As the Guardian has noted in an email newsletter this morning:
Rishi Sunak cancelled a meeting with Greek prime minister Kyiakos Mitsotakis at the last minute on Monday after his counterpart gave an interview calling for the Parthenon marbles to be returned from the British Museum. In a renewed row over the fate of the antiquities, which were taken from the Acropolis in the 19th century, Mitsotakis told reporters he was “deeply disappointed by the abrupt cancellation”.
I am simply staggered by this.
The Elgin Marbles were looted by the UK two centuries ago.
They are not ours.
They belong to Greece.
To pretend otherwise is deeply embarrassing.
To refuse their return is simply wrong.
To make a diplomatic incident out of this shows a profound lack of judgment whilst waving the flag for our past colonial failings.
Sunak should be ashamed of himself.
Any decent politician should commit to the return of stolen property.
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Agreed.
Having visited the Parthenon in April this year, there are artifacts that are being returned (in a trickle, but not a flood, to be honest) by other countries (who also looted the Parthenon in the same era).
Sunak probably thinks ‘giving back stolen property to foreigners’ is too ‘woke’. Utterly pathetic.
This is utterly childish from Sunak, who us putting a veneer on ‘worst PM’ stakes.
My hope is at the next election the Tories will be wiped out to such an extent, so that they never recover. (Unlikely, but there is always hope.)
Does that include repealing and overturning successive Inclosure and Commons Acts?
It should
I can’t believe Sunak really has a view on this, it is all about “what will play best to my supporters?”.
So far, so bad… but will Keir Starmer dare take a principled stand? The track record does not encourage me.
From what I heard on my morning’s news round-up, Starmer’s position is currently that he would support loaning the Marbles back a few at a time for limited periods. Pathetic.
I will be discussing this on Radio 2 – the Jeremy Vine Show – at 12
Starmer really IS deserving of one of my nicknames for him – that of Sir Useless Woodentop. Agreed, Kaal Rosser – utterly pathetic. And TOTALLY fails to meet the need! Zero judgement alas.
I’ve compared him before to Zimri in Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel”.
Here it is again:
“A man so various, that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind’s epitome.
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong;
Was everything by starts, and nothing long
But, in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon;”
The two bits that really fit are “Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong” and the final word “buffoon”
Alas, a lethal, amoral and sociopathic buffoon.
I think it shows how petty the UK can be. It’s been going on for 200 years!
We are talking about 17 sculptures that clearly mean a lot more to the people of Greece than the UK. I doubt whether they mean much to the average Brit.
They are the booty of empire. We should do the right thing and give them back.
It’s been going for far longer than 200 years. Britain has never cast off its buccaneering attitude: if we can nick it, it’s ours. Go to just about any museum in Britain and you’ll find booty displayed as other peoples’ culture, but rarely with adequate mention of how it was acquired i.e. that it’s as often as not the spoils of Empire, taken without the owners’ consent. Elgin Marbles, Benin Bronzes, enormous quantities of Indian artefacts and even the scalps of native-American chiefs. In my travels around the world I was struck by the foreignors’ views about the British Empire: a mix of contempt (for the wholesale plundering and extractionism) and grudging admiration (for how we got away with it for so long). Sunak’s attitude to the Greeks about the Elgin Marbles (why aren’t they called the Parthenon Marbles?) smacks of the Establishment entitlement that is so obvious in our politics too.
The simplest solution other than just returning them would be simply make full size copies of them, display those copies in British museum with a public relations diatribe about how the stolen originals were gained then graciously returned after thoughtful talks with Greek government. The ongoing saga about keeping such stolen items is a bit ludicrous.
Spot on
With reference to copying the Marbles, it seemed to have been a common practice in the past. The Victoria & Albert museum has a whole bunch of such copies on display . They are splendid, well worth a visit.
Therefore no reason it cant be done in this most important example.
There are already some wonderful copies of them in Peebles, Scotland. Dare I say it, they were actually more interesting to see because they are in pristine condition.
Having twice visited the awe inspiring replica of the Lascaux cave in France and seen the amazing work of the people who recreated it so accurately down to the last millimetre, it is not beyond the wit of man to create accurate replicas of the marbles for the British museum and send the originals back where they belong.
They could scan and 3d print them now
Richard Compton (son of Robin Compton and Janey Kenyon-Slaney) did exactly this when he needed money to restore a stable block at Newby Hall.
Saw a TV show on newby Hall were the presenter could determine which one of the 10 ancient statues was a copy.
Careful, Richard, we say ‘Parthenon Marbles’ It’s the Telegraph that calls them ‘Elgin Marbles’.
We don’t say ‘Goering Rembrandt’.
I agree
I made the point just now on Radio 2, where I was asked to discuss this
It could be that the British Museum and government are embarsed by the damage done to them when the paint was stripped off. This also damaged the carving.
I wonder how many of us live in houses which have been stolen from nature. If the house wasn’t there in the last century you could argue that the theft is very recent too.
Nature is ‘irreplaceable, once lost it’s gone forever’ ©CPRE.
Ah but the developer acquired the land legally, you would say.
You never answered my last question and now you return with a really very strange conspiracy theory.
Might you deal with the question I asked about Sizewell?
All conspiracy theories are strange Sir.
There is one going around that after an environmental assessments running to tens of thousands of pages and a planning process that’s taken over a decade, all the engineers and scientists are conspiring to get a power station application through to build and deliberately put the public at risk. Their motive is not explained.
A lot of people are signed on to that conspiracy theory. It doesn’t make doing so any more respectable than believing the moon landings were faked.
I have opposed Sizewell since 1971. I was 13.
My father planned the power lines out of Sizewell – the pair of lines you will see striding across East Anglia.
He was an intelligent man. A senior engineer.
He was utterly unable to justify the risks Sizewell created to me. He simply said science would solve them, without knowing how.
That made him part of an utterly irresponsible conspiracy.
It is still going on.
It would seem you are part of it.
I asked you to justify your position. My father never could. How do you?
We don’t appear to have any decent politicians in Westminster imo.
There are also very view of this endangered species in Washington, DC.