Ross Clark Ross Clark

Statue toppling is doing a disservice to Black Lives Matter

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I don’t know how much of a organisational structure there is to Black Lives Matter in Britain but if I were part of it I’m sure I would be furious at the crowd who felled the stature of Edward Colston and deposited it in Bristol harbour. 

They have set off a tsunami of civil virtue-signalling which has drowned out all the other issues I am sure I would rather be talking about. The latest victim is a statue of Lord Baden-Powell which is set to be removed from Poole Harbour by Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council, which itself erected the statue only 12 years ago in order to commemorate his setting up of the scouting movement. No longer will he gaze over Brownsea Island, where the first scout camp was held in 1907. He has been felled, apparently, for being a racist and Nazi sympathiser.

Baden-Powell has always seemed a little dodgy to me, and my jaw did drop a little when I read his diary entry – from 1939 – marvelling at his bedtime reading, Mein Kampf.

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