Statue wars: what should we do with controversial monuments?

Robert Jenrick’s pledge to protect monuments and statues from mob iconoclasm with new laws and powers is very welcome. It’s an issue on which the Government has been quiet in terms of legislation, even if the Prime Minister made clear last summer that ‘we cannot try to edit or censor our past’.

Now that the initial wave of Black Lives Matter activism has subsided, it’s essential to stop left-wing councils from renaming our streets, removing public monuments or, worse still, hanging a badge of opprobrium on them. There is more going on here than many realise: Policy Exchange’s History Matters Project, which is chaired by Trevor Phillips, has so far documented more than 160 cases of history at risk of erasure, from statues to street names, and parts of school and university curricula.

As Jenrick points out, much of this has been rushed through without democratic consultation or due process. The toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol began the wave of assaults, removing a figure who, whatever his considerable faults, did more than anyone else to fund the city of Bristol.