My views about the proper home for the Parthenon marbles began at an early age. At an English grammar school in the 1940s, a small group of us were selected to study Latin and Greek and very little else. It was a turbulent political period in Europe just after the second world war had come to an end; and our weekly task was to translate the leading article in our local newspaper into both Latin and (ancient) Greek. As a result, in a Britain facing real hardship with even bread and potatoes rationed, Athenian politics in the 5th century BC somehow merged into British post-war politics. We became convinced by Plato that we were destined to become philosopher kings and by Pericles, in his funeral speech, that anyone who did not engage in politics was useless and that democracy was a far nobler form of government than any other. By the age of 16, most of our class had joined the Labour Party.

This party at the time was engaged in decolonisation, first of India and then, eventually, the rest of its colonial empire. It was a painful time for many of our politicians – of both the Left and the Right – who only slowly realised that the British Empire was coming to an end. So when, towards the end of the war, Winston Churchill proposed that the Parthenon marbles be sent back to Greece as an act of gratitude for the courage and sacrifices of the Greeks in defence of democracy. Mr Attlee, the Labour Party leader, rejected the idea as irrelevant: his view of politics was utilitarian and there were more important issues to tackle than the return of sculptures removed 150 years earlier. Churchill’s approach to politics had always been more imaginative and poetic, as was that, later, of Melina Mercouri. It took years of civil war and fascist dictatorship to produce a Greek politician who understood that a vibrant democracy cannot flourish unless accompanied by demands for the decolonisation of its heritage.

Today a welter of linguistic hypocrisy has infected the museum community. Powerful institutions in the US and Europe pretentiously talk about ‘floodgates’ and small points in the law on ‘ownership’ and rebrand themselves as ‘universal’ and ‘encyclopedaic’ - as if imperial loot, piled up in one building, is absolutely essential if the ordinary citizen is ever to comprehend the cultural history of the world. This hypocrisy has a British long pedigree. Our 18th and 19th century ancestral elite, force-fed at school, as I once was, with idealised portraits of ancient Athens, managed to convince themselves that they were now the authentic Greeks and that modern ones were mere barbarians.

But this tide is now turning, as imperial hubris wanes and global ethics are taken more seriously. Museums with collections of aboriginal human remains – collected in the 19th century in the hope that scientific examination of them would reveal an earlier and inferior Darwnian species – are now being sent back in recognition of their sacred status in their country of origin; it will take a little longer for the return of sacred stones to follow that of bones. But the signs are hopeful. Both UNESCO and the EU are encouraging the mobility of cultural objects. New museums – like that now beside the Acropolis – are being designed and built to fit a particular purpose rather than to glorify outdates pride. International cooperation over cultural artefacts is growing across the world as concepts of ownership are seen as irrelevant when certain cultural objects clearly belong to mankind as a whole and it is agreed that the context in which these objects are displayed is what matters most. In Britain ordinary people recognise this trend; opinion polls constantly reveal a large majority for returning the marbles to the Acropolis where they were created. The return will take time and careful negotiation between governments and museums willing to make concessions on both sides. But I tell my grandchildren that I am certain they will go back in their lifetime.

Christopher Price is a former British Member of Parliament and university vice chancellor. He is deputy chairman of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles.

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