Listing Controversy II: Statues, Contested Heritage and the Policy of ‘Retain and Explain’

By Prof Antonia Layard, Professor of Law (University of Bristol Law School)

“Edward Colston by John Cassidy, 1895” by mira66 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

[This article is a follow-up to an earlier one by the same author]

Seven months after the removal of Bristol’s statue of Edward Colston in June 2020, the Secretary of State for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government is concerned. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph on January 18th, Robert Jenrick argued that “We will save Britain’s statues from the woke militants who want to censor our past”, claiming that “Latterly there has been an attempt to impose a single, often negative narrative which not so much recalls our national story, as seeks to erase part of it. This has been done at the hand of the flash mob, or by the decree of a ‘cultural committee’ of town hall militants and woke worthies”. (more…)