Preserving Heritage and Statues in Cities

Caroline Dinenage Excerpts

Monday 7th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Digital and Culture (Caroline Dinenage)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) on securing the Adjournment debate. Gosh, that was wide-ranging! I think I would need an entire Front Bench of Ministers to respond fully to all the important points she made. If she will forgive me, I will use the short time left to me to concentrate on the bits that fall into my portfolio, which would be those that come under the topic of this debate, and to set out the Government’s position on statues in cities and the wider context she talked about.

The hon. Lady started by saying that the debate on how best to acknowledge and commemorate our past and history is complicated. It can provoke really strong emotions and, although we might sometimes disagree with each other’s positions, we always have to remember that everybody’s individual views are strongly and sincerely held and need to be seriously considered. That is because our history shapes who we are and what we value, and we are the poorer if we seek to deny that.

We believe that the right approach to statues and to other aspects of our history that are in the public realm—that are displayed publicly—however contentious, is, as the hon. Lady says, to retain and explain their presence, and present to the public their full story. Sometimes that is unpalatable, but it is important that we learn from it, as she pointed out; we cannot airbrush our past. We need to face up to it, however uncomfortable, and explain the history of those who are commemorated or marked within the contexts of the dominant norms of their time, and how those differ from the world we live in today and what we regard as acceptable. There are so many diverse opinions on the matter of statues. As she mentioned, for every statue on display that is deemed contested, there are at least two often conflicting opinions on what should be done, and there is often no consensus. The one thing I would like to try to reach today in this short debate is some kind of balance on this issue.

Let us start by putting the debate in context. There are approximately 12,000 outdoor statues and memorials in England. I agree with the hon. Lady that far too few of those are of women or of people who were significant in the LGBT struggles of our past, or of people with a range of other important aspects. However, all the statues that exist are of interest, significance and often pride to the communities in which they are erected. A significant number of them are listed in their own right or as part of the buildings in which they reside, which means that they are protected. The regulatory framework means that their removal or amendment can be complex, protracted and expensive, particularly given that in some cases planning permission has to be granted to get rid of them. Just one of those 12,000 statues has recently been removed illegally—the Colston statue in Bristol, which she mentioned.

The hon. Lady talked about how in April the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government introduced a new planning power, giving him the authority to call in for the ultimate decision a local authority intention to remove an unlisted plaque or commemoration. A lot has been said about the penalties, but to put this matter in context, let me say that this power has yet to be used. That is an important comment to make.

It is also important to remember that we do not just erect statues to mark the contributions of others at the national level; in local communities up and down the country there are commemorations to our own heroes, with many of those figures being a real source of local pride. George Stephenson, engineer and father of the railways, is commemorated in Newcastle. An important recent addition in Oldham is a statue of a local suffragette and former mill worker who was an associate of Christabel Pankhurst and who was jailed for three days for challenging MPs who opposed the campaign for votes for women. As the hon. Lady said, we would all be far better off if there was more recognition of women such as that who played such a pivotal and important role in history, and without whom she and I would probably not be here doing our jobs today.

A commemoration in a public space, often funded by public subscription, is a really positive way to acknowledge the contributions that these individuals have made to their own communities. As we look at them, we have got to learn important things about the history of the area in which they lived and the wider context of the world in which they existed and the values of the communities that commemorated them.

However, as the hon. Lady said, the full stories of some individuals who are commemorated and their place in history are terribly complex. Some of them have been commissioned by past generations with very different perspectives and understandings of right and wrong from those we hold today. Although we may now disagree with those figures and their actions, they do play an important role in teaching us about our past. We are all products of our time, with our attitudes, beliefs and values often reflecting the age in which we live. Looking back, some of the norms of earlier centuries look bizarre—in fact, sometimes they look abhorrent—when measured against what we regard as acceptable today.

--- Later in debate ---

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Alan Mak.)

[Caroline Dinenage]

That brings us to the current debate about whether we should be removing statues, very often of men who were esteemed and well regarded in the past but, by today’s standards and values, built their wealth and fame on things that we now find morally repugnant, such as the transatlantic slave trade.

Last month, I visited the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. I found it disturbing and upsetting. Probably to my shame, it taught me some uncomfortable facts about our history that I did not know. But as a confident and progressive country, we should face those difficult facts squarely, not wipe them from the history books. Historic England, the Government’s adviser on the historic environment, agrees. It argues that if we remove difficult and contentious parts of our heritage, we risk harming our own understanding of our collective past.

How can we avoid repeating the errors of the past if we do not learn from them? Rather than erasing these objects, we have to seek to contextualise or reinterpret them in a way that enables the public to learn about them in their entirety, however challenging, uncomfortable and distressing that might be. The aim should be to use them to educate people about all aspects of Britain’s complex past so that the Britain of the future can be better, stronger and better advised.

Much has been said and written about contested heritage in the past 18 months or so. The aim is to take politics out of the debate and allow organisations to get doing what they do best: curating our national heritage for future generations. To that end, the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has established a heritage advisory board, which will oversee the development of guidelines that help decision makers in public and other organisations decide how to address the aspects of our heritage that have become controversial. The starting point is always that objects should be assumed to be retained in situ and contextualised in order that the full and comprehensive legacy of the deeds and actions of that person can be discussed, even if some of them are horribly unacceptable by today’s standards.

[Dr Huq]

I totally agree with what the Minister is saying; I think we are at one on all this. We are talking about public space, place, purse, taste and all those things, so it is right to have these safeguards, but I wonder what she thinks of the 10-year tariff for defacing statues. A lot of women think that just looks really weird, and even the equality assessment says it will not result in one single more prison place. It just seems that that kind of thing is playing to the gallery. I wonder whether she has a view on that.

[Caroline Dinenage]

I am glad that the hon. Lady mentioned that. I am not aware that any of those kinds of sanctions have been handed out. That is a maximum sentence, and I am not sure that anything even approaching that has ever been dished out. When we measure it against the minimum sentence for rape, of course it seems obscene. Of course, the maximum sentence for rape is life imprisonment, so then it looks a little more understandable, but there is never any excuse for raping a woman, and of course human life and respect for each other should always take precedence over respect for statues and other man-made objects.

We have to be really careful about going down that track and making political issues out of something that is difficult. Really, what we are talking about here is memorials, and memorials do not just have historical significance. They are not just pieces of stone or marble; they are sometimes also very deeply symbolic, culturally or emotionally, sometimes to those who have died, and hold a huge importance to those who visit them. Thinking back to events around Parliament Square in 2020 and the pictures and reports of the violence and the vandalism at some of the protests that took place then, the public are very rightly concerned about the respect for memorials in those types of contexts, so we do have to take that into consideration.

In the past year, some in the culture and heritage sector have been subject to some really disturbing social media abuse because of the work of their organisations. There can be absolutely no justification for defacing statues and for damaging memorials and symbols of British history, but most importantly, while we do not always agree on the approach some heritage organisations take in dealing with controversial aspects, I absolutely condemn those who hide behind the anonymity of social media to make threats to the hard-working curators and heritage professionals who are simply doing their job. With my other hat on as Digital Minister, I am determined to tackle that via the online safety Bill, because nobody should ever be abused or attacked online simply because of the job that they do.

I hope that I have managed to convey to the hon. Lady how committed I am to the hope that through dialogue and improved contextualisation of the stories of those commemorated, we can arrive at a consensus as to how best to address contested heritage. Rather than tearing things down, we should work at building that consensus and at building a better and fuller understanding of our complex history.

Question put and agreed to.