 Merry Christmas! The 12 days of Tiskey has brought us to Christmas Day and today we are looking back at the month of June. It was when the Black Lives Matter movement really went global. The killing of George Floyd by a white police officer had brought to the fore issues of racial injustice in the United States and with people pent up after three months of COVID restrictions this time around they really exploded worldwide. In Britain that manifested most dramatically in the felling of a statue of a prolific slave trader Edward Colston. In response to that action we saw liberals and conservatives hand-wringing about the fact that for example slavery wasn't so bad actually at the time or I wish they'd have done it but just democratically and peacefully. Let's take a look at myself Aaron and Ash debunking those points one by one. On Sunday at the Bristol Black Lives Matter demonstration a statue of slave trader Edward Colston was pulled down by protesters. Let's take a look at the dramatic footage. So after being pulled down the statue was rolled from the city centre to Bristol's harbour. This is what happened next. So this is a slave trader responsible for the trafficking of 84,000 Africans to the Americas to be sold into slavery. 19,000 died on the journey. It's obviously an outrage that this statue was ever allowed to stay in Bristol city centre for so long but the fact that he was dragged to the harbour and thrown in the sea like so many of his victims has a certain poetic justice to it. Ash what's your take on the scenes we saw in Bristol this weekend? Pure unadulterated joy. It's wonderful. It's wonderful. I've got a like barrage of texts from like one of my friends which was just like this is great he's in the bottom of the river stop whining no one can do anything about it done now in the harbour and I think what I love about it is that we've become so used to politics being this thing which happens to the sort of grinding negotiations in parliament within institutions which are ultimately frustrating and haven't been able to deliver the kind of social change or justice that people really really need and to have a political action just cut through that and for the statue to be taken down not because of this long drawn out battle with a council or some kind of petition to a higher authority but because a young and diverse crowd led by black people said we're not going to have this anymore staring at us the celebration of a man who's responsible for the enslavement of thousands of people the deaths of at least 19,000 people in the middle passage he's gone he's in the harbour and as you said the symbolism of that happening in the very docks where his slave ships would come in and the fact he's at the bottom of that water rusting just love it. Yeah you've seen sort of various people offer sort of soporific platitudes today whether it's Keir Starmer or Rishi Sunak saying that this isn't how justice is administered I would disagree what we saw on Sunday in Bristol is pure unadulterated justice it's a justice that can't be performed by bureaucracy and by paper clips and by pens and tick boxes and by the way I don't say that in a sort of dismissive way all of those things are needed for the everyday reproduction of a liberal democratic society but it was an instantiation I think of pure justice I mean I sound like Robert's Pierre perhaps but I can't think of many other ways sort of to put it and there's a beautiful picture of a young black guy with Black Lives Matter t-shirt Black Lives Matter face mask with his knee on the neck of the statue a young black guy next to him with a t-shirt saying something about Trump Donald Trump Trump is a waste man and it's like if you wanted to and I don't want to asceticize it too much because it's a very political action born of a great deal of suffering historic suffering but if you wanted to almost sort of you know compose a sort of historic painting justice it would it would look like this and I kind of you know I mean look we'll talk about the sort of the sort of political responses to it but I didn't expect them to be quite so bad I mean we are talking about a former slave trader there we are first of all what I want us to do is address and I imagine debunk the sort of two main forms of criticism which have been thrown at this action on Sunday so the first of them is this idea that we shouldn't erase history so first this comes in the form of people saying you know we can't get rid of statues because that's trying to erase our history that's trying to pretend our past is something it wasn't and the other closely related brand is the one that says oh people in the past they all had problematic views and problematic activities and ways of making a living that now we seem are completely we see to be completely unacceptable so our example of this from today is surprise surprise Julie Hartley Brewer talk radio host so she tweets breaking news almost every single person from British and world history probably doesn't share your values today and almost certainly did bad things at a time when they weren't necessarily thought to be bad things and which you won't like but that might be fine for something like flares but this was slavery I mean the 84,000 people he was transporting from Africa to the Americas I don't think they thought it was fine at the time also I think I mean this is just a complete category error in in this particular issue because Winston Churchill right we I mean he was a colonialist and a racist but he's also remembered for helping to defeat the Nazis he's someone with a complicated past Edward Colston was just a slave trader who gave some money to charity that's his only legacy so this idea that we're going to cancel him because he did something the only thing he's famous for is the slave trade so the fact that you would celebrate him is nonsense and of course we have learned more about Edward Colston from this action in being thrown into the harbor than we ever have from that statue standing I sort of would beg you to find anyone in this country who knew much about well a few people in this country would have known something about Edward Colston before this but the number will have dramatically increased since this action I don't know about you but I was very surprised when I went to Germany and I didn't see a single swastika or Nazi statue when I was wandering around Berlin because I thought why would they want to erase their history like that you know oh you might not be familiar that was this guy Hitler he was in charge of Germany you probably won't have heard of him because he didn't see any statues around and when you make that comparison right which is that Germany obviously did confront confront its Nazi history had to go undergo a program of denatification and that didn't lead to a forgetting of the horrors of the Nazi regime but rather the ability to remember it correctly because you weren't left with these objects which just integrated into your everyday fabric of reality which made it seem like all those things were okay so not only do I you know reject the idea that you're erasing history by taking down these statues I actually propose the idea that by having a confrontation with these statues by tearing it down by having this political moment of throwing