CAROLINE ANSELL MP: Our history needs to provoke debate

However, the campaign to remove the nation’s statues of slavers and imperialists is making me feel increasingly uneasy because I fear it’s divisive and counter-productive. There was some local concern at the weekend for our own War Memorial and the Royal Sussex Regiment Memorial.

George Orwell, in his novel 1984, wrote how the regime constantly destroyed or falsified records, rewrote books and renamed streets and statues to enable history to be stopped with the aim that “nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right”.

We’re not in this dystopian loop yet, but I hope you can see the danger.

I understand the toppling of statues has been a time-honoured way to express outrage throughout history but, most often, it has been at the end of totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union. Britain does not fit these criteria. If we remove the statues of all the slave owners and imperialists from our public spaces, we risk losing their ability to inform (with the right educational focus) future generations.

This view doesn’t undermine the Black Lives Matter campaign, which I very much support. I think - if we draw a breath for a moment - it actually complements it and will allow a wider debate about how we can address injustice.

If we remove or destroy them, I fear the damage to our shared understanding. No statues of slavers in our land and, in time, no slavers, no slaves, then no war heroes, no war; no holocaust, no Auschwitz extermination camp. Can people forget? Yes, they can and quite easily.

We could put these statues in museums, and perhaps that’s a compromise, but I don’t think it is as good as leaving them where they are because everyone walks the streets and the scope to educate is enormous. Of course, they need to be adapted with extra information about what these men did, why they did it and how it affected others. Much could be added with help from local communities. These statues, that were once a celebration, can become a warning, an education and a beacon for progress.

However, the idea to keep these statues and use them to educate, cannot work without much more effort to highlight the achievements of many others who were oppressed or overlooked in our recent history. Nothing would please me more than to see a statue honouring the Windrush generation, for example, for the tremendous contribution they have made to this country.

All this is a more nuanced way forward and one that will take time – most things good and enduring usually have to be. It’s something that Nelson Mandela recognised when he sought out reconciliation at every turn of his incredible life.

I would rather have history that offends, provokes debate and inspires change than no history at all.