In the summer of 2020, there was perhaps no moment that divided the nation more sharply than when Black Lives Matter protesters tore a statue of 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston from its plinth in the centre of Bristol and rolled it into the harbour.
While few critics went so far as to defend Colston and his legacy, they argued that this type of direct action was “erasing history”. Britain’s prime minister at the time, Boris Johnson, claimed that to remove statues of figures like Colston from the public square was “to lie about our history”. Sir Trevor Phillips complained that Britain’s public history was being “erased entirely” and Nigel Farage went a step further, describing the protesters who removed the statue as “a new form of the Taliban”, desecrating Britain’s cultural memory for their own amusement and dragging the country into Year Zero-like ignorance.
