Elgin Marbles

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, and especially the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, I would like to welcome this excellent short debate on the Elgin marbles. I want to stand back from the specifics of the “to loan or not to loan” argument, and avoid the tit-for-tat row over ownership, because I fear that this technical approach can distract us from why these sculptures really matter. We should not lose sight of the marbles’ value as sublime works of art, the quality of their artistry and what Virginia Woolf described as their “immense and enduring beauty” after millennia. I urge that we refocus the public discussion to the sculptures’ significance in the history of the accomplishments of western civilisation.

I was reminded of this when rereading Tiffany Jenkins’s excellent Keeping Their Marbles: How the Treasures of the Past Ended Up in Museums … and Why They Should Stay There. I recommend that DMCS Ministers treat themselves to the book for Christmas. In it, Dr Jenkins details how the 1816 House of Commons Select Committee that investigated Lord Elgin’s proposed sale of the marbles to the nation not only found that he had acquired them legally, but broadened its deliberations to weigh up the sculptures’ aesthetic and cultural merits. It concluded that the marbles’ artistic magnificence was such that their presence in Britain had the potential to spark an artistic renaissance. The context for this appreciation, fuelled by Enlightenment values, was the 19th-century interest in ancient Greece and especially the inspiring classical model of Athenian democracy, which chimed with the democratic spirit of mass society emerging in Britain at the time.

What a contrast with 2023—anti-democratic trends are on the rise, and rather than publicly promoting these artefacts as inspiring embodiments of the world’s first democracy, policy retreats into uninspiring pedestrian legalese. Additionally, it has become fashionable not to celebrate but to demonise western civilisation. The Enlightenment and 19th-century cultural figures are routinely impugned as representing white supremacy, racist privilege, and so on.

Unsurprisingly, the dispute about the marbles has been dragged into the sordid anti-western discourse, and we are told that the return of the sculptures would be a positive act of decolonisation. But like so much of today’s philistine, politicised use of the past to score contemporary identitarian points, it bears little relation to historic facts. The notion that the return of the marbles would be reparation for what was stolen by British colonialists 200 years ago is misleading. When Lord Elgin acquired the marbles, Greece was under the thumb of the Ottoman Empire, not the British Empire. Indeed, the Ottomans were happy to sell them; they were indifferent to 19th-century Hellenism or democratic virtues of ancient Athens or anywhere else, and the Acropolis served as a garrison at the time.

Despite such inconvenient facts, there is growing pressure on all museums to repatriate their artefacts in general. Worse, too many who work in the sector behave as though their institutions are little more than repositories of ill-gotten gains of a shameful, colonial, slave-owning past. We should instead demand that they act as public servants, trusted by democratic society to curate the world’s treasures as guardians of historic scholarship and artistic appreciation.

In this context, it is crucial that the Government urge the British Museum not to fudge the issue in the name of political expediency or diplomatic niceties. I worry that talk of loans seems to do just that. Can the Minister promise to unapologetically defend housing Elgin’s precious marbles within London’s encyclopaedic collections, as an aid to a universal understanding of human culture?