife writing a column for the Spectator about life in lockdown which omitted the salient fact that they'd buggered off to Durham; testing the capacity of a Range Rover petrol tank to its absolute running-on-fumes limits; being the parents of a four-year-old with a cast iron bladder; and retrospectively editing a blog post in April 2020 to give the impression that he warned everyone about the coronavirus last year - all mean that he didn't break any of the rules he helped to set and therefore he shouldn't resign.

Instead, a pathetic rebranding of Dominic Cummings, father of the year, erupted. It was quickly pointed out that the whole "he did what any good dad would do" line insulted everyone, especially those struggling to juggle kids and work, and all who had followed the rules since March.

So, the Dompologists started yelling: "LET'S MOVE ON AND TALK ABOUT THE IMPORTANT ISSUES!".

OK. Sure. Fine by me. Let's talk about the important issues. How about we start with childcare? Seriously, I've never heard so many people who have never previously breathed a word about childcare talk so much about childcare when they leapt to Cummings' defence.

Let's talk about childcare not just for now - although that is important - but for the long-term. What can we do about (mostly) women giving up careers because childcare costs meant they were literally paying to go to work? What about incentivising employers to subsidise childcare, offer more flexible hours or working-from-home opportunities to help families? Hell, if anything good can come of this wretched virus, it might be the penny dropping for presenteeism-obsessed employers in regard to trusting staff to work from home. At the same time, though, how about recognising the need for people who work from home to have access to childcare? And what about affordable, high-quality childcare for people on low incomes? Maybe some of the Conservative MPs who smashed the red wall could raise this issue on behalf of their working class constituents?

Perhaps the craven cabinet ministers who all spinelessly tweeted embarrassing boilerplate nonsense about Cummings being a plucky little battler who was struggling with childcare could show the same concern for families up and down the country? I could introduce them to someone I know, a single father raising a severely disabled teenaged daughter while working from home. I'm sure that meeting would prove very instructive for the government front bench.

And let's talk about how shamefully outrageous the Downing Street rose garden press conference was. Why was an unelected adviser allowed to use that particular space to defend himself on live TV?

But more importantly, if the Dompologists want to talk about the big issues of the day, let's talk about how Cummings' defence blew wide open the rifts among Brexiters, and how it became painfully clear that the main reason Boris Johnson hasn't sacked him is because he is too scared to try and be prime minister without his trusty adviser.

Cummings came across as being puffed up with his own self-importance during his rose garden statement but he had a point - to Boris Johnson, he is important. Cummings was quite right to talk up his importance to the running of the country - this is the pedestal on which Johnson placed him and now he's incapable of taking him down.

We have a prime minister who is self-serving, unpleasant, cowardly, bullying and lazy. This PM gig has not panned out like he thought it would when it competed for top billing in his masturbatory fantasies at Eton. As a result, he relies heavily on Cummings, having been way too impressed by the effectiveness of the "Take back control" slogan of the Brexit campaign.

Since then, Classic Dom's simplistic slogans have been the order of the day. To be fair, "Stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives" was clear and effective. It was an instruction the Cummings himself found impossible to follow but it made sense. Now we have the shitshow of "Stay alert" with a government rushing to ease lockdown rules because public trust has eroded. It seems the government has figured everyone is just going to flock to the nearest park or beach anyway. Bizarre rules about allowing six people in your garden as long as nobody sits on the sunlounger or uses the toilet abound. We're being warned not to have sex with anyone outside our own households but we can let the cleaner, nanny or estate agent in, if required.

Today, we witnessed the Rees-Mogg-inspired farce of MPs queueing in a ridiculous conga line to vote in parliament, along with a drive to force all 650 MPs back into the House of Commons before it's safe to do so, all because the PM is useless without his braying fan club behind him. The pared-back parliament with limited numbers in the house and questions by Zoom exposes Johnson as an incompetent blatherer, a desperate haystack of a man, obviously out of his depth, reaching for Latin Christmas cracker jokes when he has no answers.

Dominic Cummings isn't urging the PM to take a step back and look at this mess with a cool head. He's probably delighted with the chaos - after all, we are edging towards his libertarian wet dream where everyone does the hell they want so they can all be blamed when there's a second spike in COVID-19 cases. And he is happy to continue to lead Boris Johnson down this pitiful path, regardless of whose lives it might cost, along with leading us over an irresponsible no-deal Brexit cliff for good measure. One unelected man has way too much power. That is what has emerged from the scandal over the drive to Durham. That is what is so outrageous and that is why we should stay angry.



Photo: Ninian Reid/Flickr