The Consultation Institute’s Legal and Parliamentary Officer writes reports on a less familiar take on statues: how to adding a new one! Stephen Hill suggests in an opinion piece that the process for planning for the statue has become contentious…
image: for illustration – Balfour, Lady Francis, CC via Wikimedia Commons
…unusually….story this week is not about the removal of a statue, but the erection of one…
Stephen Hill writes for the TCI:
Over the last few years we have all become familiar with stories about statues. The first was the Edward Colston statue in Bristol, torn down by protestors and dropped in Bristol harbour for his deep connections to slavery, and since then there has been a steady drip-feed of argument and counter-argument about the rectitudes of removing statues, names and other tributes to public figures connected to the sins of the past. In Bristol, they resolved it by convening a history commission and undertaking a public consultation, a model also followed in Stroud, which the Government also advocated and promised legislation on (albeit without the ‘history commission’ bit).
Unusually, our statue story this week is not about the removal of a statue, but the erection of one. The Royal Mile in Edinburgh is probably the most famous streets in Scotland, most recently and prominently seen during HM the Queen’s funeral cortege and lying-in-rest ceremonies last month. In 2021, the Lord Provost of Edinburgh (the chair of the City Council) announced that joining the 12 statues of men already on the Royal Mile would be the first woman, the suffragist and medical pioneer Dr Elsie Inglis, whose work during the First World War in Russia and Serbia distinguished her internationally.
Initially the trustees of the foundation looking to put up the statue, near the site of a maternity hospital founded by her, opened a competition to design it, starting in August, with a winning design to be announced next April. Only a few months on, the trustees announced the closure of the competition, and the appointment of the King’s Sculptor in Ordinary in Scotland, Alexander Stoddart to design the monument.
The decision has not gone down well. Supporters of the campaign have responded angrily, not only that the competition has been closed, but also that there was no consultation before Stoddart’s acceptance of the commission was announced. The trustees changed their approach to the statue after the Queen’s funeral procession, and “considerations that have been brought to the attention of the trustees”, which they claimed rendered the original brief “suboptimal”.
The plans for the statue have now been paused in their entirety over the furore, and the trustees are considering the feedback and options. The whole dispute has got us wondering about the other end of the statue process- how it is decided whether statues are required, and what their design should be. One of the things we sometimes talk about is the difference between consulting on principle, and consulting on design. It crops up primarily in planning consultations, where sometimes you find that, like here, people agree with something in principle, but when it comes to design there’s a disagreement.
The dispute here seems to be largely of that form, albeit it has become a particularly bitter one with a war of words being fought by both sides. In this case, it seems to be revolving mostly around whether the sculptor is the right person, rather than design considerations per se, and it’ll be interesting to see how the issue is resolved. Consultors will be well aware of the principle that it’s generally advisable not to pull exercises in the middle of their process- public authorities have got in trouble for doing so in the past. Whilst this is a competition, rather than a consultation process, it does touch upon consultation issues, and leaves us asking- should they have consulted on the different designs?