it into the harbor but it's a better historical education than leaving it up ever was the whole thing about oh you know historical context it requires nuance of the tens of thousands of people trafficked in the ships which you know were overseen by was it the royal african company of the tens of thousands of people trafficked basically from west africa to britain's colonies in the west indies how many of them do you think were saying well you know look there's a debate you had here actually and there's a bit of nuance and yes about 15 to 20 percent of us are dying on ship and they're throwing some people over overboard and we've been ripped out of our culture our our society we're going some we've never been before we're going to be brutalized but but look there's two sides to the story it no nobody who was a slave thought there was nuance and context so this whole thing is ridiculous the only people that thought what they were doing was okay were the people making money from it who weren't the slaves and they chose to give a blind eye to evil because they they profited from it so i mean it's not like we're talking about oh yeah in africa there was a you know there was also a conversation on the gold coast and many people volunteered to be slaves and actually it's more complicated there's just bullshit it's just so stupid and dumb who actually thinks this actually i can tell you it's people like julia harley bro no one engages their brain and thinks about this logically for more than 10 seconds buys the line that there's a context specific nuanced issue there have been slave insurrections since forever since you know the roman age since uh you know in antiquity it's talked about very frequently so it's absolute garbage in terms of the question of of history remembering i thought this was very nice from bristol council i mean we can talk about why why they'd allowed the statue to to remain up for so long but i thought their response to it falling was quite nice so let's get up this picture they've collected all the signs that were laid in the city after yesterday's black lives matter protest and they're going to preserve them on display in the history museum um let's go to the other form of opposition to this action from sunday the idea that the statue should have come down or it would have been fine if it came down but only if it had happened via the legal means and we're going to go to a tweet by sagid javid now as the representative of this position i grew up in bristol i detest how edward colston profited from the slave trade but this is not okay if bristolians want to remove a monument it should be done democratically not by criminal damage now that might seem like a reasonable point it's definitely more reasonable than the one that julia hartley bruer came out with but there is a problem there has been a long standing campaign to try and remove this particular statue from the center of bristol and in fact from the names of of of schools of concert halls or all sorts of institutions around bristol are named after this slave trader and all of them have been blocked um so in fact not only plans to take this statue down have been blocked but even completely minor ones to put a plaque on that puts his existence that that statue in proper context even something so minor was blocked by normal democratic channels or normal legitimate political channels as sagid javid would call them i want to get up a passage from the bristol post this was from an article last year explaining the difficulty of getting a statement agreed this is this was an idea as the plaque that was going to go under the statue originally it was a free paragraph statement which revealed how colston played an active role in the enslavement of more than 84 000 africans including 12 000 children and of those 19 000 died on board his ships it was controversial at least the one Tory councillor richard eddie who said that he objected so strongly to the wording that he said he would understand if it was vandalized or stolen i wonder what he says now but then bristol live revealed last august that there was a significant problem of bristol historian francis greenacre on behalf of the merchant venturers the organization colston belonged to which still holds services and commemorations in his honor today got involved a debate ensued with the wording of the plaque changing gradually with mr greenacre challenging it removing things like his position as a Tory MP changing the word traffic to transport it and maintaining a lengthy dispute about the numbers and ages of the thousands of children who died on board colston ships so there you have it there was a there was a long drawn out campaign that was you know the pinnacle of a 25-year campaign to try and get either this statue removed or put in context and the people who were part of you know the same organization that colston was part of were not happy unless you had a sort of mealy mouth statement underneath there that you know well there should be no nuance but that's what they're trying to do trying to say this wasn't as simple as it was was it 84 000 was it 64 000 like what the fuck so this idea that people should have just you know why why didn't people think to start a petition why didn't people think to lobby their council people they'd been doing that for decades we don't have statues by accident we don't have monuments by accident we don't have memorialization by accident they have to be preserved and they have to be maintained and so what we have when it comes to the Edward Colston statue is one the fact it went up in what was it 1895 so the statue goes up you know what well over 60 years after the slavery abolition act passes which outlawed slavery in the british empire in 1833 and on the original plaque it said he was amongst you know the wisest men in the city you know one of the best and wisest men so you have this kind of quite literally a whitewashing of the role slave money has played in building the city of bristol and also building this man's reputation and his legacy immediately when the statue goes up but it's not enough to put a statue up you have to keep it up and that's why you need these strange organizations with their kind of pet historians like francis greenacre to make the case of why this slaver was a good slaver or why the slave trading he did wasn't particularly bad if you actually looked at the issues and what it does is that it just creates noise it just creates the a kind of fog around the issue so you lose sight of the very clear moral point which is why are we celebrating a slave trader in a diverse city in the 21st century that's what the whole thing is about and it's a way of clogging up the political process now this is where I differ from both saja javid and i'm sure we'll talk about him later kia sama i actually think that that protest and the action of those protesters i don't think it was violent people didn't get hurt it was a statue he doesn't have nerve endings he doesn't have feelings i think it was a legitimate political action because the so-called legitimate means by which politics takes place of petitioning the council writing to this person writing an article it had no effect because those processes have been corrupted and corroded by the lingering poison of slavery