Over the last few years, the people of Britain are increasingly falling on the side of Lord Byron — who, in 1812, mourned the Parthenon’s sorry post-Elgin look: “Dull is the eye that will not weep to see. Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed.” According to successive YouGov polls, a clear majority of Britons want to see the Parthenon artefacts displayed in the magnificent New Acropolis Museum, in a special hall overlooking the defaced Parthenon.

Alas, the British government and Elgin’s surviving supporters are resisting tooth and nail, insisting that the Parthenon artefacts in the British Museum are its property and must remain so eternally. Their claim to legal property rights is both tendentious and detrimental to the British sense of justice. They point out that Elgin had a permit from the Ottoman occupying forces in Athens to take what he liked from the Acropolis — which, they insist, gave him the right to own and to sell on whatever he removed. Even if we set aside the fact that said Ottoman permit never granted Elgin permission to hack the statues and friezes from the monument with the use of saws, the claim is absurd and, indeed, quite dangerous.

Imagine if the Nazi occupying forces in Paris had granted some gentleman a permit to remove statues from the Louvre. Or if Putin’s men in Mariupol were, today, to grant a visiting antiquities dealer a permit to remove priceless artefacts from a local museum. The very notion that these permits bestow secure property rights over the removed artefacts is an affront to every decent person worldwide. As for the British establishment’s usual rejoinder — that the Ottoman occupation of Greece was centuries long, or that Greece had not been a modern nation-state before the Ottomans invaded it — it is terribly disrespectful to scores of Britons who, like Lord Byron, travelled to Greece shortly after Elgin had vandalised the Acropolis to fight alongside the Greeks reclaiming their liberty and founding the modern Greek state.

More from this author

A Greek Watergate threatens the West

By Yanis Varoufakis

This unending saga is back in the news. For the last six months or so, George Osborne, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer who currently serves as Chair of the British Museum, has been negotiating a deal with the Greek government. It will see a portion of the Parthenon sculptures sent to Athens, on loan, to be displayed at the British Museum in exchange for other antiquities. The real reason Osborne has entered into such negotiations is self-serving: he needs to raise £1 billion to refurbish the British Museum, but fears that, in view of British public opinion, unless he washes away the stench of Elgin’s larceny from the halls and corridors of the British Museum, sponsors will not be forthcoming.

Unfortunately, constrained by the British establishment’s determination to insist on maintaining full property rights over the artefacts Elgin brought to England, the deal Osborne is offering the Greek side is shameful. Indeed, it could not be otherwise, as long as the UK government and the British Museum insist that they own the artefacts outright.

Think about it: members of the British establishment, who consider the artefacts to be British, and know that the Greek side does not recognise their property rights, oppose even lending them to the New Acropolis Museum, fearing that a Greek court, if not the Greek government, might decree that they not be returned to Britain. The only way they would consider lending them is on the basis of the deal that Mr Osborne is now putting to the Greek government: a deal stipulating that, for the privilege of being lent half the removed Parthenon artefacts, Greek museums must send over other priceless artefacts to be kept in the British Museum as “collateral” — essentially as hostages that will force the Greeks to return the loaned Parthenon marbles.

No Greek government can ever agree to such a sordid deal. And no decent Briton should look at it with anything other than deserved scorn.

Suggested reading

Museums have always been problematic

By Mary Harrington

Speaking personally, I think it is absurd, after 200 years, to be having the same discussion. It is upsetting for us Greeks and it is dispiriting for the Brits. I am no cultural nationalist, in that I do not want to see every fragment, every statue, every frieze or vase produced in Classical Greece returned to us. The Parthenon friezes, metopes and pediments are a very, very special case. They were created as integral parts of the Parthenon and were hacked down by Elgin with a permit from our enslavers. They belong neither to the Greeks nor to the Britons. They belong to the Parthenon, with which they can be best re-united if they are displayed in the perfectly-designed room on top of the New Acropolis Museum. It is visually connected with the temple in a manner that would bring tears to any visitor’s eyes.

And what about the British Museum? Does it end up with an empty room where the Parthenon relics are now? Absolutely not. As an internationalist, and an Anglophile, I would loathe that. But imagine the following. Let the Parthenon Marbles be re-united with the Parthenon permanently. And let the Greek government commit to keeping the relevant room in the British Museum stocked with a permanent, rotating exhibition of priceless stand-alone classical era treasures. It would allow the people of Britain and international visitors a reason to visit the British Museum again and again and again.

In this manner, the Parthenon will become whole again. And the British Museum will be enriched by a never-ending parade of splendid Greek antiquities that function as joyous ambassadors of Classical Greece in central London, not as Mr Osborne’s sad hostages.

The citizens of Bristol have been arguing for years about what to do with the statue of Edward Colston, a big noise in 17th-century mercantilism who built schools and almshouses with the cash made in the slave trade, converting one form of property — human flesh and souls and sinews — into another.

In 2018 Bristol City Council agreed to the addition of a panel explaining the source of Colston’s wealth. Nobody could concur on the wording. Then, last month, a white police officer in Minneapolis exerted nine fatal minutes of pressure on the throat of a man named George Floyd, and the decision became academic: Black Lives Matter supporters in southwest England responded by dragging Colston’s effigy to the pavement, rolling it towards St Augustine’s Reach and pitching it into the docks. Another white police officer, Superintendent Andy Bennett, watched the statue swallowed by the water. “I do understand why it’s happened,” he told a BBC reporter who asked him why he did not order his officers to intervene. “It’s very symbolic … there’s a lot of context that sits around it.”

