Petition update and response from Mark Tami MP

Hello Everyone,

Thank you for your continued support as we now have over 3000 signatures to keep William Gladstone's name at the library, his statue and other namesakes intact in Hawarden. Please do keep sharing. Hopefully this petition will help other parts of the UK to recognise William Gladstone's valued contribution to our society and why such statues and namesakes were attributed to him by our ancestors and their good reasons for doing so.

I wrote to Mark Tami our MP for Alyn & Deeside to make him aware of our feelings on the matter and our support to keep Gladstone's memory intact for all the great good he did.

I am happy to say that Mr Tami responded to the news of our petition and made the following comments as part of his reply:
"I firmly believe that the UK generally must confront the issue of systematic racism. There is a clear need for us to do so locally as well." ..."Part of this comes in the form of considering the physical legacy of racism, and what changes should be made; a debate gievn increased prominence by the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol" Mark Tami MP.

Pleasingly, Mr Tami recognises, our stance that William Gladstone is not at all the same as some other statues in the UK such as Colston, the valuable work that Gladstone undertook throughout his career and that we remember him as a great Prime Minister.

"There is, however, a clear difference between the memorials to Colston in Bristol and to Gladstone in Hawarden for example, which is that those to Colston were erected to remember him as a slave trader, whereas those to Gladstone remember him as a Prime Minister. Edward Colston's material legacy today is empirically one of human suffering; something which given Gladstone's work over the course of his life as in the main a reforming Prime Minister one can not say." Mark Tami MP

I concur with Mr Tami's closing view "that there must be much greater education and understanding for all in society. We need to learn from our history, the bad as well as the good." There is much good to be learnt from the devotion to democracy and commitment to respecting the rights of all people that William Gladstone demonstrated throughout his career as a Member of Parliament and four times Prime Minister.

Best Wishes

Katie