The Guardian view on the ‘Colston Four’: taking racism down | Editorial

The choice by a jury in Bristol to acquit the “Colston Four” of legal harm, following their function within the toppling of a statue of the slave dealer Edward Colston in June 2020, is a welcome signal that Britain is altering. Within the seventeenth century Colston was considered one of Britain’s wealthiest slave merchants. It speaks volumes about what Bristol’s Victorian civic leaders valued after they determined to erect a monument to Colston in 1895, nearly a century after the slave commerce was abolished (many years earlier than slavery itself). Simply 12 years earlier, a second statue of William Wilberforce, who campaigned for slavery’s abolition, was erected in his home city of Hull. But within the south-western English port, whose wealth was constructed on the flesh commerce, it was seen as match to honour Colston with a monument, and a plaque describing him as “virtuous and sensible”.

The prosecution ought to by no means have been introduced, and maybe wouldn’t have been had the house secretary, Priti Patel, and different ministers, been much less vociferous of their condemnations of the protests, which culminated in Colston’s statue being dumped within the harbour. It’s removed from clear that this use of the state’s assets was within the public curiosity. Six other activists have been handled through a “restorative justice” route, together with voluntary work.

Objections to the Colston statue, which occupied a distinguished place in Bristol’s centre, have been longstanding, and part of a wider, local movement to take away tributes to the slave dealer from the town (together with the renaming of its principal live performance corridor). That emotions amongst a piece of the general public lastly boiled over was due to the passionate objections to racial injustice aroused by the Black Lives Matter demonstrations following the homicide, lower than two weeks earlier, of George Floyd.

The decision just isn’t, as one of many defendants herself identified, a inexperienced mild to “start pulling down all the statues in the UK”. Colston was a specific individual. His monument belongs to a particular time and place – and is now in a Bristol museum, thus demolishing the concept taking it down was an effort to “erase” the previous. What the jury’s choice reveals is that members of the general public are greater than keen to consider the messages embedded in our constructed surroundings, together with monuments – so a lot of them Victorian. They accepted the defence’s case that it was the presence of the statue, and failure to replace the plaque, that constituted an ethical – if not a authorized – offence.

Reckoning with the previous is tough. Britain was as soon as an empire that ruled huge areas of the world. Astonishing ranges of greed and cruelty are a part of our historical past, together with a religiously motivated “civilising” mission that sought to export Christianity throughout the globe. Everybody who cares about information ought to assist efforts to extend public understanding of all this. In organisations throughout the nation, together with the National Trust, good work is being carried out.

But to date, the federal government has set its face in opposition to something that may make heritage much less celebratory, condemning as “woke” all makes an attempt to position artefacts akin to those who fill British nation homes (and metropolis squares) in a broader context. Its repressive police bill seeks to extend jail sentences dramatically for these convicted of legal harm (at current, the utmost for inflicting harm value lower than £5,000 is three months).

Statues are symbols, and tackling racism requires greater than shifting them. However acknowledging historic injustices is a part of constructing a extra equal society in the present day. Quite than complaining about the best way during which the legislation has been utilized, as some ministers have carried out, the federal government as a complete ought to suppose once more. Britain is healthier off with out Bristol’s monument to Colston.