I'm Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the RSA, and I'm delighted to welcome you all

to today's special event.

It's really a great privilege to be joined by two of Britain's most admired public intellectuals,

Mary Beard and David Olusoga.

Mary and David will be well-known to everyone watching, I'm sure.

Mary is a well-known classicist and David is a pioneering public historian of race,

slavery, and empire.

In their award-winning work for the page and the screen, they combine deep scholarship

with compelling storytelling power.

By shedding vivid new light on our past, they offer us new ways to understand ourselves,

each other, and the world around us in the here and now.

So, David, Mary, welcome.

It's really a special privilege to be joined by such brilliant thinkers to help us make

sense of the moment we're all living through.

We first had the idea of bringing you together when we spotted an exchange you had on Twitter

a few weeks ago following the Black Lives Matter protest in the UK and the felling of

the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol.

You seem to kind of hold differing views on the statues debate in recent years, but that

exchange led to the kind of sense that you might be moving a bit closer together, or

at least, at least that there's a kind of compromise position you might be able to hammer

out.

So today we're giving you a space to try and do that in person.

David, can I start with you?

In the past weeks, there's been a lot of airtime given to you know pretty well-rehearsed arguments

in the debates around statues and the politics of memory.

But even so, it'd be great if you could share again how it felt for you watching the

Colston statue fall that weekend, why it was so significant for you and for the city of

Bristol, and how it compares with previous flashpoint moments in recent years.

I wonder what you think the felling of that statue means for how far as a nation we've

come and how far we still have to go?

Well, watching those events was watching an impossibility happen in front of your eyes.

At the end of last year, the debate in Bristol people I know are heavily involved in, and

I was tapped into, was whether or not we might be able to get a contextualization plaque

added to the plinth, the pedestal on which Colston stood, that made mention to the people

who are utterly invisible in this whole memorialization of Colston, which are the tens of thousands

of people who were enslaved by the Royal African Company where Colston was involved and the

probably around 20,000 people who died in the process, either in the middle passage

or in the slave raids or in the other many manifest horrors of the slave trade.

Now, even that quite meager, modest ambition of having the victims of Colston mentioned

on the pedestal was thwarted and it was rebuffed by the people who defended him.

So I presumed that I would never in my lifetime see that statue come down.

So for it to come down instantly overnight in a dramatic way was an incredible experience.

And what I've found was when I spoke to other Black Bristolians- I live in Bristol, lived

here longer than anywhere I've ever lived, so I will give myself the title of Bristolian

without being offered it- I found myself very emotional.

I think what we've learned in the weeks since, is that statues are very important.

People constantly in this debate say, "Oh, you're wasting your time.

Talk about something else.

Why are you debating this issue?

Statues are taking up all the air time."

Well, I think what we discovered was that the removal of that statue was not the end

of the process.

What began was a process of what I've called de-Colstonification.

There are around 20 institutions and street names and other ways in which Colston is remembered

in this city.

Institution after institution found themselves, and the days after that statue is toppling,

able to do things that they were unable to do the week before, which was to disassociate

themselves from a mass killer.

The concert hall had already decided it was going to change its name, but it took its

name off its façade, as did an office block Colston Tower.

A school is now consulting on changing its name.

Another school is consulting on changing its name.

Institution after institution found themselves able to act in a way that they just were incapable

of doing a few days earlier, so that effect was catalytic in a way that I didn't expect.

David, before I bring in Mary, to what extent when you watch that happening in Bristol do

you feel that each of those incidents is one in which the institution is thinking deeply,

reconsidering deeply, learning, or to what extent is it simply that this has now become

a shifted norm?

And woe betide you if you don't respond because you'll be seen to be a racist?

And does that matter actually?

Do you care whether or not people are just doing it because it feels like you have to

do it or they're doing it through a process of thought?

I can't speak for the thought processes and the discussions within organizations that

I'm not privy to.

What I would like to think is that this has gone a bit deeper.

Is that they've looked at the passion.

They've looked at the directness with which those protests have targeted a single statue

in that city.

This wasn't thuggery, which is what the right-wing press would like us to believe.

If that were the case, there's a statue of Edmund Burke nearby.

There's other statues.

All of them were untouched, as was every shop window and shopfront or places that could

have been looted.

It wasn't thuggery.

It was a very targeted political protest.

I think what institutions have looked at is that this isn't just a change in the political

wind.

This is a change of consciousness.

And it's brought about by a generational shift.

And what I hope happened is that the morning after, people woke up and thought, "What have

we been doing defending a mass murderer for all of these years?"

His toppling allowed a clarity of thought that just had been obscured and blurred before

the toppling.

And I'd like to think that people suddenly realized that this wasn't worth it, that this

is drawing a line in the sand over someone who just didn't deserve it, who was not worthy

of this level of defense and protection, was a losing battle.

Not just one that they were going to lose, but one that wasn't worth morally fighting.

Thank you, so much to come back to there.

Mary, I'll turn to you.

You had a pretty clear position on the Cecil Rhodes statue when the campaign for its removal

first began several years ago.

I'm interested in how your views have changed since then if they have.

You said you were happy to see Colston fall.

Yes, I was.

I was delighted.

Tell us about the distinction between Rhodes and Colston.

I think the problem about this for me is that there isn't-- This is where we never get to

agree entirely.

There's no hard and fast rule.

There's no set of criteria which says X falls and Y doesn't.

I felt very much like David that I'd watched much more distantly the debates about Colston

and seen an impasse happening.

