A Labour peer has called for the statue of Robert Clive to be pulled down from outside the Foreign Office in Whitehall. Baroness Debbonaire claimed the Grade II bronze sculpture’s depiction of “subservient Indians” in King Charles Street was damaging international relations.

The former shadow minister, who was Sir Keir Starmer’s culture secretary in opposition before losing her seat in the old Bristol West constituency at the last general election, told a panel event that the statue should be taken down.

Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, she said: “I’m not sure that a statue of Clive should really have any place outside the Foreign Office. I walk past it and the frieze shows happy, smiling people really delighted to see him. And that’s just not historically accurate. It’s not helpful for our current relationship with India and it is deeply unhelpful to see India as a country that Britain civilised.

“India had a thriving engineering industry in the 17th century – it knew about mineral extraction, there had been incredible technological advances, it knew about free trade before free trade rules were ever written. That was closed down by an extractive colonising force.

“But what is pictured on that statue is tiny, tiny little Indians who are subservient and incidental to their own national story, and then a great big Clive.”

Clive of India was a clerk with the East India Company who rose to become a wealthy military leader and ushered in British expansion on the subcontinent.

He has been blamed for presiding over the Bengal Famine of 1770, which is thought to have killed up to ten million people.

Statues of historical figures with links to the empire came under threat after the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the murder at police hands of George Floyd in the United States.