More from this author

Enough with the crazy talk, Eamonn Holmes

By Matthew Sweet

The context, however, is not just that of the 17th century. The Colston statue is not the Cenotaph. It is not the statue of Churchill in his greatcoat in Parliament Square. It was not built by Colston’s contemporaries or near-contemporaries. It was erected over 170 years after his death, thanks to the efforts of James Arrowsmith, a Bristol businessman and Colston superfan whose fundraising campaign didn’t reach its £1,000 target even after the statue was unveiled in November 1895. (Having failed to guilt-trip Bristol’s inhabitants into coughing up, Arrowsmith seems to have stumped up the last £150 himself.) The message inscribed on the plinth — “erected by citizens of Bristol as a memorial of one of the most virtuous and wise sons of their city” — does not speak for all those citizens.

Bristol in the early 1890s was not a city at ease with itself. On Friday 23 December 1892 it was the location of a “March of the Workers”, held in support of the women of Sanders Sweet Factory on Redcliffe Street — who were employed on such bad terms that they were nicknamed “Sanders’ White Slaves”. (If they tried to join a union, they received their cards.) On the day of the demonstration, the dragoons steamed in. Two hundred mounted officers tried to split the march. At the end of the night, 57 demonstrators and 51 police had been injured. Those present on that day might have taken a sceptical attitude to a public artwork celebrating Colston’s philanthropy. Their ideas about how to alleviate poverty in the city had been answered with violence.

So it would be wrong, I think, to read the Colston statue as an embodiment of civic or imperial confidence. Better, perhaps, to see it like one of those Porsches bought by men in the thick of a midlife crisis — a gleaming expression of self-doubt and anxiety.

Suggested reading

Why not cancel Nancy Astor?

By Douglas Murray

A world map from the 1890s shows the vermillion expanse of British Empire. But in the year that the statue went up, a strong note of pessimism had already entered the culture. HG Wells published The Time Machine, depicting a world in which all human achievements ended, twitching in the mud. Degeneration, a doomy treatise by the Hungarian social scientist Max Nordau, had became an unexpected bestseller in England, perhaps because he argued that, having been the fastest to develop, it would be the first to decline.

The idea had already occurred to the Victorians: it emerged from the writings of thinkers pondering the implications of Darwinism. In 1880 the zoologist Edwin Ray Lankester suggested that for “the white races of Europe” evolution might be switching into reverse. “Possibly we are all drifting, tending to the condition of intellectual barnacles”. Lankester had read his Edward Gibbon, and recalled the idea that Rome had fallen because it had conquered and consumed too much. “Rome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world. The habit of parasitism clearly acts upon animal organization in this way. Let the parasitic life once be secured, and away go legs, jaws, eyes, and ears; the active, highly‐gifted crab, insect, or annelid may become a mere sac, absorbing nourishment and laying eggs.” This is the language of the lecture theatre, but these ideas were not the preoccupation of a minority of intellectuals. They had become mood music of the culture — played out most memorably, perhaps, in Kipling’s Recessional (1897) — a poem for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee that read like an elegy for a dying country.

In 2017, protesters in Durham, North Carolina, used a rope to topple a Confederate statue, and provoked both outrage and approval. But the ease with which it fell told the most interesting story. The monument was less than a hundred years old. It wasn’t erected to General Robert E Lee by those who fought beside him. It was the product of a much later moment — one in which Jim Crow laws were entrenched across the south, and the Ku Klux Klan were enjoying a boost from the success of DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). Colston’s toppling tells a story of similar recency.

Suggested reading

How apocalyptic is now?

By John Gray

The statue of Edward Colston is not a pure object upon which later generations have imposed an anachronistic argument. The statue is an argument. About the relationship between the individual and the state, about employers and workers, about civic responsibility and Britain’s place in the world. Its construction was a political gesture. So is pushing it into the River Avon.

The protesters of Black Lives Matter did not drag Colston’s figure out of the city and smash it to pieces. When they submerged it in the docks, they were making a decision about its proper place in the environment — a decision accepted, tacitly, by the officers present on the scene. Perhaps this was not an act of destruction, but a form of endowment. One that may bring wealth to the city far greater than the kind that can be extracted from a black body with the use of a whip.

The 19th century, however, has a caveat to add. The Victorians celebrated their record on the abolition of slavery. Mid nineteenth-century popular culture buzzes with self-regard on this issue. Charles Dickens’s American Notes (1842) railed against the “accursed and detested system” of slavery — without noting who might have picked the cotton used to make his shirts. Visitors to JR Planché’s spectacular burlesque Mr Buckstone’s Voyage Round the Globe (1854) would have congratulated themselves as they laughed at the anti-American gags in its script:

To the west, to the west, to the land of the free –
Which means those who happen white people to be –
Where a man is a man –  if his skin isn’t black –
If it is, he’s a n—–, to sell or to whack…

But a joke from a later line in this song should give us pause for thought. America, for Dickens and his contemporaries, was a zone of racial violence and exploitation — but it was also the country of laughable prudishness.

Where the legs of the table in trowsers are drest:
Away, far away, to the land of the west.

No 19th-century Briton ever covered up a piano leg for decency’s sake, but in the course of the 20th century, this fiction became one of the most tenacious exemplars of their attitudes. A smug joke that backfired.

The Victorians used American racism as a way to feel good about themselves. So do we. It’s a habit that dissuades us from genuine moral introspection. Another solid fixture we might hurl into the water.