THOSE with most to lose when people gather to confront the police or bring down statues get understandably edgy: where will it all end? It’s doubtful if the Parisians who gathered on July 14, 1789, to storm the Bastille had intended to kill its commander and several of its defenders. They were, after all, intent merely on gaining access to the arms held within the prison. But passions were running high in the city amidst fears the royal army was to be let loose upon the people.
Thus, the sight of Black Lives Matter protesters toppling the statue of an old slave trader in Bristol and threatening to remove Henry Dundas, who played a key role in delaying the abolition of the slave trade for 15 years in 1792, from his perch high above Edinburgh city centre and others of his ilk elicits a suite of predictable responses. The most representative of these was from Neil Oliver, the television history-man who said: “I find it very concerning that this kind of behaviour is a step on the road that leads to mob rule, to the guillotine.”
Mr Oliver, of course, has form when it comes to adding a purple hue to his vivid declamations. During the 2014 Scottish independence referendum he described the Yes campaign as “a hate-fest”. He thinks that the mere prospect of a second referendum is “a cancerous presence”. The Electoral Reform Society begged to differ on how the referendum campaign was conducted, describing it as providing a gold standard in the quality of political engagement.
Not long after this Mr Oliver became President of the National Trust for Scotland. This organisation has several artefacts of questionable provenance but you have to become a member before you can access its properties, so these should be okay … for the time being anyway.
READ MORE: Black Lives Matters protesters plan to topple Glasgow statue of a former PM - but have wrong man
I’ve no great enthusiasm for disassembling statues, but it hardly sets us on the road to perdition. This is merely a rather more visceral rendition of what governments and universities do routinely when they remove degrees and honours from figures who fall from grace. Viewed purely from an artistic perspective many of these old statues are of limited aesthetic value anyway and I’d be inclined to remove most of them on those grounds and replace them with something more vivid and edgy that honours the nobility of lesser realms. Stick the old slave-owners in a museum and let their mass defenestration be regarded as a moment in history of itself.
What is more important here, I think is this historic opportunity of pulling down the much more insidious and less visible structures which permit racism and racial discrimination to flourish in the long term. I was moved by Anas Sarwar’s speech on Thursday at Holyrood in which he starkly outlined our casual indifference to racial inequality in civic Scotland.
Purely in the political realm I have been disobliging of Mr Sarwar’s machinations and stratagems in seeking to shape the Labour Party in Scotland. But there was no doubting his passion on this occasion as he took us through the myriad executive positions in Scotland by which civic influence is wielded and told us they were the exclusive preserve of whites. Scotland and Glasgow in particular is home to a prominent, well-educated Asian community who have contributed greatly to the economy and culture of our nation – Mr Sarwar himself is a gifted son of this group.
Yet, in 2020 smart, diverse and inclusive Scotland doesn’t trust any of them to be major decision-makers in the civic boardroom cliques which determine future strategies in education, health and the arts. There’s little point in posting pictures on Facebook of your presence at a Black Lives Matter demonstration and the harrowing of the nation’s rogue statuary if you’re not shamed and embarrassed by such civic and cultural apartheid.
In September, 2018 Glasgow University published a report of how it had benefited directly from the Atlantic and Caribbean slave trade. The figure of £200m emerged but it admitted that this was probably incomplete, so sinewy and deep-rooted were the routes and means of profiteering from slavery. It’s inconceivable that other Scottish academic institutions, venerable trades houses, finance firms and family fortunes have not similarly benefited from the routine torture, rape and murder of millions of black people.
Nor was this confined to the actions of a few old merchants whose stone effigies are currently looking a bit precarious. In a book of essays published in 2015 called Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past, Professor Sir Tom Devine and a group of his fellow academics outlined the extent to which almost the entire economy of Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries was under-written by profits from the Caribbean slave markets.
READ MORE: Black Lives Matter: Every Scottish street linked to slave-trade revealed
In his concluding essay, Sir Tom wrote: “The funds which helped to lubricate the Chesapeake trade were drawn from Scottish landowners, trustees, tradesmen, physicians, military officers, spinsters, widows and university professors, among many others. That also meant the profits of the slave-trade tobacco business were widely distributed through these financial networks well beyond the ranks of the active merchant community itself.”
Perhaps it’s reasonable to question how far back we need to go and whether the raking of ancient ashes can achieve anything. Yet, no-one is proposing punitive land and property-grabs or to impoverish those whose present fortunes are directly descended from racist genocide. It’s surely also reasonable to encourage these families, firms and trades bodies to make a similar audit of their slavery-derived fortunes. Like Glasgow University they could make proportionate reparation with endowments and scholarships for the descendants of those whose suffering once fed and watered the entire Scottish nation.
When the Labour Party began to introduce all-women, constituency short-lists they were criticised for endorsing the sort of discrimination they purported to revile. Yet, such a response failed to acknowledge that centuries of male privilege saw many men being promoted and honoured merely by their membership of exclusively all-male golf clubs and masonic lodges. A similar programme of positive discrimination in favour of our Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities is clearly required if Scotland seeks to become a truly inclusive and diverse nation.
And if black lives really matter then our response has to be much more profound and long-lasting than knocking down a few old statues.
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