We should not underestimate how mortified Keir Starmer and his team of cosmopolitan trendies feel to be governing a country like Britain.
Born in 1962, Starmer belongs to a tradition of left-wing politics infused with the adolescent spirit of that decade. The activism is less about public-spirited concern for the working man than a matter of viewing the past, in all its givenness, as a prison to which progressive politics is the escape key. For such people, leadership of Britain generates a special kind of embarrassment, owing to the fact that throughout our history we have managed to pull off being free and humane without ever falling seriously for the cult of progress.
We are talking, after all, about an hereditary kingdom with an established church, an imperial state crown, and a healthy suspicion of codified constitutions. Despite Tony Blair’s deliberate vandalism, much of this remains and much of the rest can be restored. As of yet, we have suffered no wholesale break with our past. I suspect that Starmer, if he had the interior life required to entertain such fantasies, would much prefer to be French or American.
Such juvenile politics can motivate all sorts of day-to-day decisions, from gift-wrapping the Chagos Islands for a CCP ally to removing portraits of grey-whiskered statesmen from government offices to make way for the likes of Ellen Wilkinson, a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. “Change”—the glib reason given for Rachel Reeves’s move to swap a Nigel Lawson photograph for one of this socialist boss girl—becomes its own justification.
Indeed, upon becoming the first female chancellor of the exchequer, Reeves vowed to replace all the wall-art in the No. 11 Downing Street state room with paintings either “of a woman or by a woman.” Rather than revering the office they have joined, it is typical of such activists to spite the heritage of the institutions from which they feel history has hitherto excluded them. I struggle to shake the suspicion that they would not be so petulant unless they feared deep down that such exclusion, at least in their own cases, may have been warranted. Margaret Thatcher had enough self-belief to avoid any urge to pretend that Pitt the Younger and William Gladstone were not great men.
It is in the light of Reeves’s callow, small-minded bitterness that the Labour government’s reported desire to ship the Elgin Marbles back to Greece should be understood. According to Craig Simpson, Arts Editor at The Telegraph, the government is actively looking for loopholes opened up by the 2022 Charities Act that may enable them to return the artefacts—a move otherwise forbidden by laws stemming from the British Museum Act of 1963.
We might have assumed that such technicalities would be thanked as a saving grace: any government that is unable or unwilling to make a moral case for keeping the marbles in Britain can at least see off the Greek demand for repatriation by taking refuge in legal arcana. This was the successful, if somewhat unheroic, strategy pursued by the Tories while in office.
The extraordinary thing about Starmer’s approach is that, without any fresh pressure whatsoever, he is going out of his way to raid our national museum of the jewel in its world-beating collection. The modern state of Greece has no meaningful diplomatic weight to throw around. The British government’s hand has not been forced. It is a blatant case of petty vandalism, motivated by the same cringing, half-educated embarrassment at our past that prompted the feeble Chagos agreement and Reeves’s decorative crusade against the glares of her more accomplished predecessors.
None of this is to scoff at the desire of Greeks or anyone else to see the sculptures reunited with the Acropolis of which they were once a part. Though I do not accept it, there is an aesthetic case for restitution. What is especially revealing about Labour’s search for a legislative loophole is that it would permit museums to dispose of artefacts in their care if the trustees feel they have a “moral obligation” to do so. In other words, the government views the case for returning the marbles to Athens as ethical, not aesthetic.
This lends a quality of self-abasement to what could otherwise be an interesting debate about cultural treasures and their curation. After all, what form can this “moral obligation” take if not an apologetic acknowledgement that the British Museum has been hoarding stolen goods for two centuries and will continue to be a beneficiary of unconscionable theft until the marbles are returned to their rightful owner?
The historical record does not support this account of how the marbles came to reside in Britain. Between 1801 and 1812, Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin and for a brief time Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, devoted much effort to removing many of the sculptures around the Parthenon—then, like the rest of Greece, under Turkish control—and shipping them to England.
Far from donning a balaclava and snatching them in the dead of night, Elgin acquired multiple forms of legal title from the governing Turks at a time when the local Greek population, for whatever reason, had been content to watch the gems clustered around the Acropolis fall into disrepair. Elgin was of the view that, rather than wasting away, the sculptures would be better off adorning a private museum that he was in the process of putting together.
