What’s in a statue? The long-running debate over statues of Confederate generals in the American South has been given a larger platform because of the killing of a woman in Charlottesville. As is almost always the case in Britain, an American debate has taken on a British flavour, with Afua Hirsch, writing a piece for the Guardian saying that Horatio Nelson, the British admiral who won the decisive battle of Trafalgar against the French and Spanish fleets, should have his statue taken down due to his support for the slave trade.
First, a simple truth: public space is limited. There are only so many statues in a park. To celebrate one person you may need to store a statue of another in a vault somewhere. This problem is on stark display in parliament: a number of politicians of third-tier quality have marble statues, because their careers were over when the building was constructed. A series of impressive politicians whose achievements happened after parliament was built don’t have so much as a plaque. There is a statue of Lucius Cary, a Liberal politician of justified obscurity, but not one for William Wilberforce, who ended the slave trade, or Ernest Bevin, who helped create Nato.
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