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Spectator
6 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
Clive of India must not fall
The only MP I have ever really wanted to marry is Thangam Debbonaire. The former Labour MP for Bristol West and I have little in common. But it has sometimes been a desire of mine to marry her and take her surname, so becoming Mr Debbonaire. Marital relations would doubtless be fraught, but on the plus side there would be the thrill of friends being able to say things like 'Darling, you know the Debbonaires are coming for dinner?' Which would more than make up for it. Since being booted out by the voters at last year's general election, Debbonaire has been elevated to the House of Lords, where she still attracts my attention. In an interview on the BBC's Newsnight at the end of last month, shewas so fantastically aloof towards the concerns of the public – and any viewers – that it seemed becoming Baroness Debbonaire had rather gone to her head. As indeed it would to mine. Anyhow, the noble Baroness was back in the news in a small way this week when she used the Edinburgh book festival to call for the removal of the statue of Clive of India from its magnificent position outside the Foreign Office. Clive appears to be guilty of that most common of modern crimes: being found to have lived in the past. As a result, he can now be added to the 'Wanted' list of statuary which, by my reckoning, has in recent years included almost every figure honoured in Trafalgar Square and indeed everywhere else in the country. Debbonaire must know where this type of talk can lead. She was an MP for Bristol when the locals of that city – and a few outsiders – decided to take things into their own hands and tear down the statue of the local slaver and philanthropist Edward Colston. You get the strong impression from such people that if they had their way they would follow the example of American cities such as Portland, Oregon and Richmond, Virginia. After the great outburst of iconoclasm during the past decade, Portland has become a terrific city to visit if you have a deep interest in empty plinths. Monument Avenue in Richmond now has only one monument on it – a statue of the late tennis player Arthur Ashe. That was erected in 1996, but doubtless it too could come down some day, not least because it gives off the unfortunate impression that the child kneeling at Ashe's feet is about to be harshly beaten by him with his raised tennis racket. Those who call for the removal of historical monuments always do so for the same reason: the figures being honoured should not be honoured because they did something dishonourable. The people telling us this insist that we should teach a different version of our history. When pressed, they generate a distinct suspicion that the version of our history they would like us all to imbibe is their own version. Nonetheless, they are winning the argument. A YouGov poll published earlier this year found that young Britons are the group most likely to take a negative attitude towards the British Empire as a whole. Indeed they were the only cohort of voters whose most common answer regarding their attitude was that the Empire should be 'a source of shame'. This, incidentally, was an increase of almost 10 per cent since the question was asked just six years ago. So Baroness Debbonaire and others should probably be happier than they are. They are getting their way. But I do wonder what sort of people will be created in this new iconoclastic era. Personally, I prefer the sort that we used to produce. I used some downtime this week to read the recently published diaries of Peter Kemmis Betty (Half a Banana, Charlcombe Books). Kemmis Betty was a Gurkha officer imprisoned in the Japanese Changi prisoner-of-war camp between 1942 and 1945. Having written and kept the diaries at considerable risk to himself, he relates plenty of the horrors that he and his fellow prisoners went through – including their discovery of what had happened to their fellow PoWs a little way up the road on the Burma railway. The thing that really stands out about the diaries are the accounts of how the British prisoners manage to get through their time in the camp. They arrange a series of talks to keep each other entertained and educated. They set up a choir. They put on theatrical productions of plays by George Bernard Shaw and Noël Coward. One inmate, who was previously a violinist in the London Philharmonic, gives a performance of Beet-hoven's Violin Concerto in D. The days are long and the suffering terrible. The prisoners try to supplement their food by arranging a system of gardening. Makeshift sheds in the camp are used as chapels, with one padre internee saying afterwards how many of the PoWs stated it was 'the sacraments and services of their churches which kept them sane, when everything men hold dear was lost'. If the phrase 'mustn't grumble' could be summed up in a diary, it is here. But it got me thinking again about those attitudes, manners and characteristics we used to take for granted as being distinctly British. They are the sort of traits that some of us grew up with. And it seems to me that they are among the less tangible things to be lost when you wage war on everything in your past so gleefully. The eagerness to condemn our past seems particularly acute at the moment. Yet all attempts to replace that past are so thin that nobody can even define them except in the most anodyne and meaningless fashion. Britishness is now said to be about kindness and tolerance. Fine things, but they only get you so far. The question of whether they would get us through the sort of trials our forebears went through is a question I suppose only time will answer.
