A prominent Labour peer has called for a statue of Clive of India to be removed from its high-profile spot outside the Foreign Office in London, arguing that visiting Indian citizens and dignitaries should not be forced to walk past it.
Thangam Debbonaire said the statue commemorating Robert Clive’s bloody establishment of British rule presented the UK in a poor light and was historically inaccurate.
“That statue continues to promote him in a victorious mode and as a symbol of something that had universal good,” she said.
“I don’t think it’s helpful for any visitor to the Foreign Office, particularly those of us from Indian origins in the diaspora, but also visiting Indian people, Indian dignitaries, ambassadors, trade ministers, to walk into the Foreign Office past that statue. I don’t think that presents Britain in a particularly good light in the 21st century.”
Clive is one of the most controversial figures from Britain’s colonial past. The historian William Dalrymple has called him an “unstable sociopath” and a violent asset stripper.
The bronze statue, by the sculptor John Tweed was completed in 1912. It shows him in formal dress with one hand resting on the pommel of his sword, the other clutching papers. The inscription on the statue’s pedestal declares him simply as Clive.
Lady Debonnaire, a former shadow culture secretary, said the statue and the panels around its plinth gave a false impression.
“What it doesn’t do is contextualise or indeed give any honesty about what his presence in India actually did. He extracted a vast fortune. His former home, Powis Castle in Wales, contains hundreds if not thousands of objects that he took.
“What the statue doesn’t do is give any honesty about the impact of colonial rule on India. There is still a popular view held publicly across the UK of empire as beneficial to its recipients.”
Debbonaire described this as “wholly inaccurate”. “Before colonial rule, India was a very developed country. It understood free trade, it was trading with its neighbours – something the East India Company and the other colonising forces successfully crushed.
“Since independence, India has grown economically, scientifically, in engineering terms, in computing terms, artistic, and so on and so forth.”
Debbonaire was a Bristol MP when Black Lives Matter campaigners toppled the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston into the harbour in 2020.
The statue was placed in a Bristol museum last year, along with explanations of who Colston was and what happened to his memorial.
Of the Colston statue, Debbonaire said: “It still lives but in a different form, which gives it context. I don’t think the British are harmed by being more honest about the figures of our past.
“The current presentation of Clive in its current form and place do not achieve that.”
Debbonaire made comments at the weekend about the Clive statue at an appearance at the Edinburgh international book festival during a session on freedom of expression.
Explaining why she brought up the Clive statue during that session, she said: “One of the things that really matters in freedom of expression is an understanding of power and whose stories get to be told and how, and whose stories do not get to be told.”
