With the recent controversy about the confederate flag and statues and monuments to confederate generals and leaders, I was wondering do analogous controversies arise in the UK? The centuries have seen numerous struggles for the throne, the civil wars, uprisings in Scotland and Ireland, etc. Is there a statute of limitations beyond which old grudges are let go as ancient history? For example, afaik Guy Fawkes Day is simply a day to have fun setting off 'crackers, not a day of black remembrance of a vile traitor. Would anyone eccentric enough to fly the Jacobite flag draw ire? I know that at one time things like this were taken dead seriously in Britain under various treason laws; what’s the situation now?
Jacobite? Nobody would care. Guy Fawkes? Just an excuse to have a party.
The Guardian tried to find a Jacobite claimant to the throne to litigate his rights a few years ago, just to cause trouble. The German prince who was nearest declined to play.
I think we’re on the whole fairly sanguine about stuff like that. There’s a statue of George Washington in Trafalgar Square, after all.
Anyone professing serious Jacobite tendencies is likely to get a polite smile, and later an upraised eyebrow.
There’s a Gandhi one in Parliament Square.
Most memorials in Britain are in order: WWI, WWII, 2nd South African.
For the last there’s rather a good statue in Bury St. Edmunds. Very few people could tell you when the last Boer War was.
( There’s also a tribute to Ouida, unveiled by no less than Lord Curzon. )
Where there are battlefields, there can be tributes to either side, in suitably nondescript language.
Actually, no. This is what you imagine happens based in your own reactions.
In reality, most people aren’t interested; some shrug; some mildly argue; some are interested and twice complete strangers have told me they also are so. Basically it’s like saying one’s a tolstoyan anarchist or a situationist; sufficiently odd that it’s out of experience, but not so much as believing in some peculiar American religion or believing in aliens ( both of which I have also met ).
In 300 years time people will find it odd if you profess social democracy or libertarianism: they also will be of the distant past. That doesn’t ‘disprove’ either creed.
You are supposing an awful lot here.
Congrats on free associating while in charge of a keyboard/headwand.
For good historical grudges, you have to go to Northern Ireland, where parades commemorating the 1690 Battle of the Boyne are an annual sore point.
Well, the thing is, I know from experience; and I know when people are amused or smirking. Really, most people don’t care one way or another.
i have no idea what this means.
I think you’re onto something here: people don’t care about ancient history so much as they care about enduring legacies. I now strongly suspect that the real objection to the Confederate flag isn’t that it was the standard of a movement that was killed 150 years ago; but rather it became the symbol of discrimination and oppression in the pre-Civil Rights era.
Actually, the Confederate flag really only became a widely-known and used symbol DURING the Civil Rights era; Georgia, for example, added the Southern Cross to the state flag in 1956, and the Confederate flag started flying over the South Carolina statehouse in 1961. It became a symbol of opposition to civil rights, a way to show white resistance to the emerging reality of the end of discrimination.
And the other statue immediately in front of the National Gallery is of James II. The two of them together are as neat an illustration as you could possibly want of just how laid back the British can be about such things.
[QUOTE=Lumpy]
I think you’re onto something here: people don’t care about ancient history so much as they care about enduring legacies. I now strongly suspect that the real objection to the Confederate flag isn’t that it was the standard of a movement that was killed 150 years ago; but rather it became the symbol of discrimination and oppression in the pre-Civil Rights era.
[/QUOTE]
Much the same can be said about those historical events that still arouse controversy in the UK. It’s not as if either Guy Fawkes or the Boyne have been remembered with the same enthusiasm continuously since the seventeenth century; both anniversaries have been re-invented at various later moments when they were used to promote more topical political agendas. So Orange Order marches are now primarily about the very recent past, even if they continue to use all the old iconography. Whereas elsewhere in the UK Bonfire Night has become just an excuse for some fireworks because there anti-Catholicism, once so virulent, has entirely disappeared as a political issue.
Except, of course, in Northern Ireland, until the whole Good Friday process included measures to try to reduce tensions about symbolic coat-trailing (but with varying degrees of success).
And there’s a certain unease about the uses to which extreme right-wingers have put both the Union flag and the St George’s flag (but various sporting occasions have rather turned the tide on that).
As far as the Jacobites are concerned, I think that if you asked a hundred random strangers what they knew about them, you would be lucky to find one who didn’t ask “What’s a Jacobite?”
Cromwell’s statue sometimes causes controversy. To many in England, including myself, he’s the greatest Englishman of all, a staunch Republican who crammed monarchy into the dustbin where it belonged. It’s a real shame the parasites came straight back after his death. There are those though, not least the Irish, who found his treatment of opponents a little too harsh.
Even Churchill’s statue occasionally gets harshly treated. The son of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour got in trouble a few years back during some sort of anti-capitalist protest. I think it may have been linked to defacing a Churchill statue, but I could be wrong.
Jacobite statues? There are a number in the Highlands. They are not overly controversial, but it’s probably best not to go on an anti-Jacobite/Scottish rant whilst standing near them.
He got done for swinging about on the Cenotaph.
In much the same way that to many in Germany, Hitler is the greatest German of all.
Interesting perception of someone who basically used God to justify his actions, trashed the established law and destroyed the freedom of parliament in the name of ‘the people’, much in the fashion that later south american Juntas did.
Oh, and then he pretty much reinvented the monarchy and the House of Lords in all but name 
Why don’t you simply admit that it has become a symbol of racism? Last time I was in SC, I saw a small panel truck adorned with confederate flags and slogans like “Impeach Obama”. There were other racist displays. It is KKK under a different symbol.
Now Richmond (and doubtless many other places) has a statue of Robert E. Lee. I don’t see that as primarily (or even significantly) racist, but it does honor a traitor. See tomorrow’s Doonesbury cartoon (we get the Sunday cartoons on Saturday) for an effective reply to the common misconception that secession was about anything other than slavery.