After a series of financial headaches, Elgin instead sold the marbles to the British Museum, where they have remained for over two centuries—longer than the modern Greek state, arising in 1828, has existed. And even then, it was not until 1983 that the government of Greece put in a formal demand to have the artefacts returned.
The aesthetic case, hinging on the value of artistic unity, suffers more through practicalities than a failure of principle. It would do the sculptures lasting damage to be released into the open Mediterranean air. If returned, they would therefore not be reattached to the Parthenon but displayed in the neighbouring Acropolis Museum. It follows that we are dealing not with a case for restorative unity so much as geographical proximity, which seems pointless.
Nevertheless, to make a reparative rather than an aesthetic pitch for returning the marbles to Athens necessarily casts aspersions on Elgin and the wholly legitimate manner in which he acquired and transferred them. By extension, arguments with this moralising zeal also serve to condemn Britain herself as a longstanding enabler and beneficiary of cultural theft.
Since none of this is accurate, it is often remarked by the opponents of restitution that caving to Greek demands would mean surrendering our role as a custodian of world-historical cultures to a petty form of nationalism that is both possessive and light on detail. While this is true, we risk doing the case too much credit by viewing it only from the Greek perspective. The real marvel is that so many in our own ruling class, from George Osborne to Keir Starmer, are committed to applauding in Greeks the very sentiments they attack in us, when we dare to express them, as small-minded, reactionary, atavistic.
They are driven by a calculation that if they cannot be as great as our historic rulers they can at least be more morally preening. They are less embarrassed about inheriting the British Museum than they are troubled by the knowledge they could never have built it. Most of all, they find little comfort in the suggestion that their forebears may pride themselves on no more than a self-serving monument to the accomplishments of other civilisations. This is because they are well aware that, by creating such museums and achieving much else besides in the days when Britain bestrode the world, our ancestors secured for themselves a solid place alongside the most trailblazing heroes of classical antiquity.
As this government racks up more and more blunders, they will only be further tempted to revenge themselves upon our past, so intimidating are its glories.
The Revenge of the Mediocre
John Weis / Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
We should not underestimate how mortified Keir Starmer and his team of cosmopolitan trendies feel to be governing a country like Britain.
Born in 1962, Starmer belongs to a tradition of left-wing politics infused with the adolescent spirit of that decade. The activism is less about public-spirited concern for the working man than a matter of viewing the past, in all its givenness, as a prison to which progressive politics is the escape key. For such people, leadership of Britain generates a special kind of embarrassment, owing to the fact that throughout our history we have managed to pull off being free and humane without ever falling seriously for the cult of progress.
We are talking, after all, about an hereditary kingdom with an established church, an imperial state crown, and a healthy suspicion of codified constitutions. Despite Tony Blair’s deliberate vandalism, much of this remains and much of the rest can be restored. As of yet, we have suffered no wholesale break with our past. I suspect that Starmer, if he had the interior life required to entertain such fantasies, would much prefer to be French or American.
Such juvenile politics can motivate all sorts of day-to-day decisions, from gift-wrapping the Chagos Islands for a CCP ally to removing portraits of grey-whiskered statesmen from government offices to make way for the likes of Ellen Wilkinson, a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. “Change”—the glib reason given for Rachel Reeves’s move to swap a Nigel Lawson photograph for one of this socialist boss girl—becomes its own justification.
Indeed, upon becoming the first female chancellor of the exchequer, Reeves vowed to replace all the wall-art in the No. 11 Downing Street state room with paintings either “of a woman or by a woman.” Rather than revering the office they have joined, it is typical of such activists to spite the heritage of the institutions from which they feel history has hitherto excluded them. I struggle to shake the suspicion that they would not be so petulant unless they feared deep down that such exclusion, at least in their own cases, may have been warranted. Margaret Thatcher had enough self-belief to avoid any urge to pretend that Pitt the Younger and William Gladstone were not great men.
It is in the light of Reeves’s callow, small-minded bitterness that the Labour government’s reported desire to ship the Elgin Marbles back to Greece should be understood. According to Craig Simpson, Arts Editor at The Telegraph, the government is actively looking for loopholes opened up by the 2022 Charities Act that may enable them to return the artefacts—a move otherwise forbidden by laws stemming from the British Museum Act of 1963.