Spectator
12-08-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
What Baroness Debbonaire gets wrong about Clive of India
Baroness Debbonaire, addressing the Edinburgh International Book Festival, has called for the removal of the statue of Clive of India, Baron Clive of Plassey, the site of one of his most famous military victories, from its prominent place adjoining the Foreign Office, at the end of King Charles Street, looking out across St. James's Park from what are known as Clive Steps. Clive was a founder of British imperial power and control over India. Twice governor in the mid-18th century, he was a brilliant military commander, a determined administrator and an opponent of corruption, though he himself became rich on the profits of empire. He fought warlords by becoming one of them himself. Subjected to waves of criticism for the way he governed from both the conscious-struck and jealous, and subject himself to bouts of depression, he may have taken his own life in 1774. His statue was erected much later in 1912, and like Clive in his own lifetime, was controversial and contested. The statue of Edward Colston, the Bristol slave trader, was also erected just before the first world war and also commemorated someone who lived much earlier. It's relevant to this new, confected controversy over Clive because Debbonaire was a Labour MP for Bristol until the last election, a veteran of the rancorous debates in that city over the Colston monument until it was pulled down by a mob in 2020. We might have hoped that the Baroness would have learnt the obvious lesson that disputes of this type set communities against each other and undermine social cohesion. Nobody wins, and society loses, in a culture war. We might also have hoped that instead of demanding the removal of an artefact of which she disapproves, the noble baroness would have used her speech to call for a new work of public art beside the Foreign Office representing the values she holds dear. She could put herself at the head of a committee to raise funds for such a work. But speech-making, removal and perhaps destruction, are always easier (and more psychologically revealing) than working to win broad support for the commissioning of a new piece of art. This prominent corner of official London is a work in progress. On one side of Clive is the entrance to the Cabinet War Rooms, Churchill's headquarters in the Second World War that have been preserved for posterity. On the other side is a new monument to the victims of the Bali bombing of 2002. The area is rich with British history, its victories and tragedies, its heroes and villains. But the subtle and complex nature of the past is lost on Debbonaire who thinks it her right to judge for the rest of us. She complains that on Clive's statue, the frieze running around the base depicts 'tiny, tiny little Indians' as subservient. The common practice of sculpting, in miniature, key moments or themes in the life of those commemorated may be unknown to her. Does she also disdain the frieze running round the Albert Memorial, depicting great cultural figures, or the allegorical sculptures of Africa and Asia at its corners? Or the panels depicting the lives of ordinary people at the base of the statue known as The Meeting Place at St. Pancras Station where two lovers embrace high above scenes of everyday life, again captured in miniature? (The statue is disdained by our cultural elite, as it happens, but highly regarded by those same ordinary people.) Debbonaire's greatest mistake is to complain that Clive's statue taints and distorts our relationship with India today. Wrapped up in the cliches of contemporary anti-colonialism, she is unaware of India's profound interest in the British colonial past and respect for the legacies we left behind. She might spend some time reading the splendid essays by the Sri Lankan scholar Rohan Fernando, published by History Reclaimed, on the cultural and scientific inheritance from the Raj and its reception in contemporary India. The British founded dozens of museums across India; established scientific institutions such as the Indian Meteorological Department and the Archaeological Survey of India (whose Director, John Marshall, discovered the Indus Valley Civilisation exactly a century ago); mapped India's terrain and geology; built canals and railways. All of these achievements are acknowledged and celebrated by an authentic Indian culture which is ever more at ease with its British past. Debbonaire is not alone in her ignorance of these legacies, of course. University College, Oxford has decided to criticise its greatest son, Sir William Jones, who in the late eighteenth century first identified the family of Indo-European languages, wrote codes of Hindu and Muslim law, and began the study of Indian archaeology. A panel recently placed next to the great monument to him in the college chapel, sculpted by John Flaxman, confects a charge sheet of the usual offences. But Jones is revered by Indians as the founder of the study of their cultures: his grave in Calcutta is the site of regular commemorations and he even adorns a recent Indian postage stamp. An Oxford college dishonouring a great scholar dishonours only itself. Baroness Debbonaire does greater damage, pitching us all into unnecessary disputes based on faulty history and imagined grievances.
Yahoo
11-08-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Labour peer calls for removal of Clive of India statue near Foreign Office
Labour peer Baroness Debbonaire called for a statue of the colonial administrator Robert Clive in a street next to the Foreign Office to be removed. The former culture secretary said the Clive of India statue misrepresents the history of colonial-era India by portraying Indian people as "incidental to their own national story". Lord Clive was governor of Bengal in the early stages of British colonial rule, and has been blamed for tax policies that contributed to a major famine in 1770. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Lady Debbonaire said the statue wrongly suggests Britain "civilised" India, despite Indian prowess in trade and technology before colonial rule.
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Former Bristol MP takes seat in House of Lords
A former Bristol MP and shadow minister has taken her seat in the House of Lords after being awarded a life peerage. Thangam Debbonaire had served as the Labour MP for Bristol West since 2015 but lost to the Green Party's co-leader Carla Denyer in the new seat of Bristol Central in the 2024 general election. She will now be Baroness Debbonaire of De Beauvoir Town in the London Borough of Hackney. During her time as an opposition MP, she held a number of shadow cabinet positions over a period of four years - most recently as shadow culture secretary. Baroness Debbonaire wore the traditional scarlet robes for the introductory ceremony. Her election defeat marked a rare loss for Labour as they cruised to a resounding majority win in July. She later said she expected to lose her seat over the Labour Party's "lack of a strong narrative" over the war in Gaza. Baroness Debonaire is the second Bristol politician to enter the Lords in recent weeks after former city mayor Marvin Rees took his seat on 24 February, becoming Lord Rees of Easton in the process. Former city mayor takes seat in House of Lords What is the House of Lords and how does it work? Bristol 'makes history' by electing its first Green MP House of Lords
