Fighting over statues obscures the real problem: Britain's delusion about its past | Martin Kettle

A collective failure to look the history of empire in the eye stops us from being the kind of country we could be

There were two historically striking things about Bristol’s statue of Edward Colston. The first, most obviously, was that the statue of a slave trader could still have had pride of place in a British city in 2020. The second, much less remarked, is that the statue was only erected there in 1895, fully 200 years after Colston’s life and almost 90 years after the abolition of the slave trade.

Why did the statue go up when it did? It wasn’t to celebrate slavery. It was because, at a time when Britain’s empire stretched around the globe, what seemed to matter most about Colston to the city’s rulers was not how he had got his riches but his enduring and formidable legacy of philanthropy. Like most late Victorian British cities, Bristol was governed by Gladstonian Liberals not by Tories. The Liberals abhorred slavery and extolled their abolitionist forebears. But they celebrated their own enlightenment, in the form of the charitable schools, hospitals and research centres that they endowed, even more.

The dark star behind Brexit remains the British people’s unreconciled relationship with the experience of empire

Related: BLM protesters topple statue of Bristol slave trader Edward Colston

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