The government wants statue-botherers to face 10 years in prison – presumably that applies to those who remove memorials to paedophiles
In the old days, vandals and hooligans simply knocked things over, be they flowerpots, bus stops, old ladies or standards of common English decency. But these days anything that is knocked over, as long as it is knocked over with a sense of clear moral purpose, isn’t merely knocked over, it seems, but “toppled”. Indeed, a court judgment in Bristol last week opened the floodgates for a summer of 2022 epidemic of righteous toppling. Let the games begin!
On Wednesday, the four committed young people, opportunistically identified as part of a much larger group that toppled the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston into the Bristol docks in 2020, were found not guilty of criminal damage. They clearly broke the letter of the law of the land and Colston’s sculpted, slavery-funded cane and fancy frock-coat coat-tails specifically were definitely criminally damaged during the toppling, but the jury acquitted the four by referring to a higher moral standard – the new religion of wokery, as Dominic Paddleboard Raab would have it! Or admirable sensitivity to local public feeling in a city once riven by racial tension that is now proudly multicultural, as it is also known. Tribal war! Signs and wonders!! Move on!!!
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