13 June 2024. By Nigel for The Spectator.

Three weeks ago, I received an SOS from a distressed citizen of Glasgow, urging me to protest against a recently installed display at the Kelvingrove Museum, ‘Glasgow – City of Empire’. Predictably, the exhibition falls over itself to clock every conceivable association between the city and slavery, inviting the visitor to envisage appropriate reparations. Scraping the barrel of shame, it complains of one of Glasgow’s greatest benefactors, William Burrell, that ‘his business partners exploited enslaved Africans’. Enslaved Africans? Burrell was a shipping magnate around 1900, almost 70 years after slavery’s abolition in the British Empire and at least a generation after emancipation in the United States.

As for the city’s world-leading role in the movement to abolish slavery in the early 1800s, and the Scots’ disproportionately high role in the British Empire and its century and a half of anti-slavery endeavour, the Kelvingrove has nothing to say.

So I dispatched an eight-page letter to Kelvingrove’s manager, and a shorter version to the Scottish Times. Replying to the Times, Duncan Dornan, who runs Glasgow’s muse- ums, defended the display on the ground that it was designed through extensive discus- sions with ‘diverse communities’.

The same week, something similar hap- pened in Portsmouth. A proposal to commemorate the Royal Navy’s role in ending the Atlantic slave trade with a statue on Gunwharf Quays was turned down by a property developer. Why? Because Landsec, the commercial owner of the Quays, had consulted their ‘employee diaspora network’, who considered the statue out of keeping with an ‘inclusive environment’, lacking ‘sensitivity to what is a very emotive topic and dark part of our history as a nation’.

In both cases, organisations at opposite ends of the country had given members of ‘diverse communities’ and a ‘diaspora net- work’ a veto over the public representation of Britain’s history. The kindest way to understand this runs as follows. Since the voices of ethnic minorities have been marginalised historically, we should listen to them. And since they continue to suffer ill-effects stem- ming from their ancestors’ enslavement or colonial subjection – perhaps in the form of post-colonial racism – we should defer to them. They now get to have the final word.

One fly in this ointment is empirical evidence that Britain is not generally racist, and that racism may not be the cause of the disadvantages some ethnic minorities suffer ….