Britain is due a reckoning with its own past, says University of Sussex professor
A statue of merchant and slave-owner Edward Colston is thrown by protesters into Bristol harbour during a protest in 2020. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA Wirein full swing, historian, Prof Alan Lester believes the Danny Boyle-created masterpiece, “one in which everyone in the UK could see themselves” was seen “as a threat” by some.
“Unfortunately, it isn’t in her gift to realise that,” Lester says, fearing the actions of a confluence of Conservative MPs now in opposition, ever nervous of populist Reform MPs sharing places nearby on the opposition benches. Lester and his ilk of historians are frequently criticised for raising the sins of empire, or for trying in the words of the biographer of Margaret Thatcher, Charles Moore, to make the British “feel bad” about themselves and their history.
“This was based on the notion that Britain is an island with satellites, and that never the twain should meet. And that colonised people didn’t belong in the centre,” says the academic. By June 2020, Lester, being treated for cancer and with time on his hands, looked on with astonishment from his hospital bed as controversy raged after protesters in Bristol toppled the statue of merchant and slave-owner Edward Colston.
“The one thing that anybody who has read a single sentence in an archive of colonial governments and read original documents knows beyond question is that race and racism were absolutely fundamental to the governance of empire.
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