Mitchell Library, Glasgow
Lesley McDowell
The problem with this debate, laudable as it was, was that it lacked an opposition. The question "should we apologise for the past?" was answered by John Gilmore, AC Grayling, Melanie McGrath, Mike Phillips and Clare Short, and by and large they all agreed that yes, we should.
There were varying opinions about what "apology" can do: does it merely fetishise certain aspects of history? Gilmore felt that "an apology is probably a good idea but it shouldn't be simply a feel-good excuse for politicians", while Grayling demurred slightly by saying that apologies were only worth anything if the person apologising actually meant it and learned enough from it to do better in the future. "Why," he asked, "are we not doing something about the 12 million people living in slavery throughout the world right now?"
What has occasioned this collective wringing of hands is the highly publicised 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery - although, Mike Phillips argued, that wasn't the right date at all. Phillips was concerned with why we feel the need to make apologies, and he didn't want the anniversary to polarise black and white: whites sorry for what their ancestors did; blacks angry about what was done to theirs. He wanted "apology" to mean a nicer world than the one we have now.
Clare Short enjoyed using the occasion to attack Tony Blair's obsessive-compulsive need to apologise for everything, including the Irish potato famine ("everything except the things he is actually responsible for") and was worried that apologies are an easy option. Melanie McGrath argued that the Inuit people forced by the Canadian government to live in inhospitable regions in the 1950s, where many of them died in excruciating circumstances, were due an apology - and, what's more, wanted one.
But while none of this was particularly objectionable - how can any right-minded person not oppose slavery? - what was needed was someone who opposed the whole notion of apologising on moral grounds, if only to set fire to what was ultimately a rather damp squib of a debate. Preaching to the converted is always easy. And, alas, often rather dull.
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