Not a week goes by now without another attempt to whitewash history. Once again the liberal ultra left is attempting to posthumously manufacture a narrative of this country’s past in a way that seems completely counter intuitive to their objectives.
This week it is the turn of Colston Hall in Bristol. In the name of anti racism, campaigners have targeted one of Britain’s oldest performance venues. Colston Hall is named after Edward Colston who lived in the UK, was a merchant and member of parliament until his death in 1721. Now I am going to tell you something about Edward Colston which comes with a trigger warning if you are the type of person who thinks that; middle class mummies doing yoga is cultural appropriation, 6 year olds should be questioning their gender rather than playing outside or is a member of the Cambridge Union.
Edward Colston was a slave trader and quite a prolific one at that. As deputy governor of the Royal African Company he oversaw the transportation of around 100,000 enslaved Africans to plantations in the West Indies and America between 1672 and 1698. So by all accounts (by which we mean, by modern judgement) Edward Colston was a massive knob, we can all agree that if he was alive today we would be severely pissed off with him and probably petition him to be removed from the country, troll him on twitter and the like. But he’s not alive today. He’s properly, completely, for 296 years dead. But Katie Finnegan-Clarke, of campaigners Countering Colston, thinks that “it is wrong that he should be honoured by having a prestigious cultural venue named after him.” Honoured?! Katie he’s dead, he’s been dead for fucking ages mate. He died completely loaded and with (probably) almost no remorse for running a company which at the time was approved of by the monarchy. So I don’t think he’s feeling honoured Katie. I don’t think he’s feeling very much at all because as I mentioned, he’s dead.
Now look, I have no problem with acknowledging that Edward Colston was a bit of a flap-dragon. But what I do have a problem with is the increasingly totalitarian nature of the liberal left’s message. And the inconsistency. If you really want to change the name of a hall or tear down a statue because you don’t like the history of it then at least be consistent. Let’s get rid of that Churchill statue in parliament square. He said some pretty distasteful things about Sudanese ‘savages’ before triumphantly claiming that he had killed three of them. We have a few statues of Cromwell here and there which should probably come down along with all the statues of WW1 and WW2 generals, most of whom were pretty damn sexist for not letting women onto the front line. Oh and we should probably remove all references of any of our Kings up until 1837 because almost all of them had mistresses and a substantial chunk were paedophiles.
So, as you may have guessed, I don’t think we should run around tearing down statues or renaming music halls or boycotting venues just because we disapprove of the name or the history of the thing. Instead we should be acknowledging the difficult past, be thankful that we’ve progressed and are continuing to progress. The alternative is that we whitewash away all the parts of our history which make us blush or ashamed. We need them there precisely because they make us blush, they ensure that we learn from our past mistakes.