My mother was born in 1933. She grew up in a Britain
without racism. The police did not beat up black people. There was no
discrimination against black people. We didn’t have any laws regarding racial
discrimination. Sporting events were completely free from any ugly racist
chants and no one thought about black lives mattering or not mattering. The
only black people my mother ever saw in those days were in films or news reels.
In 1945 there were very few people from ethnic minorities
indeed living in Britain. We were like modern day Poland or Belarus. In World
War II Poland lost 17% of its population. Belarus lost 25%. By contrast the United Kingdom lost 0.94%. But
while Poland and Belarus rebuilt with what they had, Britain decided to
gradually increase immigration.
In Poland and Belarus identity is a matter of the
language you speak and who your parents are. Someone from Grodno in Belarus
with Polish parents is Polish, citizenship has little to do with it.
In Britain we are more inclusive. We accept that every
British citizen is as British as every other. We don’t care what language you
speak, or where your parents came from. The British identity is open to all in
a way that is simply not the case in most of the world. Yet this our shared
identity is under attack.
The proportion of ethnic minorities in Britain has
risen from less than 1% in 1945 to approximately 13% in 2011. None of these
people were taken aboard slave ships and forced to come here. They either came
voluntarily or their parents did so.
Migration has brought benefits, but it has also
brought things that have been less welcome. There is a long list of race riots
stretching back to the 1950s. There have been gangs and crime. Some British
cities have become informally segregated. We have had to learn about cultural
practices such as forced marriage and honour killings and worse that had not
been present here since medieval times. We have had to deal with terrorism
committed by adherents to a religion that was hardly here at all when my mother
was born. We have had to develop a whole series of laws to deal with racism,
which was a problem that simply did not exist prior to 1945.
So, while acknowledging that immigration since 1945
has brought with it great benefits it’s worth taking into account that it hasn’t
always been easy for any of us.
There is no question that racism exists in Britain.
Some members of ethnic minorities face horrible discrimination. But a quick
look at our present Government shows that people can overcome prejudice and
succeed. Rishi Sunak and Priti Patel hold two of the highest jobs in Government.
They do so on merit. Other black people too
numerous to mention have reached the top in all professions.
Racial discrimination is illegal in Britain. Anyone
who acts in a racist manner is liable to lose their job if not their liberty.
Discrimination still exists, but the solution is for British people to fight
this together rather than to single out one side of our society as guilty while
the other is innocent.
The attack on monuments in Britain is an attack on the
history good and bad that made Britain the country that it is. It is unjust for
people whose families did not fight off the attack from Nazi Germany to call
those who did racist.
When I walk through the average British city, I see
statues of people I don’t recognise. You
would have to be a great expert or else looking for something to destroy to be
able to tell who each of these statues was and how they earned their money.
The problem is not one statue, the problem is one of
escalation. After the mob throws one statue into the harbour, it is rewarded
with another. So, encouraged it seeks a new target.
The focus on slavery is ill-judged. Britain was not
merely in the forefront of the movement to abolish slavery, we spent 40% of the
Treasury’s annual income in 1833 to do so. We then used the Royal Navy’s West
Africa Squadron to prevent the Atlantic slave trade and succeed in eradicating
it. For this we get almost zero credit and much blame.
In the modern world there is still slavery, but hardly
any of it is in Britain nor is it is the USA. Slavery exists to the greatest extent
in Africa, India and Pakistan, North Korea and Russia. But Black Lives Matter
is uninterested in modern forms of slavery. It prefers to riot and topple
statues of slave owners from centuries ago.
Britain and the United States are democracies and each
of our citizens has equal rights before the law. There is injustice, there is
racism, but few of our citizens whose families have arrived here recently
regret that decision. If they did, they could reverse it.
If we get rid of every monument to every person who owned
slaves or had connections with the slave trade, we will not merely get rid of
Colson, we will get rid of Robert Burns, William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. Serfdom,
after all, was equally a form of
slavery. In America if you get rid of Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart you will eventually
have to get rid of Grant’s Tomb and Mount Rushmore.
Worse that that you will have to get rid of the
Lincoln Memorial.
Lincoln freed the slaves, but he also said “my first
impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,—to their own
native land.” Imagine if Trump said that today. But if you get rid of Lincoln,
Washington and Jefferson, what would be left. It wouldn’t be America.
If Sadiq Khan’s family had moved to Warsaw in 1968 he
would not now be the mayor of that city, no matter how hard he had worked. He
might not even be recognised as Polish by his fellow citizens. If he tried to
destroy a statue of a Polish historical figure, he disliked he would be met
with fury. If he called Polish people racist for fighting Nazis he would be met
with bemusement.
Demonstrations, violence, vandalism and toppling
statues will free no slaves in Pakistan, India and Africa and elsewhere, but it
will poison race relations in Britain. We need to get beyond race in order to
find our shared humanity.
Let's abolish slavery where it is rather than destroy statues where it isn't
