This week, the Colston Four - Jake Skuse, Rhian Graham, Milo Ponsford and Sage Willoughby, the four people who pulled down the statue of slave trader Edward Colston from Bristol City Centre in June 2020 - were found not guilty of criminal damage at Bristol Crown Court. The defence successfully argued that the presence of the statue was in itself a greater crime than the action of pulling it down.
There have been some quite angry reactions from media executives such as Kelvin Mackenzie and some MPs (mostly Tories) such as Robert Jenrick, who argue that the decision undermines the rule of law. In this excellent article, Graeme Hayes, Brian Doherty and Steven Cammmiss explain using legal terms why this ruling does not in fact undermine the rule of law - they explain it better than I can so I highly recommend reading it to anyone unsure, but essentially it explains why there were many legal reasons to acquit the defendants, particularly because the trials of protesters work a little differently from ordinary criminal trials, as the burden on the defendant is generally not to prove that what they are accused of did not happen, but that under the circumstances it was intended to prevent a far greater crime. There's more detail in the article, but ultimately this was demonstrated successfully in court.
The greater crime the defendants argued they were preventing was the continuing presence of a monument that was greatly offensive to the citizens of Bristol, that had been petitioned several times to the council to remove legally, to no effect. I've never written about the removal of that statue before, but I can say firmly that I am fundamentally in favour of its removal. I grew up very close to where that statue was, and I still live nearby today. I've walked past it hundreds of times, and I now regularly walk past the plinth where it was. It is not missed at all, either by myself or by others.
Since this statue came down, the subject has been discussed in the media frequently, and I actually think has been a great opportunity for education. It's only been in the last couple of years that I've realised that most people outside of Bristol hadn't heard of Edward Colston prior to the removal of his statue - because if you grow up in Bristol, his name is unavoidable. Pretty much everything in Bristol is named after Colston (or at least, was until a couple of years ago) - I can think of three different schools, a major music venue, student accommodation and many more, that bore his name. This is because the trade that Colston brought Bristol made this city rich.
I really love being from Bristol - it's an incredible vibrant city, with a real can-do attitude and a creative buzz to it, and most importantly it's very multi-ethnic. As a white male Bristolian, I've always been aware that not only am I a person of considerable privilege, but also that I'm a beneficiary of a city that got rich off the back of the slave trade. I don't think there's much point feeling guilty for that, but I like to think that as a city we've moved on from that and are now welcoming to people descended from nations that England has previously invaded and colonised. There's probably a lot further we could go with regards to that, but I feel that the removal of this statue is very much a step in the right direction. I've heard it stated quite a lot that the removal of the statue erases history - a statement that I'm tempted to respond to with a sarcastic 'That's why nobody knows who Hitler was' (a retort I borrowed from Philomena Cunk). But in all seriousness, how does it erase history? Nobody is pretending that history didn't happen. If anything, the opposite is happening - it's to create more awareness of exactly how we got rich, and saying that even though we might benefit from the wealth that history brought us, we are now making the decision to distance ourselves from the means. Making that decision actually makes it more possible for Bristol's economic value to be shared equally - until 2015, taxpayers were still reimbursing former slave-owning families for their loss of slaves. And with Edward Colston's name more widely known now than it was before, it is more possible to have a national conversation and a more broad understanding of history.
In relation to the frequently raised (and quite tedious) question of 'Does this mean we can remove any statue that people don't like then?', the answer from me is actually yes. If a statue is generally disapproved of by the ordinary people living nearby, I feel that they have every right to remove it. Ordinary people make up communities, and they should decide whether or not a statue represents the values of their community. For me personally, I don't like statues at all. I don't believe that any human being, whether living now, in the past or yet to be born, deserves that almost God-like level of accolade, and I'd theoretically be in favour of the removal of every statue in the world. But in reality, it shouldn't be my decision each time - it should be the decision of the people who live wherever it is. I was fortunate enough to get to see the statue of activist Jen Reid for the single day it replaced the Colston statue, but although I thought it was an insult for the council to take it down so quickly when they dragged their heels over Colston for more than three decades, I prefer the plinth with nothing. An empty plinth is a reminder of what happened there - how a statue was erected that was utterly hated by the city, how the authorities refused to remove it despite widespread pressure to, and how an act of civil disobedience ended it and made a strong statement about what our city stands for. To me, what is important now is the remembrance of that, particularly at a time when the Government is trying to make it harder to protest. Protest is a human right, and when successful is very often sanitised by history, the grassroots element watered down and forgotten over time, to morally separate it from any subsequent issues that may be campaigned about in the future. We cannot allow this to happen - this was an act of civil disobedience, and must be remembered as such.
I'm actually quite glad that the campaigns to legally remove Colston's statue were unsuccessful. If they'd worked, the local council would have been able to claim credit for it. In this case, there is no credit to be taken by anyone except the people who were actually there removing it. It's a classic case of ordinary people taking matters into their own hands, something that I think we could all do a bit more of. We all share this world and much of the time, delegating responsibility to politicians only results in half-baked platitudes and little else. As long as you aren't hurting anyone and you know there's good reason for what you're doing, there's often a lot of value to just cracking on with something. Here in my home city, where there used to be a statue emphasising our history of slavery and colonialism, there is now an empty plinth emphasising our collective desire to improve ourselves and right past wrongs - a desire that is organic and has not been fed to us by anyone at the top. I think that's something that we should all be bloody proud of.
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