ou might think, given some of the responses, that the statue of slaver Edward Colston was one our best-loved national treasures. Priti Patel, the home secretary, called its toppling and dumping in Bristol harbour by Black Lives Matter protesters “utterly disgraceful” and “sheer vandalism”. The policing minister Kit Malthouse chipped in that it was “mob rule”. This is one occasion when Boris Johnson might, instead of adding to the chorus, have wheeled out those classical allusions he’s usually so free with – to educate his cabinet about basic cultural history. People have been toppling statues for as long as there have been effigies of the famous. The BLM iconoclasts were merely doing what was customary in ancient Rome. When Sejanus, cruel henchman of Emperor Tiberius, finally fell, so did his statues. The crowd attacked them as if beating up Sejanus himself. In Bristol, red paint to symbolise the blood of slaves was daubed on Colston’s bronze body. More recently, the most explicit way for the peoples of eastern Europe to celebrate their liberation from communism in 1989 was by pulling down the statues of leaders that had loomed over them for so long. I don’t remember any western politicians calling their actions “disgraceful” or “vandalism”. It was instead acclaimed as the legitimate voice of the people finally taking down the lies of the Stalin era. As an art lover, I could wish that we saw statues in a purely aesthetic way – but we don’t. We equate a statue with the person it represents and that’s pretty much it. When a revolution overthrew Pope Julius II in 16th-century Bologna, the city’s people celebrated by tearing down a colossus of the Pope, melting it, and using the bronze to make a huge cannon. It cut no ice that it happened to be a masterpiece by Michelangelo. Had Bristol’s statue of Colston been a work by some west country Michelangelo, there would obviously be more to debate. But it was just one of Britain’s legion of strange, unmemorable old statues put up in the Victorian age. Designed by one John Cassidy and erected in 1895, it typifies the artistically unimaginative genre of statuary favoured in Britain in the age of empire. If it wasn’t for the protests against it in recent years, the boring old figure of Colston would have been noticed by no one. It would have continued to fade into the fabric of our cities just as statues of Queen Victoria or Kitchener do. We don’t really notice these statues – until someone gets angry at them. This oddly brings them to life. Who took any notice of Oxford University’s statue of arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes before the Rhodes Must Fall campaign? It’s absurd to pretend Colston or Rhodes are much-loved heritage heroes or that their statues are major works of art. Colston’s record as a slave trader is established historical fact. Saying he was also a benefactor of Bristol is a bit like saying a serial killer was nice to his mum. At the heart of this is a long-running problem: Britain has never truly faced its slave-trading past. Bristol and Liverpool both mushroomed as cities on the flayed backs of slaves. The commercial boom that made Britain rich in the 18th century was fuelled by slavery and the Caribbean sugar plantations that relied on it. Bristol has fine Georgian houses whose every brick can be read as a monument to the slave trade. What’s not fair is to say slavery, or the sins of empire, make Britain inherently evil. That’s because we also have a history of conscience and protest. Anti-slavery campaigners stood up against this inhumanity in the 18th century. It was British abolitionists in the 1780s who published the infamous diagram of the Liverpool slave ship, the Brookes, revealing the way living people were crammed in. William Blake protested against enslavement in his prophecies; William Wordsworth wrote eloquently in support of the Haitian rebel leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture; and Mary and Percy Shelley boycotted sugar. Britain has plenty of heritage to be proud of – and the BLM protesters have just joined it. There is one argument made against removing statues that seems sound, at least on the surface. It is that we need more memory, not less. By erasing Colston’s statue, it might be claimed, you simply remove an image that made people think about a history we really should never forget. But it’s a fantasy to say we all go around contemplating the rights and wrongs of our past through the medium of Victorian statues. Yes, the history of slavery and empire should be central to our sense of Britain’s past. But we need to find new ways of understanding the transatlantic trade in humans. Why not start by replacing Colston’s statue with a big bold artwork that recreates the cargo deck of the Brookes?