History gets the Glasgow kiss

Gladstone, Livingstone and Peel all targeted in city's hatchet job report.

There may be a war on, but while we are all (quite rightly) looking east, the gravy train of anti-Western historical revision ploughs onwards, full steam ahead. First of all we had the headline-grabbing story of the National Museum Wales ‘cancelling’ Trevithick’s steam train:

Robert Poll, UK heritage campaigner and the founder of Save Our Statues, said: “Trying to cancel trains shows the desperation of some to attack any and every part of British history. We should be celebrating these amazing feats of civilisation, rather than weaving them into a false narrative of endless oppression. This relentless focus on supposed negative associations of progress is leading us backwards, with science, philosophy and now industry all being systematically renounced.” (The Telegraph, 15th March 2022)

More significantly, we also saw two more “slavery audits” published, by the University of Manchester and by Glasgow City Council. I’ll concentrate here on the Glasgow report given its heavy focus on statues and having now digested all 119 pages so that you don’t have to!

What is most obvious is the level of subjectivity involved in declaring a “link” to slavery. Its author, Stephen Mullen, is quick to exonerate beloved national bard Robbie Burns despite conceding “There is no doubt that Burns intended to… work as a ‘poor negro driver’” in Jamaica. Mullen circumvents this by pronouncing that he’s only interested in those “verifiably involved”. He even proceeds to declare Burns “the most famous Scot in history not to be involved with Caribbean slavery.” Now some might call this a highly dubious claim given over a millennium of Scottish history before even reaching the Caribbean, but all must admit it a highly subjective one.

Just two paragraphs later, and Mullen has no such qualms about damning explorer David Livingstone for merely working in a mill where “the cotton was sourced from the West Indies.” Now, if we are to exercise modern moral judgements (which, to be clear, we should not), then surely the intent to work as a literal slave driver is more egregious than simply spinning cotton? And let’s not forget (as Mullen appears to) the most important part of Livingstone’s life and legacy. Livingstone said he would rank his work to end the East African slave trade above discovering the source of the Nile. Mullen clearly ranks both as minor occurrences in the later life of an evil young cotton spinner.

People should be remembered for the extraordinary things they do, not the ordinary ones. That is why we must expose reports like this.

Then we have two men from the “sins of the father” category: Glasgow MP James Oswald and four-time Prime Minister William Gladstone – both targeted because they inherited money gained from slavery related activities. Of course Mullen doesn’t stop to question if inheritance can constitute immorality – it is merely accepted.

Gladstone was a great liberal reformer and staunch opponent of slavery. Yet recently we’ve seen a disproportionately intense focus on dissecting his early advocacy of gradual abolition from those who sense an Achilles heel. Oswald too was an abolitionist, yet Mullen describes him as “a nominal supporter of emancipation in the 1830s, which resulted in a pay-off to pro-slavery interests” (italics mine). How is this anything but a subjective reading?

Then we have Robert Peel. Readers might recall when activists caught up in the hysteria of 2020 confused Peel with his pro-slavery father, only to then make up a reason for his statue to come down anyway:

Although organisers recognised they had initially referred to the wrong person, they said they wanted it removed because "we should not celebrate colonisers." (BBC, 11th June 2020)

This episode revealed both their historical illiteracy and their determination to target anything in order to attack British history. According to Alistair Lexden, official historian of the Conservative Party, Peel “was a lifelong opponent of slavery and the slave trade and sent the British Navy to the coast of West Africa to help suppress them.” But, once again, Mullen is only interested in how the young Peel apparently “advanced the proslavery position” in the 1820s. He only refers to one source, Michael Taylor, a young Irish historian who capitalised on that 2020 hysteria with his first book The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery. Mullen describes him as a “leading” historian.

Now I’m not here to say necessarily that Lexden is right and Taylor is wrong (though I have my suspicions). The main point is that disagreement clearly exists yet is swept the carpet because it doesn’t fit the narrative, exactly as it was with the Melville Monument in Edinburgh.

Next on the hit-list come two soldiers, Colin Campbell and Sir John Moore, both at times stationed in the West Indies. As, of course, were thousands of other soldiers at the time, going wherever and doing whatever they were told to. No mention, of course, of Campbell’s heroic “thin red line” at Alma or Moore’s heroic death at Corunna, immortalised by poet Charles Wolfe. Heroism is not en vogue.

Finally, we come to James Watt and full circle back to the beginning of this piece and the distortion of the Industrial Revolution into a malevolent engine of colonialism. Thus Mullen contends that “The Boulton-Watt steam engine was exported to the British West Indies after 1803 (after James Watt retired in 1800) and allowed enslavers to accumulate greater profits up to 1834.”

Now many historians, such as Dr David Starkey, argue the complete opposite: that development of labour-saving technology is what enabled the abolition of slavery. Moreover, every tool ever made has probably been used to facilitate something bad. Choosing to focus solely on that application is bizarre and speaks volumes of the real motivations at work.

The Glasgow audit, like all such audits, is a hatchet job cloaked in the garb of academic respectability and reasonableness. The “offences” it tables are all highly debatable and presented without any balance of achievements. People should be remembered for the extraordinary things they do, not the ordinary ones. That is why we must expose reports like this.