We're here again. Remember all that hoo-ha about whether or not we should pull down statues of slave traders? Well now, The City of London Corporation has made a U-turn on its previous knee jerk decision to remove statues of Beckford and Sir John Cass - who were British politicians with links to the transatlantic slave trade.
Beckford was a two-time Lord Mayor of London in the late 1700s who accrued wealth from plantations in Jamaica and held African slaves.Cass was a 17th Century merchant and philanthropist who also profited from the slave trade.
The U-turn means that the statues will now stay in place at the Guildhall building, and the corporation who came to this decision has said the statues will now have “plaques or notices placed alongside them, with contextual information about the two men’s links to slavery."
Round of applause! At last, common sense have finally prevailed, but it took a while and probably cost a bit to come up with this obvious solution. Look, I’m not in for glorifying bad doing, but these were complex characters who did what was deemed at the time acceptable.
Yes Yes Yes.. explain their context and reason for being where they are, after all they are part of history. It’s not that difficult to work out. But this wish to obliterate or sugar coat the past has more sinister connotations. It’s a mindset that is infiltrating all parts of our society.
If we’re not careful we will end up with a generation of people who cannot cope with the truth. This ideology has filtered into our education system where people are literally not allowed to fail or be told you are not good at something, the grading system for GCSCE’s going from 9 being very good to 1, so you literally cannot come away with nothing.
On school sports day, everyone gets a prize, there is no coming last, no one is allowed to fail. Look as I said, I don’t agree that bad doing should be glorified, but people need to get a grip. Failure is part of learning. We learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of others. We learn nothing is we erase them.
We cannot live in a lawless society where you are allowed to pull a statue down just because you don’t like the reason why it’s there, where you can evade the law by holding the moral high ground.
We need to be able to have conversations and make decisions and take account of the facts. Emotion should not overrule reason and we need to be allowed to fail.
