Heritage Sector & Bigots!

 BLANCMANGE or NEUTRALITY in the Heritage Sector?

NEXT Friday, the 17th, January 2020, Tristram Hunt, the director of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, will begin a series of talks on Radio 4 about Museums in the 21st Century and their relevance.  In the blurb the BBC announces this forthcoming event thus: 

'Museums have never been more popular around the world or faced such sustained criticism. While the Louvre enjoys record-breaking visitor numbers, Abu Dhabi's Saadiyat Island builds a new museum campus for the Middle East and blockbusters from Leonardo to Van Gogh to David Bowie circle the globe, museums are also under challenge. Critics questions historic claims to neutrality, call for the repatriation of colonial-era artefacts and protest over the origins of sponsors' money.'

 https://www.bbc.co.uk › BBC Radio 4 › Curating the Future

In May 2018, the director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tristram Hunt, had caused a bit of a stir when he announced: ‘I see the role of the museum not as a political force but as a civic exchange.’  Adding that he ‘was not so sure [that museums] have a duty to be vehicles for social justice’.

On July 5th, 2019, in an article on the Red Pepper website Siobhan McGuirk wrote a passionate piece entitled 'Museums are socially vital precisely because of their political nature' in which it was declared:

"We are in the midst of a momentous self-regarding public debate over what it means to be British. From the shadows of referendum campaigning until now, misrepresentations, half-truths and outright lies have proliferated, recasting the past to demonise the other. The phrase ‘fake news’ has been co-opted to the point of meaninglessness, while flagship media outlets grant platforms to bigots, justified as promoting ‘neutrality’ – as if facts were up for debate, or ‘civic exchange’."

Indeed, Red Pepper's mention of  'flagship media outlets grant platforms to bigots', naturally reminds one of an incident in April 2010 in which the Rochdalian lass,Gillian Duffy, 65, heckled the prime minister [Gordon Brown} as he was interviewed live on TV in Rochdale.  Brown initially ignored her but was then asked by senior aides in his entourage to meet her.

Later the Prime Minister was then famously caught on tape as, unknown to him, the microphone was still turned on:
Brown: 'That was a disaster. Well I just ... should never have put me in with that woman.  Whose idea was that?'

Aide: 'I don't know, I didn't see.....'

Aide: 'What did she say?'

Brown: 'Oh everything, she was just a sort of bigoted woman.  She said she used be Labour. I mean it's just ridiculous.

 'Just a sort of bigoted women'.  Which is precisely the attitude someone on the self righteous left of politics would take, is it not?

Brown then followed with more painfully patronising talk from:

Brown:  'Very good to meet you, and you're wearing the right colour today. Ha, ha, ha: How many grandchildren do you have?'
Duffy:  'Two. They've just got back from Australia where they got stuck for 10 days. They couldn't get back with this ash crisis.'
Brown: 'We've been trying to get people back quickly.  Are they going to university.  Is that the plan?
Duffy: 'I hope so. They're only 12 and 10.'
Brown: 'Are they're doing well at school?  [pats Duffy on the back]  A good family, good to see you. It's very nice to see you.'

How pompous and smarmy can you get?  And is it any wonder that Labour is failing to gel with the northern working class?

Red Pepper itself has previously distinguished itself by finding space to argue the case for 'no platforming' people they don't like or people they may regard as being 'bigots'.  .   

For more on Museums go to: 

BRING BACK KROPOTKIN! - Northern Voices

northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com › 2020/01 › bring-back-kropotkin

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Steve Platt on Colin Ward & John Rety

In the 2010 April / May issue of Red Pepper

Steve Platt wrote in his column 'PLATTITUDES'

a feature on the deaths of Colin Ward, aged 85, and

John Rety, 79.  He said that this 'had deprived the

British anarchist movement of two of its most

original and influential thinkers.' 

He added:

'I first came across them through squatting campaigns in the 1970s, by which time they were already veterans of the pre-1960s generation of political activists who kept a left libertarian flag flying before it became fashionable to do so.

'Both men helped with Squatting-the Real story (Bay Leaf Books, 1980), a book for which I was the main writer.  Colin wrote a chapter on the post-war seizure of army camps, hotels and other buildings, when tens of thousands od ex-servicemen and their families laid down a challenge to the 1945 Labour government to deliver on its promise of decent homes for all. 

'John, who was a key squatting activist in Camden Town, gave generously of his time, knowledge and activist energy in helping me to assemble the history of the later squatting movement that emerged in Britain from the late 1960s.

'Indeed, the survival of Camden Town as we know it today owes much to the resistance initiated by John and his partner Susan Johns in 1973 to their eviction by a property developer from the shop they ran at 220, Camden High Street.  At the time, companies associated with Cromdale Holdings owned a quarter of the properties in the area;  50 shops were empty pending redevelopment.

John and Susan's squatting of their old shp acted as a catalyst for the fight to save the high street, which was eventually won...

'For me, Colin and John were key communicators of the message that there was life on the left beyond state socialism.  From housing cooperatives to allotments, from holiday chalets to garden sheds, Colin's approach to "anarchy" in action ( the title he chose for what is still the best - and certainly most readable - book on the subject around) was rooted in the practice and everyday in a manner that made his most utopian of visions seem no more than ordinary common sense. 

John's anarchism sparkled most fully in his love of poetry and commitment to live performance, notably at Torriano Meeting House.  First squatted as a arts centre, which provided early platforms for artists as diverse as Emma Thompson and John Hegley.  There was delicious irony, that one-time bastion of the British Communist Party.

'I was too young to enjoy Colin's editorship of the journal Anarchy and John's of the paper  Freedom at the time they were published.  But the back issues I saw later helped to inspire in me a belief in the potential of small-circulation publications with often esoteric interests to have an influence way beyond their immediate readerships.  That's one reason why I'm associated with the magazine I'm writing for here.'