Boris Johnson has just tweeted that, “We cannot now try to edit or censor our past. We cannot pretend to have a different history. The statues in our cities and towns were put up by previous generations”. I dislike the extremism of language that marks the twittersphere, but this really is fatuous nonsense. Of course we “edit” our past as we emphasise and reveal moments in it. Of course we can censor how it was represented. Johnson himself has attempted to write a history of Churchill to achieve these very objectives (not that it’s any good, except about how Churchill wrote).
I’ve welcomed tearing down the statue of the Bristol slaver Colston from his pedestal, rolling it to the dockside and tossing it into the water. His galleons did the same to many slaves. It is not an act of vandalism. No one’s property was damaged. None were hurt, unless you count the amour propre of those clinging to their belief that England’s class system is a saviour of world civilisation and never an oppressor.
Purging our monuments in this way has an obvious upside. We actually learn about what they symbolise. Those who complain that it destroys history are quite wrong. In his twitter feed the Prime Minister claims the “statues teach us about our past, with all its faults. To tear them down would be to lie about our history, and impoverish the education of generations to come”. Wrong again! It is the way they are currently preserved that reproduces a culture of denial and ignorance. When the past is symbolised by rickety mystifications, history is badly taught, no one believes in it, and all enthusiasm is lost.
