National Heritage Act 1983

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, for securing this debate, which has predictably been very interesting and enjoyable. In the previous debate, secured by my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Weardale, defined corruption as being about the misuse of entrusted power. Of course, colonial power was not entrusted by those who were colonised to us—the powers—but was imposed on people at the point of a gun, bayonet or a gunboat. This is how we come to have the kind of objects that we are talking about.

It is sometimes a very direct and clear case of theft, even under the laws of the time, but there are much broader issues as well about all the objects from colonial backgrounds in our museums. I am reminded of the fact that the first time I went to the Foreign Office and looked around at the glorious surroundings, I thought “Ah, this is where the wealth of India went”. It was a little simplistic, but you get the idea.

I should make a personal statement here. I come from a white settler background in Australia, and grew up on land that was stolen from the Wallumettagal people. I acknowledge that I benefited from that. Perhaps influenced by that background, unsurprisingly I would go further than the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey: it would be a step forward to empower trustees and directors to make decisions, but here there is a moral responsibility for the British Government to make decisions about these objects, which were often stolen in their name. The noble Lord set out what is happening in Belgium, Germany, France and many other places and in institutions in the UK where we are seeing those returns.

The moral case here is overwhelming. The noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, referred to short-term political pressures, but basic morality is not subject to short-term pressures. If something was stolen, you give it back; that is a universal, long-term value. I make a practical point, too, about the geopolitics of today. If we look at the global view of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in most of the global north there is a clear understanding that Russia is in the wrong and Ukraine has been attacked. If we look at the global south, particularly among the public in the global south, the view is not nearly so clear. A lot of that comes from a kind of distrust of the global north—countries such as the UK—and the long-term impacts they feel about being victimised for so long.

On that point, I will finish by referring to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine. She said that history cannot be unwound and that it would take more than returning these objects to undo the damages of the past. I absolutely agree with her on that. Loss and damage in the global climate talks is a related and much larger issue in scale, but this would at least be a start of us doing the right thing. In terms of global politics, making restitution for some of the damage we have done in the past would take us in the right direction.