James Ford is a public affairs consultant. He worked as an aide to the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, at City Hall between 2010 and 2012.
The Culture Wars are over. That is the overwhelming message from the new Labour Government, as newly installed Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson announced plans to repeal the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 that was intended to fine universities if they failed to ensure freedom of speech on campuses.
The Education Secretary, however, is not the only Labour politician waving the white flag in the Culture Wars. London Mayor Sadiq Khan has quietly called time on his Commission on Diversity in the Public Realm. Billed “as a landmark commission to ensure London’s historic achievements are properly reflected across the capital” and intended to “drive for greater diversity across the public realm – including statues, street names, building names and memorials,” the Mayor launched the Commission with great fanfare in 2021 at the height of his first re-election campaign.
Of course, you would be forgiven for not realising that the Commission had been wound up. There was no press release from City Hall announcing the move. (I only learned of it when I read a eulogy for the Commission on another blog site). The Commission’s last meeting was held on 31 January this year. Presumably, the Mayor has now concluded, after three years of committee meetings and doling out large public grants, that London’s public realm is now diverse. Job done. Mission accomplished. Nothing more to see here.
This, of course, seems unlikely. The policy context for the Commission was an Art UK report, published in October 2021, which found that 79 per cent of London’s statues and memorials to named individuals were dedicated to men (some 21 per cent of all public sculptures). There were twice as many statues dedicated to animals (eight per cent) than to women (four per cent). Whilst London had more statues of people of colour than any other UK cities, white men still dominated. It seems unlikely that these numbers have changed significantly over the past 3 years.
What the commission has excelled at is spending taxpayers’ money. In addition to the £1 million plus lavished on the Commission’s Untold Stories programme (which has funded around 70 community projects in 24 London Boroughs – none of them Conservative-controlled, of course), the Commission has also contributed £130,000 towards an AIDS/HIV memorial and £500,000 for a memorial to the Slave Trade in Docklands. However, it is hard to calculate what policy impact the Commission has had, and what kind of longevity or legacy will the projects it funded have now that the City Hall chequebook has been closed.
The Mayor has hired Social Life, a consultancy that specialises in research and community projects “exploring how people are affected by changes in the built environment” (and which has undertaken work for the GLA before) to assess the Commission’s impact. But is this the best way to assess the Commission’s achievement? No historians are being asked to render their verdict. Nor will any economists or accountants be asked to assess if the Commission has provided value for money. The Mayor is not even asking Art UK to conduct another assessment of London’s memorials and statues to compare the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of the Commission, and quantify if the capital’s public realm is now definitively diverse.
The lack of a truly independent evaluation of the Commission’s work arguably tells us everything we need to know. But it is hard to ignore the fact that the Commission – or, by extension, the Mayor – toppled no statues. This is despite the fact that, when launching the Commission, Sadiq told the BBC: “There are some slavers that should come down, and the commission will advise on that.”
In fact, neither the Mayor nor his Commission can take credit for any of the controversial statues that have been removed, or other high-profile public renamings that have occurred in the past few years. The Canal and River Trust announced it would be removing a statue of slaver Robert Milligan from outside the Museum of London Docklands in the summer of 2020, many months before the Commission’s first meeting. Many other major London institutions with links to slavery and slavers – such as Cass Business School (now known as the Bayes Business School)) and the Geffrye Museum (now known as the Museum of the Home) – rebranded themselves without any input from the Mayor or the Commission. At the same time, Nelson’s Column has never been toppled, despite the hopes of the left wing commentariat.
Of course, policy impact and value for money were never the point. If the Mayor was really going to enter the culture wars, this was never going be the first – or biggest – battlefield. The Commission never seriously intended to re-write or re-balance London’s contested history. If the Mayor of London had been serious about wanting to topple the icons of Empire then the Commission would have needed planning powers – but it didn’t have any.
As Historic England has recognised, addressing the UK’s forgotten histories is best done through the school curriculum – but the Mayor of London has no power over schools. If the Mayor wanted this quango to have legitimacy and be taken seriously, he would have filled it with credible historians and experts. Instead it featured just one historian, one art historian…and an actor that starred in Rogue One. The Commission could have been set up as a permanent fixture of the GLA to contribute to the London Plan, but it was only ever set up for a limited period – just long enough for lefty activism to move on to its next cause célèbre.
Rather, the Commission had two real aims: to allow Sadiq to shamelessly posture and virtue signal to his supporters, and to stoke outrage amongst his opponents. And it has succeeded on both fronts.
While being bad at history undoubtedly makes for poor public policy, there is no denying that it can create great political theatre for those on the left. An angry reaction from Conservatives to the Commission on Diversity in the Public Realm served its purpose in 2020 and 2021. The commission was first trailed by Sadiq Khan in the summer of 2020 in the wake of the death of George Floyd, as the Black Lives Matter movement was in its ascendancy, and when the angry burghers of Bristol were chucking the statue of Edward Colson into the harbour. Sadiq Khan has never been one to watch a bandwagon trundle past without shamelessly trying to jump aboard. (Remember that investigation into decriminalising cannabis he launched in 2022 but which has yet to report?).
Everything about this quango, from the timing of its creation iin the midst of a frenetic wave of vandalism and statue toppling to the initial appointment of noted Queen-heckler Toyin Agbetu to its ranks, was intended to provoke an angry response from Conservatives. To Tory ears it sounded like Sadiq Khan was determined to re-write the capital’s history, tear down its statues and rename its streets, parks and public buildings after Karl Marx and Mao Zedong. For a Conservative commentator the Commission was, simultaneously, terrifyingly Orwellian, political correctness gone mad and the epitome of cancel culture. And the Mayor knew that.
The Commission on Diversity in the Public Realm is not being wound up because it has finished its work. It isn’t even being disbanded because the Mayor has belatedly realised that dabbling in statues and street names does nothing to grow the economy, improve air quality or fight a cost of living crisis. It is being cancelled because the Mayor can no longer use it to score political points. Contested history is no longer in the news. The spotlight has now moved on. And so, therefore, must the antics of our headline-hungry Mayor.