David Lloyd George’s childhood home is to be “decolonised” with the help of funding from the Welsh government. The Liberal prime minister’s modest cottage in rural Wales has been converted into a museum, which has been swept into plans to remodel his homeland along lines advocated by the Black Lives Matter movement (Telegraph).
Amgueddfa Lloyd George Museum in Llanystumdwy, which describes itself as “dedicated to the life and times of David Lloyd George”, has been working with a “decolonisation consultant” to alter how history is presented and bring it into alignment with the propositions of radical identity politics.
According to the museums service for Plaid Cymru-run Gwynedd council, which operates the site, this project involved staff undergoing taxpayer funded “anti-racist” training.
Anti-racism is the Critical Race Theory-inspired idea that it isn’t enough for white people to not be racist, and that they must instead be actively ‘anti-racist’; that is, rooting out unconscious racial bias in themselves and other white folk, and reinterpreting their supposedly hard-won individual achievements and successes in light of the ‘white privilege’ that centuries of colonial brutality and exploitation has afforded them.
It is understood that consultancy services were provided by the project Re:Collections, run by the Association of Independent Museums, which has been awarded grant funding by the Welsh government.
Re:Collections advises museums to ensure that “BAME perspectives and experiences are treated as a natural part of the histories that museums document and explore”. It also advises museums to ensure “collections, activities and exhibitions present a greater diversity of BAME perspectives, histories and experiences”.
Lloyd George was instrumental in enacting major social reforms aimed at reducing poverty and improving workers’ conditions. As Chancellor, he introduced several pillars of the future welfare state, including state pensions in 1909.
However, as Prime Minister when the British Empire was at its largest, Lloyd George was also involved in colonial ventures. After World War I, with the Treaty of Versailles, he helped negotiate the treaty terms that carved up former German and Ottoman territories, ensuring that Britain gained new overseas territories. His government also put down the Great Iraqi Revolution of 1920 in one of the first major uses of aerial bombardment as a method of controlling a colonial population.
Re:Collections, the decolonising consultancy service employed by Llanystumdwy museum, was paid for by grants from a broader programme by the Welsh government, which instructs public bodies, including libraries, galleries, museums and public artworks on how to ensure statues, plaques and paintings project the “right historic narrative”.
Announced in 2022 by the then Deputy Minister for Arts and Sport, Dawn Boden, the Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan, was proposed in response to Black Lives Matter protests. It formed part of a £4.5 million drive to ensure councils promote a “decolonised account of the past, one that recognises both historical injustices and the positive impact of ethnic minority communities”.
The Action Plan also states that Wales will become “an anti-racist nation” by 2030.
With little more than five years to go until the Welsh Government’s Year Zero date, the pace of the Welsh cultural revolution is starting to accelerate.
Thanks to proposals that form part of a wider £135,000 grant drawn down from the Action Plan’s funding stream, a project called ‘Anti-Racist Library Collections’ has begun instructing Welsh librarians on how to align with “anti-racist principles” via new staff training sessions on “critical whiteness studies” and overcoming the “dominant paradigm of whiteness”.
In a training guide part-funded by the Welsh government and developed for the country’s library sector by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (Cilip) in Wales, library staff are assisted “in their journey towards creating anti-racist libraries” with advice on developing anti-racist acquisition policies, anti-racist methodologies, anti-racist stock and collections, anti-racist stock evaluation, anti-racist library practices, anti-racist book clubs, anti-racist cataloguing and classification practices, anti-racist community engagement, and anti-racist template letters for anti-racist correspondence with local community groups.
Across the 120-page document, the phrase “anti-racist” features a total of 273 times.
Earlier this year, it emerged that “decolonisation training experts” tasked with delivering this project stipulate that training sessions for library staff should not take place in buildings with a “racist” past.
As per the warning in a “venue booking” guide created by Cilip in Wales, trainers must: “Be mindful of the venue and if you have a choice, do not choose a venue that represents a racist legacy.”
The booking guide also makes provision in case avoiding buildings with a “racist” past is not possible, stating: “If you have to use a venue that has a racist past, acknowledge this as early as possible to demonstrate your commitment to systemic issues.”
Helpfully for Welsh librarians, the Action Plan has already yielded a user-friendly blacklist of buildings in the country likely to be thick with the sort of spectral miasma of toxic whiteness that anti-racism trainers would no doubt wish to avoid.
In it 2021 report, The Slave Trade and the British Empire: An Audit of Commemoration in Wales, the devolved government scrutinised a total of 57 monuments. 93 public buildings and places, and 442 street names for their linguistic connections to 203 famous British historical figures with alleged links to the British Empire, the African slave trade and/or colonialism more generally.
The audit includes a traffic light rating system to indicate the level of deplorability each location possesses. Red demonstrates “definite personal culpability” of the location’s namesake, orange suggests “personal culpability uncertain”, while green signifies that the location has either already been forced to undergo self-transformation by the forces of progress, or has been interrogated and found not guilty of commemorating the individual(s) in question.
Commenting on Amgueddfa Lloyd George Museum’s decolonisation agenda, a Welsh Government spokesperson said: “Our anti-racist Wales Action Plan is built on the values of anti-racism and calls for zero tolerance of all racial inequality.
“We funded the AIM Re:Collections programme which helps museums deliver the goals of our anti-racist Wales action plan. The Action Plan emphasises the importance of representing and reflecting the history and culture of black, Asian and minority ethnic people to ensure that their contribution to Wales is recognised.”
