Take Churchill, but leave my racist gran out of it

Statues are kaleidoscopic totems; golems whose frozen faces hold different meanings for different groups of people throughout different points in history. Statues are erected, just as history is written, by the winners, but society is a rolling contract, a constant site of conflict and negotiation, and those at the bottom usually, sooner or later, get their shot at – or the opportunity to fire some shots at – the top-spot. Just ask the French Royal Family circa 1789, or Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath party.

The symbols that once united, may one day divide; the statues that once stood for valiance and jubilation, may one day fall for avarice and hubris. One chunk of sculpted marble can run the gamut from hero to villain and back again over several life-times – that’s if it can manage to avoid being beheaded, blown up or pulled down by chains.

2020 has been a time of great unrest in the world, both biologically and societally. Unrest over the Black Lives Matter movement has swiftly eclipsed the west’s tantrums over coronavirus restrictions, to the point where the coronavirus looks set to join the recently evaporated ghost of Brexit in the shared Ecto-containment units of our collective memory (although I predict a particularly nasty second wave of Brexit at some point in the autumn).

It’s Statuegeddon out there. History is being violently re-framed and re-claimed at home and abroad, both in the media and in the streets. In the US, Columbus and various Confederate generals have borne the brunt of this revisionist violence; here in the UK, the statues of a handful of regionally, but not nationally, well-known colonial ne’er do wells have met their ignominious ends, most notably the likeness of slave-trader Edward Colston, which was wrenched from the ground, marched through the streets and tossed into Bristol harbour.

In the UK, all of this was met with mild indignation on one side and righteous vindication on the other. Until, of course, BLM protestors in London – or at least a handful of those present during demonstrations – turned their attentions to Churchill: the great grand-daddy plinth-pimp; the undisputed Billy Big Balls of the statue world. You’ll no doubt have seen the image of the words ‘IS A RACIST’ spray-painted on the statue’s plinth beneath Churchill’s name. Later in that same day, a man was seen standing atop the cenotaph trying to ignite the Union Jack. Two competing narratives are clashing, like hammers into anvils, and it’s causing sparks.

My paternal grandmother was a life-long supporter of the SNP and Scottish independence, but never-the-less she venerated the arch-conservative Churchill as a God. She wouldn’t hear a bad word said against him. I accepted her view of Churchill wholesale and without criticism, mainly because I was young and hadn’t yet been exposed to any criticism of Churchill the man, but also because my gran had been alive during World War II. She’d spent the early forties living in perpetual fear, worrying about bombs dropping on her town, worrying if she’d ever see my grandfather again, worrying who else in the town wouldn’t be coming back, all the while working her fingers to the bone. I trusted her judgement; her lived experience. I trusted history, at least as I understood it at the time.

Churchill once represented a generation’s shared agony and sacrifice. He stood for imperialism, the old guard, a certain Brutish, British sentiment, yes, but also strength and resolve in the face of a conquering enemy, an enemy that was much worse than anything the world had ever seen before, at least in terms of scale, and military range and capability. He undoubtedly galvanised people’s spirits, fanned the flames of hope.

Now, as the war generation dwindles to a handful of living emblems, there’s sufficient distance to re-evaluate Churchill’s legacy away from the propaganda and old Blighty bluster.

Churchill may well have been an effective rallying force in the fight against Hitler’s eugenocidal expansionism, but looked at through different sets of contemporaneous eyes it’s probably fair to say that he was somewhat lacking in decency and compassion. You know. Just a smidgeon. In fact, he was a bit of an arsehole, even adjusting for the rampant racism and ingrained xenophobia that was reputedly typical of the era.

It’s quite possible that his rousing defence of the Empire was just that: a rousing defence of the Empire, and not really anything to do with repelling fascism which, under certain circumstances, Churchill was more than prepared to admire, especially when it dressed as snappily as Mussolini. And what about those train time-tables? Phwoar, missus.

In 1919 as secretary of state for war Churchill ordered chemical attacks on the Bolsheviks in northern Russia; his strategising was responsible for the out-manned and under-resourced 51st Highland Division being abandoned in France, resulting in the death or capture of some 12,000 Scottish soldiers. And that’s not to forget his part in the decision in 1919 to send tanks and soldiers into Glasgow’s George Square to settle a labour dispute.

Churchill regarded the many subjugated peoples held hostage under the banner of the British Empire as subhuman savages or unruly children, and routinely treated them as such as a matter of policy, particularly the Indians, whom he held in special disregard, a sentiment baldly expressed through his complicity in the Bengal famine, a man-made tragedy that claimed the lives of millions of Indians. This is but a small sample from the dark side of Winston Churchill. It’s hardly exhaustive. Black and tans, claims of Aryan superiority, pillages in South Africa. The list goes on. And on and on.

