We don’t need a phoney culture war about statues, we need real change
On the day that we celebrate the great Windrush generation, three years on from Grenfell, and in the wake of the PM sidestepping the issue by announcing another review, the focus has to be on the real challenges, and not some contrived Culture War.
Three years on from Grenfell and the deaths of 72 people, yet 56,000 people still live in 246 buildings that have the Aluminium Composite Material cladding, yet no one has been held accountable. Race-based hate crime in England and Wales has increased by over 120% in seven years, and the official report in to the higher proportion of those in the BAME communities dying from COVID-19 has been buried, only to be leaked, exposing the clear contribution that racism has played.
The list can go on and on… so when a black man is brutally killed by a policeman in the US, and the Black Lives Matter movement rolls out around the globe, it can hardly be seen as a surprise that it stokes up emotions. And when protestors unceremoniously pulled down the statue of the slaver Colston there was a sense that maybe, just maybe, we might actually come to terms with our history at last.
Of course, the statue should never have been pulled down – because it should never have been standing there still to be pulled down.
But where will you draw the line, went the argument as even the good saint Churchill came under fire? It’s just Political Correctness gone mad moaned some yobs and thugs, they just want to throw away our history ranted others.
The reality is, it’s about facing our history, all of it, for all of us. And of course, there will be some difficult questions about where you draw the line, but that’s no reason not to have a line. After all, there were often even older statues that had to be removed in order to put the current ones up in the first place, this is nothing new.
And then Fawlty Towers came under fire and the Thought Police were there to be lambasted.
It doesn’t matter that it was the decision of a company worried about their brand positioning or that Matt Lucas was the first to say that their Little Britain sketches were wrong – we could no longer say anything anymore, our rights were being challenged, and a Culture War was launched.
The Home Secretary demanded a clampdown on the overwhelmingly peaceful Black Lives Matter movement, much to the anger of the Police. And then she gave her backing to a new law to protect war memorials from these so-called thugs and hooligans.
If only they could have moved as quickly to protect the people living in dangerous tower blocks, or even provide our medical staff with proper PPE.
The PM, not to be outdone, went all Trumpish, spending more Twitter-time criticising the BLM protestors than the thugs counter-demonstrating the anti-racists (normally referred to as the racists).
Boris Johnson, a man who said that colonialism in Africa should never have ended and dismissed Britain’s role in slavery, didn’t act, he announced a new Commission, to Telegraph readers, from behind a paywall. He stated that, Britain cannot “photoshop” its long and complicated cultural history and that to do so would be a “distortion” of our past. Given Johnson’s proclivity for viewing his own political journey as somewhat similar to Churchill’s, it is not surprising that so few find comfort in the announcement.
It may be some time before this country is able to have a mature and reasoned debate over the rights and wrongs of Winston Churchill, particularly in the divisively jingoistic era of Brexit. Allowing these issues to take centre stage will only lead to greater divisions and remove the focus from the real challenges. The controversies over statues, and even much-loved comedy shows, are a distraction from the main event.
Interestingly Keir Starmer seems to see this and has refused to get dragged in to the side battles. David Lammy was quick to rebuff the PMs announcement of the new racism inquiry, pointing out the lack of action on the 35 recommendations in the Lammy report, or the 110 recommendations in the Angiolini review in to deaths in police custody, or the 30 recommendations in the Home Office review in to the Windrush scandal, or the 26 recommendations in Baroness McGregor-Smith’s review in to workplace discrimination.
We don’t need a culture war right now, we need real change. We don’t need TV programmes that we don’t actually watch to be pulled, we need action – in memory of Grenfell, and Windrush, and those that died in police custody, and all of those who have suffered discrimination.
Statues of slavers should be removed from our city centres, but that’s not the real war. This is 2020, we need real action.