WE NEED NOT CELEBRATE ALL OF OUR HISTORY ALL OF THE TIME:

History matters. Britain is an old country, even if Tony Blair once sought to implausibly suggest the opposite. So, a fortnight after the brutal killing of George Floyd saw Black Lives Matter protests spread across the Atlantic, the British now seem to be talking mainly about statues.

This shows the extent to which people in the UK care deeply about the past. How we think about history can shape our sense of who are today. The multi-ethnic society that Britain has become is a direct product of our long history of Empire and decolonisation, and the post-war Commonwealth immigration which followed from it. But are we able to talk about what to do when there are different views of historic symbols - like statues - without descending into a dangerously polarised culture war?

People on both sides of our most polarised debates will often agree that they don't want a culture war, before setting out all of the things the other side needs to change. We can agree that the angry shouting-matches seen in the US are not something we particularly want to replicate. It should be possible to make the case for both racial equality and for Britain's history and identity - and would be a deep shame if one had to choose only one.

A good rule in politics is not to become the caricature that your opponents describe. The cultural left risks falling into the trap of adopting the type of "year zero" thinking that sees the right worry about a slippery slope. Yet the cultural right would be out of touch too with mainstream conservative opinion should it seem to make the defence of every statue of a slaver a litmus test for national pride. Thinking through the issues more rigorously could help those with different instincts to talk about where we might find common ground.

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