Had my gran been faced with this list I’m almost certain that it wouldn’t have swayed her from her worship. Churchill was her warrior, her guide, her leader. Who was she to question him, especially when she appeared to agree with many of his underlying assumptions about people from other races?

My grandmother never carried out any genocides – none that I’m aware of anyway – but she was  undoubtedly, em, a wee bit racist. Like many of her generation, she couldn’t understand what people of other races had to complain about. And wasn’t slavery a long time ago anyway? I hear that sentiment echoed, even now. But if white people who never fought in the second world war – who weren’t even alive until years after its end – can say that they are still touched by its, and Churchill’s, legacy – that its importance will continue to be passed down from generation to generation – then why are we so unable to grasp the idea that something as horrific as slavery, still a very recent event in human history, might still cause ripples throughout white and black communities for some time to come. Nobody pushed a big button to end all racism at the moment when slavery was abolished. Some scars take a long time to heal.

My gran wasn’t rabid with her racism. It sometimes felt like she’d received a flyer about the benefits of racism one day, and just thought, ‘Ooooh, that sounds nice.’ She’d never met anyone of colour, and her TV was replete with westerns and war films, all of which helped to reinforce the white-centric status quo. Life was black and white for my gran, sometimes literally. The Japs? Vile. Blacks? Animals. The Red Indians? Savages. Arabs? Never trust them. That last one came straight from my grandfather, who’d served amongst North Africans and middle-easterners during the Second World War and formed a life-long judgement of them as a consequence. Given that during war-time my grandfather was involved with the smuggling and selling on of black-market oil via dealings with the Italian mafia, he wasn’t really well placed to opine on the trustworthiness of any particular person, much less a whole race.

I remember my papa dropping the bombshell on me that he didn’t like black people. He said it almost impassively, barely bothering to take his eyes from the TV. I was around fourteen at the time, and unencumbered by any explicit racist notions – beyond past complicity in the sad trade of unnecessary and uninspired racist jokes at my almost entirely all-white primary school, the punchlines of which featured Twixes, Drifters, chocolate biscuits and red head-dots – and wanted to know why. Why, papa? What have black people ever done to you?

‘I dunno,’ he said with a half-hearted shrug. ‘I just don’t like them.’

Although I wasn’t looking for an Aristotelian exploration of his beliefs and motivations I must confess to feeling a little less than satisfied with his answer.

I pressed him further. ‘What do you mean “you just don’t like them”? There has to be a reason.’

He thought for a moment. A few seconds later he delivered his pay-load.

‘You know how you sometimes don’t like a flavour of ice-cream? It’s like that. I just don’t like them.’

I didn’t have a comeback for that. How could I have? You’ve got to admit, that’s genius racism. Deftly dodging the whole arena of thought and reason to frame his views not intellectually, but emotionally, reducing his racism to a calm statement of preference. It didn’t seem to stem from any visible sense of hatred. Racism for my papa was as simple as saying, ‘Nah, cheers for the offer, but no thanks, I’d rather not.’ Oddly, he seemed to dig Sidney Poitier. Cognitive dissonance writ large.

I did toy with bringing him a bowl of Neapolitan ice cream, and saying, ‘Look, papa. Look at all the different colours – the pink, the yellow and the brown – all sitting happily together, in perfect harmony,’ but I was worried he might scoop out the pink bit and leave the other two by the two-bar fire to melt.

When I was 21 I met a couple of Israeli back-packers in Amsterdam. Really good guys. They saved my life in some ways. One of the duo, Dani, was of Russian ancestry; the other, Ilan, was from Arab stock. A few months later they came to Scotland to visit me. Ilan arrived first. I took him to meet my dad and gran. Now, this was certainly the first time anyone of colour had ever been in my gran’s house, and she reacted as I knew she would: with a sort of fear-soaked, ultra-politeness. She brought through a platter of sandwiches, and I just knew she’d opted for a platter because the serving plate could double as a shield should any shit happen to go down. After all, never trust an Arab, right? In retrospect, as much as I enjoyed dragging my gran into the twentieth century, it wasn’t necessarily fair to put the fear of bloody murder into her old eyes.

She was a lovely woman, my gran, kind and warm, content in her later life to live in her wee town-shaped, Catholicism-scented bubble. That feeling she got when she was finally confronted with the ‘other’ was, I think, the root of her racism, which wasn’t really racism at all, but fear. Pure, undiluted fear. A fear stoked by the people around her, and the newspapers, and the TV shows, and the movies, and by people like her old hero Churchill, who was always more than happy to take a big oily crap on the whole concept of the brotherhood of man.

