Barry Turner

By Barry Turner Columnist

On Saturday, July 4, another momentous date in the COVID-19 calendar will see the reopening of bars and restaurants in England after what, for the average pub-goer seems like a lifetime.

Those of us who enjoy this time honoured form of relaxation will be able to return to our favourite pubs, at least to the favourite pubs that survived to reopen for a quiet pint or two, with emphasis on the quiet.

Just like in the good old days when pubs were pubs, we will be able to sit in our favourite chair listening to the clock tick while the host and the staff diligently work around us with bottles of anti-bacterial surface cleaner and Vileda mops.

Door staff, or bouncers as some of us old campaigners still call them, will be present all day to make sure that the pub does not get too full and that groups of no more than four are sat at tables inside and no more than six outside, appropriately spaced at one meter distance and definitely no cuddling allowed.

Dark screens will festoon the walls of many of the big pubs, unless they are showing re-runs of last year’s Chelsea flower show. No football, no horse racing, no Rugger, no cricket, it’s still banned anyway because the cricket ball carries the virus we are told. Nothing at all that might get us so exited that we shout or cheer.

Faint music might be dimly heard in the far background, no booming rap or screeching metal, perhaps the sound of a lute or a haunting Gregorian chant. Music cannot be played in a way that would cause normal conversation to be difficult. Raising of voices is definitely not allowed as our pubs reopen. We will be able to ask our friends in our social bubble what they would like to drink without resorting to bellowing or using sign language.

Yes folks, for those who thought that the lockdown was over, it ain’t. Saturday is a day to celebrate indeed, but it won’t be party time.

The regulations have been eased, not cancelled and for those with a memory more effective than mine is, usually you will remember that the legislation that brought us three months of curfew is in place for the next two years. Clauses are built in for further easing, but for the moment local authorities and the police still have special powers to “control the virus”.

Will it work, we ask? What will happen to those who are tempted to turn up the volume and switch on the footy. Well, during the full lockdown some notorious ‘lock-ins’ took place. Several pubs were raided to find revellers behind closed curtains in darkened bars boozing away happily until rudely interrupted by the police. Licences were suspended and some even lost as a result of ignoring the regulations. Strange when not that many years ago during a different licencing regime pubs were famous, or infamous depending on one’s point of view, for the delightfully called ‘late taste’.

Police and licencing authorities retain the power to close recalcitrant pubs, but as we saw all too frequently during full curfew, there was a reluctance to enforce the emergency COVID-19 regulations, save for sending people home from their ill-considered barbecues and sherry parties.

So Saturday and for the immediate future, we will not be partying the night away down at the local boozer. Our restaurant meals will not be mass gatherings of the office to celebrate the leaving of some barely known colleague or a slap up feed at the curry house after a booze up down the pub. They will be quiet, almost monastically silent affairs, with those in the social bubble whispering and nodding across their pepperoni pizza and half cold cup of latte.

Still look on the bright side! The pubs are back. Two world wars and the great depression couldn’t shut them so we could never let a virus do it. Cheers all round!

Barry Turner is a Senior Lecturer in War Reporting and Human Rights and a member of the Royal United Services Institute.

By Barry Turner Columnist

For generations in cities and towns all over the UK, serious-looking men (it is nearly always men) have looked down on shoppers and tourists going about their business. In most cases the exploits of these individuals have long been forgotten by most who see them. They are just big lumps of bronze or stone clad in eighteenth and nineteenth century outfits looming over our streets and harbours.

The killing of an ordinary man on the streets of an ordinary city in the United States has changed the way many now look at some of these monuments. They are no longer simple street furniture or convenient meeting places, but have become a stark reminder of some of our less than auspicious history. They now represent the dark side of empire and the far from great aspects of the history of Great Britain.

For a good number of years in the US statues from the dark side of their history have been under attack. Confederate generals and monuments to rebel victories in the American Civil War have been vandalised or removed by local authorities, many of these now reside in museums where appropriate historical facts can be given about what some of these men really stood for.  Not a romantic lost cause, but a symbol of institutionalised brutality that turned millions of human beings into property for profit.

Now in the UK the statues of those who built and maintained the British Empire are coming under increased attack. It started with Cecil Rhodes whose statue adorns Oriel College Oxford, probably not so much for his imperialist exploits but for endowing the university with a scholarship fund. The Rhodes Must Fall campaign has been arguing for its removal for a number of years now and the campaign to remove monuments and statues similarly linked to the Empire is now intensifying.

Opinion polls on the subject of should they stay or should they go are remarkably balanced. For every one who wants them gone there is one who wants them to stay. While the reason behind removing them is virtually unanimous, the reason for wanting to keep them is more ambiguous. Not everyone who wants to keep them is an imperialist, a racist or a xenophobe, some just like them for what they are. A street decoration or just somewhere convenient to meet someone. So why should we get rid of them?

The toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol may very well be an act of vandalism, as described by several members of our present government. The removal of Robert Milligan’s statue was however nothing of the sort, but what is fundamentally of more importance than how the statues were removed is what on Earth were they doing there at all? How is it possible that well into the 21st century we are still displaying images and paying tribute to men who were brutal slave traders and by implication mass murderers. It may very well be the case that these long dead ‘merchants and adventurers’ were philanthropic, giving huge amounts of money to their towns and colleges — but that money was blood money.

How would the supporters of these statues react if the local council in Munich erected a statue to Heinrich Himmler, another mass murdering slave owner from a more recent period
in history? Is it the historical context that matters? Is it only the slave trading empire building characters from Britain’s imperialist past that we need to remove? Some are calling for a more radical approach, even demanding that Winston Churchill and Oliver Cromwell are removed from the environs of Parliament.

This is the problem with movements, a sound idea in the first instance nearly always overstretches its remit often to ridiculous extremes. In removing statues that cause offence, where will we draw the line?

On the 14th October 2016 in Berkhamsted a bronze bust was unveiled of William the Conqueror, one of the most important Kings in English history. William was a heroic champion undoubtedly, but like the others heroes of our colourful past, he was also a mass murderer and ruthless despot who placed virtually the whole of Saxon England into bond serfdom and massacred tens of thousands of people as an example to others. If Edward Colston was a monster, and he undoubtedly was even by the standards of his time, King William the 1st was no less so.

Sharing the environs of Parliament with Churchill and Cromwell we find another great English, well French actually, king. Richard the Lionheart stands triumphant, sword in hand in the Old Palace Yard. Generations of British school children were educated to believe he was one of the greats. We now of course know that he was a genocidal crusader, who delighted in slaughtering Muslims, with scant regard for the country that reveres him spending the vast majority of his reign on crusade or in France. Why do we celebrate such a man with a statue?

Standing on the wall of the BBC headquarters in Portland Place is another statue with horrific associations. Eric Gill, its sculptor, was a sexual pervert of astounding depravity and the BBC has an unfortunate recent history with people like that. Just as with mass murderers and slave owners, we have to ask what it says about our society that it remains where it is.

The anti-statue movement has its work cut out at this rate just deciding who we can keep and who should go. While it is clear that statues of Edward Colston and his ilk have no place on our streets, someone is going to have to come up with a more coherent strategy for determining which monuments and statues must go and which must stay.

What the statue debate has taught us is that we urgently need to revisit our history and to place in perspective the things we revere and celebrate as our heritage. We cannot preach to others about values when our own are so mixed up.

Barry Turner is a Senior Lecturer in War Reporting and Human Rights and a member of the Royal United Services Institute.