I'm extremely keen on the idea of interventions with these old guys standing up there.

Sometimes removal, sometimes additions, sometimes a contextualization.

That seems to me wholly good.

As far as I could see, that had gone on for months if not years.

And in the end, I felt too when I watched it, I felt exhilaration that someone, in the

end, said, "Enough is enough.

We're getting rid of him."

Now, I have all sorts of slightly old lady views about direct action and I worry about

that, but I have to confess, I thought, "Right.

Done it."

Now, I think that, for me, the point is that - I have different views on different statues

and on some I disagree with David - the bottom line is that there isn't a single person in

the world who's not a sociopath of some sort, who thinks that every statue should remain

up.

[chuckles] If we had a statue of Goebbels in the center of Reading, he would not be

there any longer.

It's not a question of saying: to remove any statue is to remove or to erase history.

Sometimes the removal of a statue is the creating of a new history, which I'm very happy to

be part of.

I suppose what I worry about is in a sense where on the spectrum any one statue falls,

how we make our minds up, or even without going to the Trump side, what we might lose

when we lose some of these people in our midst.

And I went back and I looked at the Bristol newspapers in 1895 when Colston's statue was

erected.

Bristol was a Gladstonian town.

I could only guess what the arguments had been behind it.

I looked at the way he was being honored hundreds of years after he died as a philanthropist

by people who I thought were not constitutively blind to slavery but somehow just passively

didn't see it.

They were getting together to celebrate this guy in a late Victorian civic occasion.

I suppose what made me think is my question is, how could they have done it?

When those guys and some women got together and they cheered and they were pleased, what

was going through their minds and why did they?

How was it that they did not see what we see now?

More to the point, I thought, what is it?

He reminds me, and that occasion reminds me, of all the things that we're not seeing about

ourselves and our own morality which will, in one day, be as abominated as that of Colston.

I think that these statues are much more dialogic than people give them credit for.

They are about challenging us.

One thing you can say is they don't have agency.

They're just a piece of metal and we can just pull them down.

We have the power here, not them.

But I think of myself slightly cheering on the removal of Colston's statue with my mobile

phone in my pocket, which was made by child labor that is as close to slavery as anything,

in someplace that I can't see.

I always have this sense that these blokes, now mostly blokes, hardly single one of them

I'd want to sit down and have dinner with, let alone approve of their politics and morality.

They're constantly challenging me to think, what will I look like in 200 years' time?

What am I doing that's going to seem as absolutely outrageous as them?

They're part of the dialogue with the past and the present.

Now, the problem in Bristol was, as David said, the fact that there was no further attempt

to contextualization meant that that dialogue was stopped, but I very much like the idea

of them challenging us about our own selves as much as we want to challenge them.

Look at Charles I outside Charing Cross.

[chuckles] What's he doing?

Well, actually, in some ways, he reminds me that some form of democracy, limited as it

was, won in this country.

[chuckles] We're not sitting there putting reeds in front of his statue.

There's a much more complicated relationship between the statue and our own politics and

morality than I think comes out in the debate.

That said, I was jolly and pleased and cheered and enjoyed a drink when Colston fell.

David, we have an agreement about Colston and that tearing of that statue was not only

welcomed but also important.

In terms of what Mary said, as a historian, in what ways do you want to qualify a kind

of view that anybody of the past who behaved in ways which are clearly unacceptable now,

should as it were that we should not in any sense commemorate them, or that we should

entirely condemn them?

I'm interested in what your view would be of that kind, a view of history I would imagine

you would find reductive.

Absolutely.

I'm not for the removal of all statues and that would be ridiculous, but I'm also not

for the retaining of all statues and everybody, whether they admit it or not, is somewhere

along that spectrum.

It's very easy to think of political, historical figures that anyone would reject a statue

or would want one removed if they could find it.

Everybody's somewhere in this spectrum and nobody is a purist saying all statues should

stand, or all statues should fall.

I think all statues following on, the obvious corollary of that, is that every case should

be taken as an individual case.

Absolutely, I also think that the idea that our age wanting a statue to be removed or

to be contextualized is not us saying that our morals are right.

I've written and thought a lot about, what about this age will future generations find

outrageous about us?

I read documents by people in the 18th century.

And you look at the doublethink about slavery.

Good, decent Christian, incredibly moral people in lots of ways, who were slave traders.

I think our age will have the same contradiction.

I think our relationship with the natural world, our failure to seize this moment to

stop the climate crisis will be condemned by future generations who will live with the

consequences and will rage against our refusal to give up on some of the luxuries that we

have when science was telling us that we had to.

I think our relationship with animals and factory farming will be seen as an abomination

by future generations.

They will judge us the same as we judge people of the past, but the way we judge them and

the arena in which we judge them is through history.

Statues are another thing.

They're about memorialization.

I think this is where this debate gets lost.

Pulling down a statue is not erasing the past because statues aren't about the past.

Statues are about the memorialization of men who at a certain point in their history, 175

years after his death, in the case of Colston, people decided should be memorialized.

This debate about statues has brought out all sorts of hidden histories about where

these statues actually came from.

And Mary's written about this really well.

What I find fascinating looking at some of the pictures in the American South is that

you have Americans from the baby boomer generation standing out in front of statues, defending

statues of Confederate generals when those statues are younger than many of the protesters.

They're defending them as if they're objective history.

They are younger than most of the people protesting because they were put up in the '60s in the