Tear down Clive of India statue outside Foreign Office, peer says

Times

3 days ago

A prominent Labour peer has called for the statue of Robert Clive to be pulled down from outside the Foreign Office, claiming its depiction of 'subservient Indians' was damaging international relations.
Baroness Debbonaire said the statue commemorating Clive's establishment of British rule in India was historically inaccurate and unhelpful to Britain's attempts to build relations with the country.
Clive, who became the 1st Baron Clive of Plassey but who history knows as Clive of India, is one of the most ­controversial figures from Britain's ­colonial past.
While employed by the East India Company in the 18th century, Shropshire-born Clive led the victorious British forces at the Battle of Plassey against indigenous fighters and was later held liable for the Bengal famine, which is thought to have killed up to ten million people.
The historian William Dalrymple has called him an 'unstable sociopath'.
Debbonaire, who was in line to be Labour's culture secretary before surprisingly losing her Bristol seat to the Green Party in last year's general election, said the Whitehall statue ­designed by John Tweed in 1912 was 'a shocking piece of sculpture'.
• Zareer Masani: Why Clive of India's statue must not fall
'I'm not sure that a statue of Clive should really have any place outside the Foreign Office,' she told the Edinburgh International Book Festival. '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.'
Debbonaire was a Bristol MP in 2020 when the city was convulsed with the Black Lives Matter protests. These culminated in the toppling into the harbour of a listed statue of Edward Colston, the merchant who made his wealth by playing a key role in the transatlantic slave trade.
• Tomiwa Owolade: Edward Colston's safe in a museum, but in future let's talk before we topple
There were calls at that time for the Clive statue in London, and another dedicated to him in Shrewsbury, to be pulled down. However, the Conservative government at the time rejected all demands to remove commemorations of colonial figures that were in the public arena and instead introduced a 'retain and explain' policy on 'contested heritage'.
Debbonaire also questioned the British Museum's treatment of artefacts that came into its collection after, in some instances being taken in contentious circumstances during the colonial era.
She said she knew of works of art that had come from 'a temple that is still alive' that was presented by the museum as simply a 12th-century sculpture 'which is saying nothing about what it means'.
'There is this silencing of stories that has a continued damaging effect on relationships between countries particularly those between the former colonisers and the former colonised,' she said.
Debbonaire said it was 'pointless' talking about financial reparations to previously colonised countries, adding: 'A better form of reparation is truthfulness, which doesn't have to require an acknowledgement of guilt because people right now are not guilty of doing those things.'