Losing Our Marbles?

Although I was on decidedly different premises at the time, I was a 19-year-old barman in a workingmen's cub in Consett (Delves Lane, if you know) when a public schoolboy first mistook me for a master in a public school. That has since happened routinely, including very recently. But no public schoolboy has ever mistaken me for a public schoolboy. There will be no real life Ealing comedy in which I was accidently made Leader of the Labour Party.

So while I would probably have liked it, and I have made occasional attempts to plug the gap, I never had a Classical education, as is immediately obvious to anyone who did. Therefore, I struggle to understand the emotional importance of holding onto half of the Parthenon sculptures and a haphazard assortment of other pieces, at least if they would be perfectly well looked after by people to whom their cultural significance was indisputable. In these parts, we have had a similar situation for many years. Until the campaign began in earnest to bring home the Lindisfarne Gospels, then the British Library had been unaware of holding it, much less had it been on display.

Unlike the Lindisfarne Gospels, and while anyone must fear for anything that was in the care of George Osborne, it is not that I actively want the Elgin Marbles to move, even if, unlike the Secretary of State for Education, I can at least pronounce their name correctly. They really do not care what they put in charge of the state education system, do they? This may as well be a Labour Government.

But well within the next 20 years, this Kingdom will be six counties lighter, and no one cares. The people who are making a fuss about the retention of the Elgin Marbles, and many of whom will soon be employees of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, abusively want rid of Scotland either despite their family ties to it or because of them, and they assume the Principality of Wales to be as fictitious as the Principality of Battenberg, except that there is a town called Battenberg.

Of course, neither the Union Flag nor the coat of arms would change in practice. Yet it is worth pondering how, for a start, the red saltire and the harp might be replaced with representations of the Elgin Marbles. Likewise, to the people in whose country the rest of us merely live, it matters who owns the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, but not who owns the utilities, the ports, the airports, the rail services, the communication networks, the steel production, or numerous other pieces of vital infrastructure. We are never going to understand.