THEY first broke out across the Atlantic. Then in England. Statue wars have been raging for years in the anglophone world, all the more since big Black Lives Matter protests broke out during the first tense summer of Covid. 

In the United States, such disputes have focused on the physical memorials of the men who fought for slavery in the Civil War. In Canada, they have homed in on the monuments to the imperialists who oppressed indigenous people. 

South of the border, some the fight has been over how the biggest rogues of the imperial era remain publicly commemorated in stone and steel. 

But the fiercest of all England’s statue wars was contested over Edward Colston. 

A monument to this slaver – a mass murderer and people trafficker if there ever was one – was thrown in to Bristol harbour during a demonstration. 

Unbelievably, there are still people who think Colston’s statue should still stand where it did, right in the centre of the city where he plotted his horrendous crimes. 

Instead, having been fished out of the water, it is in a now, rightly, in a local museum. 

In England, America and Canada, ultra-conservatives and the nationalist right want to be seen as protecting heritage and history. They see attempts to take down statues of criminals like Colston as an affront to their image of their nations as fundamentally benign. 

Parts of the Scottish right and far right are bristling for the same fight. But they have a problem: we just do not have a memorial to anybody like Colston for them to battle over. 

Late last month there was a pretty stupid attempt to kick off a culture war about statues in Glasgow. 

It came after eight city monuments – six of them on George Square – were named in a major academic report as being dedicated to men with links to chattel slavery. 

And links they sure had. 

Among them was James Watt, the perfecter of the steam engine, who as a young man sold a black boy in Glasgow. There were also some 18th and 19th century grandees and soldiers who benefited from the slave colonies in one way or another. 

But there is no Colston, and nobody like him, on the Glasgow list. And there is no demand for any monument to be taken down, never mind dunked in the Clyde. 

That did not stop those who have already drummed up a culture war on statues down south from trying to do so in Scotland. 

The Scottish Daily Express said the the eight Glasgow statues had been “cancelled”, whatever that Trumpy-Putiny gibberish is supposed to mean, in a “woke” report. The paper quoted a heritage campaigner – in fact a candidate from a fringe right-wing party in next month’s London local elections – called Robert Poll. 

Poll, who has no track record of scholarship on the history of slavery, said the Glasgow report took a “perverse approach” which “distorts our understanding of the past”. 

In fact, the statues were just a small and relatively unimportant part of a giant three-year investigation carried out by historian Stephen Mullen into Glasgow’s connections with the slave economy. 

But they are illustrative. Highlighting their stories helps explain how the Atlantic trade touched so many of us, and not just the great and good celebrated in statuary. 

Dr Mullen’s main findings? That Glasgow profited from slavery. We all did. We still do. 

In these difficult times, it might not feel like it, but we still have the wealth earned from exploiting forced labour. It is not found very much in our statues. But it remains in our institutions, buildings like the Mitchell Library at least partially funded with blood money. 

Privilege is passed down through the generations. So too is trauma and disadvantage. The descendants of the victims of slavery are still living with a legacy far more weighty than a few bits of statuary. There is a reason why the people of the Caribbean are often poor: it is because we stole the liberty and the labour of their ancestors. 

This is not an easy reality to accept. Parts of the British right, especially its more chauvinistic and nationalistic wing, appears to unable to do so. 

Some Scottish nationalists, even those who identify as left, have also struggled to come to terms with Scotland’s long history exploiting slave colonies. 

Yesterday Glasgow City Council formally apologised for its part in slavery. Half of the city’s provosts over a two-century period had financial or personal links to exploitation of Africans and their descendants. So it has a lot to be sorry for. 

It was the council which paid for Dr Mullen’s report, which is – for the avoidance of doubt – a gold-standard peer-reviewed academic paper. 

The focus now is on helping Glaswegians and others Scots to learn their history, warts and all. This – in the long run – might mean better signage on place names or statues. Or better teaching in schools. 

Glasgow was a great Atlantic port. Its merchants might not have bought and sold people as much and as often as those in Bristol did. But they traded extensively with the slave colonies. And many of them owned plantations and the people who worked them. That is our history. 

Our new and improved understanding of the past in itself is unlikely to lead to any statues being removed from George Square. Though Glasgow’s premier public space is due a refresh and it is far from obvious some of its statues merit such prominent display. But that is another battle. 

This article was amended on April 8. Mr Poll was a candidate in last year’s London local elections not this year's elections as originally reported.