How should Britain make amends for its colonial past?

Moral Maze

BBC

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.4 • 623 Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2023

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

How should Britain make amends for its colonial past?

Should museums in the UK return historic artefacts to their countries of origin? Many items displayed in museums were looted in colonial times and now there are campaigns for them to be returned. There's a related question of whether Britain should pay reparations for its role in the slave trade. Attitudes to both of these questions have shifted in recent years. Some of the Benin Bronzes, looted by the British Army in 1897 have been returned to Nigeria. The British Museum is now in talks over how the Elgin Marbles, removed from the Parthenon Temple in Greece in the 19th century, might be displayed in Athens. Recently the Church of England set up a fund, worth £100m, to address the past wrongs of its involvement with slavery. The church has expressed shame that it invested in, and made money from the slave trade. The fund will be used to benefit communities affected by historic slavery. Several universities have taken similar steps. But is this an appropriate way to acknowledge the suffering caused during Britain's colonial past? Some believe that while it's appropriate to openly admit Britain's role in slavery, it’s impossible to repair the damage done and it's wrong to expect British people today to pay reparation to the descendants of enslaved people. Others say that the economic cost of slavery is still being felt by those descendants. It's a debt that needs to be paid. It’s also suggested that paying reparation is a valuable step in tackling the racism that still exists today. What moral obligations of restitution and reparation do we inherit from our ancestors? What rights of redress can we claim for what was done to our forebears? How should Britain make amends for its colonial past?

Producer: Jonathan Hallewell Presenter: Michael Buerk

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
0:04.7	Good evening. It's perhaps slightly strange that the high watermark of classical antiquity should be found in Bloomsbury.
0:11.2	For that, we have Lord Elgin to thank, and a fat lot of good it did him.
0:15.1	He ruined himself. Some say rescuing, some say stealing, the marbles that bear his name,
0:20.8	and died all but penniless in France,
0:22.7	where he'd fled to escape his creditors. They might not be in the British Museum much longer.
0:27.8	By all accounts, they could be returned to Greece in a complicated kind of permanent loan.
0:34.1	The fate of the Elgin Marbles is just one aspect of the current movement
0:37.9	to try to write what are regarded by some as historical injustices.
0:42.4	The return of artefacts has its own issues of cultural ownership,
0:46.0	how and where glorious works can be displayed to the best advantage.
0:50.1	The wider call for reparation for past wrongs,
0:53.7	slavery, for instance, is even more difficult.
0:56.3	The Church of England has set up a £100 million fund to somehow compensate for its shameful involvement with the slave trade.
1:04.0	This raises all sorts of questions. How far are we responsible for the actions of our forebears?
1:09.6	Who would qualify for a payout and why? Where do you
1:13.1	stop? As one commentator put it, if we have to make reparation for the presumed sins of our
1:17.9	empire, perhaps we should sue the Italian government for what the Romans did to us. Paying for the
1:24.0	past, our moral maze tonight. The panel, Ash Sarka from the Navarra Media Group, the feminist author and commentator Ella Wheelan, the historian Tim Stanley and Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation. Ash, where should the marbles be? I think they should be in Athens because it will give me a chance to go there and eat some beautiful deep-fried cheese again. But on the demand for reparations, I don't think it makes sense to say that ill-gotten wealth can be handed down through the generations, but the demand for restitution can't. And I also think that the argument is misleadingly presented as being about the sufferings of the past. It's not. It's about how the suffering of the past never really went away and how it manifests in the injustices of the present.
2:04.4	Ella, Ella, we know.
1:57.7	On the marbles, I think that there's, you know, I'm going to say that there's a sort of a nice fudge to it at the moment, which is that there's, you can see them in situ and you can also go to that wonderful institution, the British Museum and see them, and I think you can get different things from both.
2:10.3	But on reparations more broadly, I think we're in danger of letting governments off the hook for their ongoing failings in the present by looking to the past for the cause and cure of all our ills. Matthew, Matthew Taylor? Yeah, I'd send them back to Athens and I'd have very good replicas for us to look at in the British Museum.
	...

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