Honestly I'm in favour of giving them back just so we don't have this same rigmarole every few months. Just cut a deal that we'll return them in exchange for short term loans of other stuff on a rotation. Wins all round.
I'm going to guess that the selection process for trustees now consists of a single question, and if you answer "give them back" you don't get to be a trustee.
I did a quick search and ‘Keeping their marbles how the treasures of the past ended up in museums...and why they should stay there’ is in LibGen. I’m sure that’s fine though. Meta will be a super safe custodian.
British museum going to British museum! Last bastion of old ideas! If you want to see innovation or organisations doing great work with communities look elsewhere!
They've already been 3D scanned and replicas could be made so the originals can be returned. But then they'd have set precedent and be forced to scan/return millions of other items stolen by the Victorians!
Starmer has never seen a reactionary privilege or an injustice of empire that he wouldn't bend over backward to preserve.
Also, my local history museum's board has an architect, an archaeologist, a teacher... The idea we can have national cultural institutions run by random celebrities is bobbins.
One assumes that the principal reason that the British Museum doesn't want to give them back is the precedent it would set. After all, if they had to give back all the stuff we had nicked without asking from other cultures there isn't going to be much left.
Listen the British Museum is one of my favourite places in the world but surely most of it needs to go back. Start with the Marbles and quickly so we can then talk about the literal dead people in there and what should happen with them.
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Also, my local history museum's board has an architect, an archaeologist, a teacher... The idea we can have national cultural institutions run by random celebrities is bobbins.