Why are Tory councillors in Essex censoring artwork? | Tim Burrows

From my house in Southend I can hear giant explosions reverberating along the flat Essex fringe. These blasts, from the Ministry of Defence-owned Foulness Island at the mouth of the Thames estuary, sometimes sound like a car boot the size of a small town being repeatedly shut. Other days they make my desk vibrate and the window frames click. Recently my daughter finally asked the dreaded question: “Daddy, what is making these explosions?” I decided to level with her as best I could. The army was testing weapons, I said, but it was nothing to worry about (for us at least).

It seems some of Southend’s local councillors don’t treat their constituents with the same maturity as I do my four-year-old. An English Garden – a contemplative artwork in the form of a rose garden and some benches installed in a park next to a former British army garrison in Shoeburyness, near Foulness – has been removed earlier than scheduled after a handful of local Conservative councillors objected to what it said about activities on nearby MoD land and their wider implications.

Created by the Australian artist Gabriella Hirst, the artwork was launched in May as part of the celebrated Estuary festival. For the artist, it was the culmination of years of meticulous work reviving the rare modern breed floribunda rose Atom Bomb, which was introduced to the market in 1953, and examining the “violent legacies and historical traumas of atomic armament”. Hirst found one of the few Atom Bombs left in the world in a botanical garden in Tuscany and had it grafted and then sent to Britain. The roses used in An English Garden were carefully grafted and cultivated over two years in Southend.

These flowers are now in storage, thanks to the councillors’ objection to the wording of a plaque in the installation that detailed the fact that nuclear weapons were assembled at Foulness (a matter of record) before being shipped to Australia, where they were detonated. The most vocal of the offended councillors, James Moyies, has said he objected to the artist’s view that by increasing its nuclear armament by 40%, the UK government was directing “considerable resources towards industries of violence instead of those of care”, and by the suggestion that “Britain had a historical and ongoing identity as a colonial nuclear state”.

The councillors emailed the local arts charity Metal, which commissioned the work jointly with the artists’ charity the Old Waterworks, saying that it constituted “a direct far leftwing attack on our History, our People and our Democratically Elected Government”. They claimed that residents had complained, although Metal said its staffed information desk based a couple of metres from the artwork received no complaints – and many locals have since spoken out in support. An ultimatum was issued to change the plaque’s wording. The artist, the curator and Metal all agreed they would do no such thing.

A standoff over two days ensued as threats increased that if Metal didn’t change the plaque’s wording by 6pm on 23 June “action” would be taken against the work, and it would be brought to “national attention”, according to a statement by Metal. Hirst said she wanted the work to stay no matter what. Metal feared the piece’s nuances would be lost if it became the latest site of a culture war skirmish, and also wished “to protect the wellbeing and mental health of a small team of staff and volunteers in Southend”, so decided to remove it.

Moyies was elected as a Ukip councillor in West Shoebury in 2014 and became Vote Leave regional director in 2016 before defecting to the Tories in 2017. He is now, a little predictably, a Johnson loyalist. He declined to comment to the Guardian, other than to say that he believed the whole story was “concocted”. He has denied allegations of threatening or bullying behaviour. He also took to Twitter to say that the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association, which said the work’s removal was an insult to the veterans and their families, “is now tied up in defending a far left artistic movement”.

How did we get here? The seeds of all this were partly sown in 2016, not just by the politics emboldened by the leave vote, but also by smaller changes to the nation’s cultural politics – specifically, the publication the same year of a cultural white paper put together by the then culture secretary, John Whittingdale, part of which talked up the idea of Arts Council-funded “placemaking”. “We want our national cultural institutions and funders – in the public, private and charitable sectors – to work together and back the vision of local leaders, local authorities, local businesses, local communities, cultural organisations and others,” it said. While this can be read as a commonsensical approach to using arts funding wisely, it could result in local arts trusts and artists being required to talk up the positive image of a place instead of critiquing or challenging it.

Once the furore over the plaque’s removal started to build online, Moyies told BBC Essex radio that he objected to the work as it didn’t “celebrate’’ the people of Shoeburyness, using the Estuary festival’s claim that it “celebrates the lives, landscapes and histories of the spectacular Thames estuary” against it. In this way, “placemaking” becomes the pretext for a kind of soft, cultural authoritarianism.

Despite the Conservative councillors’ success, the amount of local support for the work before and after its removal has been clear. Southend borough council’s portfolio holder for culture has conveyed, in an email to Metal, dismay that the organisation was put in such a position. While alarming in the short term, the affair – like the government’s self-generated row over taking the knee – might be a small-scale example of how Johnsonian populists are starting to overplay their hand.

What this boorish section of the UK right do not understand is that you don’t have to be left wing to appreciate art, even if you do not agree with it. After Moyies took to local radio to explain his objection to the work, a man who said he was a local Royal Engineers nuclear veteran and served in the Christmas islands during five tests between 1952 and 1962, called in to reply. “I think it’s ridiculous taking [An English Garden] away. To start pulling up rose bushes just because of a plaque that wasn’t running anybody down,” he said. “It was telling the truth. It’s history, it’s gone.”