Pull down Clive of India statue, says Labour peer

Telegraph

15 hours ago

A Labour peer has called on the Government to pull down a statue of Clive of India outside the Foreign Office.
Baroness Debbonaire claimed the bronze sculpture in Whitehall is historically inaccurate and 'not helpful' for British relations with India.
Clive of India was a clerk with the East India Company who rose to become a wealthy military leader and lead British expansion on the subcontinent.
He has been blamed for presiding over the Bengal Famine and in 2021 his name was stripped from a house at his former private school in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Baroness Debonnaire, who was Sir Keir Starmer's shadow culture secretary before losing her seat at the last general election, told a panel event that the statue should be taken down.
Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Labour peer said: 'I'm not sure that a statue of Clive should really have any place outside the Foreign Office.
'I walk past it and the frieze shows happy, smiling people really delighted to see him. And that's just not historically accurate. It's not helpful for our current relationship with India and it is deeply unhelpful to see India as a country that Britain civilised.
'India had a thriving engineering industry in the 17th century – it knew about mineral extraction, there had been incredible technological advances, it knew about free trade before free trade rules were ever written. That was closed down by an extractive colonising force.
'But what is pictured on that statue is tiny, tiny little Indians who are subservient and incidental to their own national story, and then a great big Clive.'
Baroness Debonnaire also referred to the statue as 'a shocking piece of sculpture' in comments that were first reported by The Times.
Clive the Great defeated Mughal forces with company troops at the Battle of Plassey, which prompted British expansion into Bengal, and went on to a huge amount of wealth.
However, he would later be accused of causing starvation by mismanagement as the Bengal Famine killed as many as 10 million people. He purportedly took his own life aged 49.
The Grade II-listed statue of the first British Governor of Bengal was first unveiled in 1912. It was then moved to its current location outside the Foreign Office four years later.
The artwork on the side of the plinth that was criticised by Baroness Debonnaire includes a depiction of the Mughal emperor granting Clive the Great the right to collect revenue for the East India Company in 1865.
The politics of the past
Statues of historical figures with links to the empire came under threat after the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in the United States in 2020.
A 125-year-old statue of the slave trader Edward Colston was toppled by a mob in Bristol in June of that year, with activists going on to dump it in the city's harbour.
Baroness Debonnaire was an MP in the city at the time and had called for the statue to be taken down two years earlier.
Addressing a Black History Month event in 2018, she said: 'Having statues of people who oppressed us is not a good thing to be saying to black people in this city.
'Edward Colston did many things, but he was not completely defined by that, and it's an important part of saying to black people in the city 'you are welcome'.'
Sir Keir said at the time that the statue of Colston should have been removed 'a long, long time ago' but also argued that the manner of its removal by protesters was 'completely wrong'.
The now-Prime Minister said: 'That statue should have been brought down properly, with consent, and put, I would say, in a museum.
'This was a man who was responsible for 100,000 people being moved from Africa to the Caribbean as slaves, including women and children, who were branded on their chests with the name of the company that he ran.
'Of the 100,000, 20,000 died en route and they were chucked in the sea. He should not be on a statue in Bristol, or anywhere else.'