The Right Dishonourable

I’ve long suspected one of the problems with our politics is an excess of humanities graduates slouching through the corridors of power, as well as skulking outside with a microphone or waving placards on the other side of a heavy gate.

This intuition puts me in the same camp as Dominic Cummings, renegade eye doctor and occasional advisor to the prime minister. Unlike Cummings I lack a history degree from Oxford, but had I bothered to go university there was no risk of me studying a science. We are both humanities children criticising the humanities.

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Before Edward Colston took a dip in Bristol harbour the prospect of problematic statues being removed in Britain was a mere glint in Afua Hirsch’s eye. Horatio Nelson, the one-armed, fornicating hero of Trafalgar, was her preferred target for his defence of slavery, but any old white man would probably have sufficed.

That at least seems to be the conclusion of other would-be iconoclasts, who are now compiling a map to “topple the racists”. Nelson features on it several times, naturally, along with Clive of India, Captain Cook, and Robert Peel. As well as removing statues the activists want to rename street names and buildings, including such oddities as the Horniman Museum round my way.

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In a competitive field, few political topics are as unsexy as arguments about process. The rules over who speaks, in what order, and within what confines are often arcane, fusty, and dull. That Jacob Rees-Mogg, fairly derided as the parliamentarian for centuries past, is the posterboy for such wrangling only emphasises this.

But as the many reports on late-night parliamentary sessions over Brexit proved, such processes are the essence of democracy. The rules can give citizens a genuine input into how things are run, hamstring mighty administrations, or baffle the observer with technicalities. Sometimes all three.

The toppling of the statue of Edward Colston, a merchant involved in slave trading, over the weekend was the opposite of such rules. Campaigners’ removed the statue from Bristol’s town centre after years of being frustrated by local politicians, the historic listing process, and the Society of Merchant Venturers. (A lack of clear popular support for it is something we’ll come to.)

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