We might have assumed that such technicalities would be thanked as a saving grace: any government that is unable or unwilling to make a moral case for keeping the marbles in Britain can at least see off the Greek demand for repatriation by taking refuge in legal arcana. This was the successful, if somewhat unheroic, strategy pursued by the Tories while in office.
The extraordinary thing about Starmer’s approach is that, without any fresh pressure whatsoever, he is going out of his way to raid our national museum of the jewel in its world-beating collection. The modern state of Greece has no meaningful diplomatic weight to throw around. The British government’s hand has not been forced. It is a blatant case of petty vandalism, motivated by the same cringing, half-educated embarrassment at our past that prompted the feeble Chagos agreement and Reeves’s decorative crusade against the glares of her more accomplished predecessors.
None of this is to scoff at the desire of Greeks or anyone else to see the sculptures reunited with the Acropolis of which they were once a part. Though I do not accept it, there is an aesthetic case for restitution. What is especially revealing about Labour’s search for a legislative loophole is that it would permit museums to dispose of artefacts in their care if the trustees feel they have a “moral obligation” to do so. In other words, the government views the case for returning the marbles to Athens as ethical, not aesthetic.
This lends a quality of self-abasement to what could otherwise be an interesting debate about cultural treasures and their curation. After all, what form can this “moral obligation” take if not an apologetic acknowledgement that the British Museum has been hoarding stolen goods for two centuries and will continue to be a beneficiary of unconscionable theft until the marbles are returned to their rightful owner?
The historical record does not support this account of how the marbles came to reside in Britain. Between 1801 and 1812, Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin and for a brief time Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, devoted much effort to removing many of the sculptures around the Parthenon—then, like the rest of Greece, under Turkish control—and shipping them to England.
Far from donning a balaclava and snatching them in the dead of night, Elgin acquired multiple forms of legal title from the governing Turks at a time when the local Greek population, for whatever reason, had been content to watch the gems clustered around the Acropolis fall into disrepair. Elgin was of the view that, rather than wasting away, the sculptures would be better off adorning a private museum that he was in the process of putting together.
After a series of financial headaches, Elgin instead sold the marbles to the British Museum, where they have remained for over two centuries—longer than the modern Greek state, arising in 1828, has existed. And even then, it was not until 1983 that the government of Greece put in a formal demand to have the artefacts returned.
The aesthetic case, hinging on the value of artistic unity, suffers more through practicalities than a failure of principle. It would do the sculptures lasting damage to be released into the open Mediterranean air. If returned, they would therefore not be reattached to the Parthenon but displayed in the neighbouring Acropolis Museum. It follows that we are dealing not with a case for restorative unity so much as geographical proximity, which seems pointless.
Nevertheless, to make a reparative rather than an aesthetic pitch for returning the marbles to Athens necessarily casts aspersions on Elgin and the wholly legitimate manner in which he acquired and transferred them. By extension, arguments with this moralising zeal also serve to condemn Britain herself as a longstanding enabler and beneficiary of cultural theft.
Since none of this is accurate, it is often remarked by the opponents of restitution that caving to Greek demands would mean surrendering our role as a custodian of world-historical cultures to a petty form of nationalism that is both possessive and light on detail. While this is true, we risk doing the case too much credit by viewing it only from the Greek perspective. The real marvel is that so many in our own ruling class, from George Osborne to Keir Starmer, are committed to applauding in Greeks the very sentiments they attack in us, when we dare to express them, as small-minded, reactionary, atavistic.
They are driven by a calculation that if they cannot be as great as our historic rulers they can at least be more morally preening. They are less embarrassed about inheriting the British Museum than they are troubled by the knowledge they could never have built it. Most of all, they find little comfort in the suggestion that their forebears may pride themselves on no more than a self-serving monument to the accomplishments of other civilisations. This is because they are well aware that, by creating such museums and achieving much else besides in the days when Britain bestrode the world, our ancestors secured for themselves a solid place alongside the most trailblazing heroes of classical antiquity.
As this government racks up more and more blunders, they will only be further tempted to revenge themselves upon our past, so intimidating are its glories.
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