Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol should have been taken down ages ago. So why wasn’t it?
Opining on the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol on Sunday, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer commented on LBC that it should have been taken down years ago and deposited in a museum.
I agree. Unfortunately while Sir Keir’s allies often describe him as ‘forensic’ this wasn’t true today.
There is a reason why the statue had to be pulled down.
It wont be news to many Bristol residents and I suspect others that there has been a long campaign to expunge links to the slave trader Colston from Bristol. Colston Hall has agreed for example to change its association.
The Colston statue in central Bristol was subject, unsurprisingly, to regular amendment by protesters and a large scale petition to get it removed. Historian Professor Madge Dresser was commissioned by Bristol Council to produce a plaque for the statue with wording that summarised who Colston really was (i.e a slave trader).
It never happened. Why? In effect because the Merchant Venturers blocked it.
The Merchant Venturers are a group of local businessmen (and recently the occasional businesswoman) that date back to the sixteenth century.
They own property in the Bristol area and fund private schools, alms-houses and so on. They are sometimes described as secretive but I’m not sure that is true. Far from all of this in 2020 appears to be a bad thing. That is not really the central point though.
There is a useful HTV documentary dating back to 1995 that gives a decent summary of who they are and what they get up to. They also have a working website.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVAq1YRK0RI
The problem is not secrecy but unaccountability. They appear to have a finger in many pies in Bristol. It’s easy enough to find this out. How to do anything about it we don’t know.
They opposed the attempt by a democratically elected Council to add a plaque to the Colston statue. Why? We can guess but we don’t know. What could be done about it? How could they be challenged?
Effectively Sunday was the last remaining option.
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