So what do we do with Churchill now?

I suppose it’s possible to embrace both Churchills: the bold, heroic, no-nonsense, fight-them-on-the-beaches figurehead, and the blood-thirsty, racist tyrant. It’s just a question of how we reconcile those Churchills and choose to remember him as a consequence. Do we really need to venerate him with a statue, and would it really damage his legacy if his statue were to be moved to a museum? On the other hand, are we being too knee-jerk, too revisionist? If we move Churchill to a museum, would he even be safe there? Are the looted treasures of Britain’s museums next on the list for reclamation or obliteration? Should the state cow-tow to violence, however righteous the impetus?

On the other other hand, in the face of a stubborn and indifferent state, isn’t violence sometimes the only mechanism that people have at their disposal to effect change? I don’t think the French Revolution would’ve gotten very far if the marginalised, powerless citizens of Paris had written a series of withering letters to their local feudal representatives.

Maybe, going forwards, if we feel the need to build a statue, we should keep it abstract or symbolic; something that evokes a moment in time rather than a man or a woman of the moment. Because things can change in a moment. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s almost certainly that.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to, or about, Churchill. Perhaps this re-evaluation couldn’t have come at a better time, given that those who moved to defend his statue this past weekend were witnessed giving Nazi salutes and attacking the police, behaviour that stands a little at odds with the virtues they claimed to be in town to defend and uphold.

Whatever we do with Churchill and the murky legacy of Britain’s colonial past, can you do me a wee favour? Leave my gran out of it. She was a good ‘un.

Some of my best friends are grans.

Jamie’s Guide to Politics: The BNP

In his high-school yearbook, Nick Griffin was voted ‘Most Likely to Make a Career Out of Racism’

At root, all the BNP wants to do is make sure that people ‘get back to their home’, which is why the organisation is so popular with taxi drivers.

Nick Griffin is the party’s current leader. When he’s not indulging in his favourite hobby of racism, Nick likes to enter look-a-like contests, and has recently come first-place in a variety of different competitions: most like Morn from Deep Space 9; most like Greenback from Inspector Gadget after a stroke; and most like David Cameron after an over-eating disorder and a motor-bike accident.

Aryan Family Guy

The BNP attracted a lot of media interest last year when it took over production of the American animated series ‘Family Guy’, and substituted Nick Griffin for Peter Griffin.

‘This is how we’ll reach the kids with our message,’ said Griffin. ‘Speak to them through popular culture; let them see me as the Fuhrer…em, the father. Like the time Hitler put himself into Mickey Mouse cartoons.’ {roll sketch}

A memo Nick Griffin sent to the production team, intercepted by news teams, spelled out the new direction he felt the show should take:

‘I’m not having a Jewish wife. Get rid of her. The baby, too. Nick Griffin doesn’t father fags. And I’m not happy about the daughter, Meg. She’s obviously a lesbian communist. Have my character send them off to camp, if you know what I mean. On the plus side, my son is a big, dumb blonde and the dog is white. I’m digging that. A final word on the neighbourhood. That neighbour of mine, the one in the wheelchair? Make it clear he was wounded in combat, or in the line of duty. If he was born that way it wouldn’t be realistic to have him survive to adulthood. As for my black neighbour and supposed best friend, Cleveland? Either kill the family off, or give them their own spin-off show to get rid of them.’

Controversy

‘Das balustrades are a fucking disgrace.’

The future of the BNP now looks uncertain. A German historian, Herr Grosse Busen, has discovered that Hitler, the party’s hero, wasn’t a racist, genocidal maniac after all.

‘The Fuhrer was actually a decorator hired by the Reichstag to brighten the place up,’ explains Busen. ‘and he was a lovely wee bloke. We know what caused the confusion. Hitler was in the main chambers, surrounded by politicians, and shouted out: “I’m going to fill all the interior spaces with colour, and widen out the mews.” But everyone thought he said: “I’m going to kill all the inferior races and coloureds, and wipe out the Jews,” and they were well up for it. Hitler only started WWII because he was too embarrassed to point out their mistake.’

Breakdown

Floella Benjamin

Nick Griffin’s nervous breakdown may serve as the final nail in the party’s coffin. He appeared on ITV’s Loose Women, and sobbed into the breasts of Floella Benjamin. As Floella stroked Griffin’s head, gently rocking him back and forth and saying, ‘Shhhhh, baby, it’s okay, it’s okay’, Griffin apologised for being a meanie and admitted that ‘he actually quite liked black people and muslims.’

Griffin is set to relaunch the BNP as the ‘Be Nice to Pakistanis’ party.