The show must go on

“Let’s not forget,” say some folk, “that Edward Colston was an incredibly generous benefactor who gave his fortune to good causes.” And so he did, except that his fortune came about by way of slavery, transporting something like 80,000 African men, women and children to the Americas. Some 19,000 of them died en route from scurvy and dysentery, their bodies being tossed into the ocean, but never mind that. He built some fucking almshouses, so that’s all right then.

If charitable giving is enough in itself, then I fully expect the citizens of Leeds to erect a statue at the city’s general infirmary in lasting tribute to Jimmy Savile, who after all raised huge sums of money. Let’s forgive and forget his serial sexual abuse directed at the young and the old. No one, absolutely no one, is saying that, so why pretend Colston was one of the good guys?

I am not going to condone the removal of Colston’s statue on Bristol City Centre and its subsequent dumping in the harbour, but to be honest I’ve got more important things to worry about than that. Generally speaking, I am opposed to the type of vandalism we saw yesterday and I am always opposed to violence. But Colston’s statue, built on behalf of Bristol’s rich and elite should have been removed years ago. Now, as Mayor Marvin Rees points out, it will be fished out of the harbour and put on display in a museum as an example of our grim past than a celebration of this horrible person.

Whether change is really coming, I don’t know. I am not convinced that large swathes of the country, especially those from an older vintage, have changed their view, as witnessed in today’s red top headlines, purchased almost entirely by older people. And the noises emanating from Dominic Cummings’s – sorry, Boris Johnson’s – government suggest there is political capital to be made from the #blacklivesmatter campaign. So the work and the campaigning must go on, peacefully I hope.