Statues and Limitations: democracy and the fall of Edward Colston

Matthew Hull, Unlock Democracy

At the weekend, demonstrators gathered in the centre of Bristol as part of a wider series of Black Lives Matter protests. The demonstrators were protesting systemic racism and oppression of Black people in Britain, and calling for those in power to overhaul state institutions to address deep-lying inequalities in all areas of human society.

The wave of protests that began in the United States have spread across the world, and in Britain they have a special resonance. The UK was for well over a century a global trading power, that built its industrial might on the oppression and enslavement of millions of Black Africans and the brutal extraction of wealth from its colonies.

In Bristol, for a time Britain’s largest base for slave traders, the legacy of slavery can be seen in street names and embodied in the city’s harbours and buildings. Many statues and public monuments present slave traders as ‘philanthropists’, honouring them in a way that belies the horrors they inflicted on others.

On Sunday, demonstrators collectively acted to rectify this injustice by removing a statue of Edward Colston - an infamous slaver and apologist for chattel slavery - and dumping it in the harbour (pictured).

Where democracy comes in

It is unquestionably a good thing that the statue honouring such an odious figure is no longer standing. But debates have continued as to whether the way the statue was removed was justified. Some have argued that the only proper course was for the city council to remove it; others that the statue’s removal by a crowd was a moment of symbolic reckoning for a city that was frustrated with delay and indecision.

In the Unlock Democracy team, we’ve been grappling with questions about where our values take us on this question. Were the crowd’s actions an expression of democracy? Or were they by-passing democracy? Would it even matter if they were? Do “democratic values” have any bearing on this question at all?

Here are some of the thoughts we had. Have a read and comment below to let us know what you think.

A longer story

It took a matter of minutes for the statue to be removed on Sunday. But it has been the subject of intense debate in Bristol for decades. The statue was erected in 1895, over 170 years after Colston’s death; Colston’s own charities struggled to find additional donors for their monumental project. From the start, the statue appeared to have had little substantial support among the people of Bristol.

Campaigns like Countering Colston have been operating for years, demanding an end to public celebrations of Colston and his legacy in whatever form. In 2017, they achieved perhaps their biggest victory to date when the trustees of Colston Hall - a large music venue in the city - decided unanimously to commit to renaming the venue.

The statue’s plaque claimed that it was “erected by citizens of Bristol”, but in reality its continued place in Bristol city centre appeared to be anything but democratic. In fact, even attempts to ‘re-contextualise’ the statue by amending the plaque’s wording have been quashed by influential Bristol figures. In 2018, despite the democratically elected Mayor (pictured below) and City Council’s wishes, an attempt to reword the plaque was obstructed by the Society of Merchant Venturers, an exclusive group that manages many of Colston’s endowments.

The democratic thing to do

Few prominent politicians have felt able to state outright that the statue should still be standing - a sign of how far the campaigns against Colston have come. But many prominent politicians, including government ministers, have insisted that the statue should have been removed through formal, official processes.

But as we have seen, official processes turned out to be ways in which small but powerful groups could get in the way of popular progress. After all, a democratically elected Mayor and a majority of councillors were unable to change the plaque. The Mayor of Bristol himself approvingly called the statue’s fate “a piece of historical poetry”, suggesting that local support for Sunday’s events runs deep.

In the face of official processes which are anything but democratic, and a statue that never had truly democratic support, perhaps taking direct action was the most democratic thing to be done.