Should Britain give back items accumulated from different countries?

LOL interview with museum staff on r4 today referenced V to show ethics of staff, well mate that was before british museum staff were found selling off the archives;
(only heard the other week how mona-lisa was temporarily stolen and duplicates sold off on black market before real one was refound - those purchasers coudn't get recourse)

Eighty-six percent of Britons would trust museum curators, a survey of British adults by market research organisation Ipsos MORI has found.

Ipsos MORI's Veracity Index, the longest-running poll on trust in professions in Britain, asks adults to judge whether they would trust people working in a range of 30 professions to tell them the truth.

The high score sees museum curators ranked within the top five most trusted professions, behind nurses (94%), librarians (93%) and doctors (91%), and alongside teachers (86%).

Museum curators have enjoyed a four-percentage-point increase from the 2020 Veracity Index, in which a result of 82% saw curators ranking eighth. The boost has seen curators overtake engineers, judges, professors and scientists in 2021.
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No, it took a lot of effort to nick them all. They can fight us for them :D

Some of the items would just not get seen if they were returned to Africa etc. it would be lost to the global public.
 
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bainbridge said:
We should make exact copies of all the stuff we took and give back the originals.
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I‘d just caveat that with it should be done case by case, if it’s an unstable country and there’s a good chance the artefacts could be damaged/destroyed then then they should be held in trust until the country stabilises to the point they can safely take them back.
 
Lol what's the Greek PM trying to deflect attention from in Greece bringing this crap up again...

As for Rishi the meeting was cancelled as the Greek PM broke explicit assurances not to bring this up - simply politics..

Labours virtue signalling response is hilarious - they would 'loan' the marbles back - very PC and commendable - except that would require the Greeks to concede they belong to us - you couldn't make it up..
 
n111ck said:
Lol what's the Greek PM trying to deflect attention from in Greece bringing this crap up again...

As for Rishi the meeting was cancelled as the Greek PM broke explicit assurances not to bring this up - simply politics..

Labours virtue signalling response is hilarious - they would 'loan' the marbles back - very PC and commendable - except that would require the Greeks to concede they belong to us - you couldn't make it up..
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Sunak could easily have ignored the bait, instead he opted to fly right into it face first... the Greek PM advocating on his countries behalf seems at least mildly acceptable in comparison.
 
I don't mind stuff being returned as long as compensation is paid and the new host can prove it'll be properly secured and preserved. Unfortunately the Greeks have shown they can't even manage a functional economy, let alone a world class museum. I wouldn't trust them to run a historic kebab exhibition, never mind curating the Marbles.
 
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jeffk said:
The Bayeux Tapestry was at least commissioned by someone in France (Odo of Bayeux) and portrays a story that has significance to France. The Elgin Marbles have no cultural connection to Britain.
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As above I'm not sure the link to France is really that good given the circumstances and to me the UK is the Norman successor state not France...

I'm surprised you'd say Britain has no cultural connection to the marbles - less of a connection than Athens itself maybe, but imo there are plenty of connections. Ancient Greece is a common cultural reference point in all sorts of ways, at least in myth Athens is seen as the ancestor of Britain's democracy, we have some words of Greek origin in our language, and our head of state has quite a lot of Greek in him...
 
Sankari said:
Unfortunately the Greeks have shown they can't even manage a functional economy, let alone a world class museum. I wouldn't trust them to run a historic kebab exhibition, never mind curating the Marbles.
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This is nonsense, they have an amazing museum that was built specifically for the job.
 
NZXT30 said:
The fact that he paid the Ottomans an occupational army to buy a part of Greece's national heritage is utterly shameful.
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Greece had been part of the Ottoman Empire for 350 years at the point Elgin bought the marbles from the what would have been considered the legitimate Government. Prior to that it had been part of the Byzantine Empire for 1,100 years. So it had been part of the Ottoman Empire one and half times longer than modern Greece has existed at the point Elgin bought the marbles.
 
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