For 125 years
A statue of Edward Colston stood in the centre of Bristol
Three decades of attempts to have it removed through official channels
Resulted in humming and hawing and hand-wringing and, ultimately, dead ends
In 2014, a poll of locals founds that 56 percent of people
Wanted it to stay

When the system for maintaining our shared public spaces fails
And a monument to a proud slave trader
Is allowed
To stand in the centre of a town
Getting older and grander by the year
Sinking its rotten roots deeper and deeper into the ground
The people, I would argue
Have a right
Even a moral duty
To tear it down
And to roll it
Without fanfare
Into the nearest fucking river
And this is exactly what they did
On June 7th 2020
Against the explicit wishes of the democratically elected Council
And the majority of the city
This is not, despite what you may think or may have heard, a complicated issue
White Britain doesn't have the privilege of saying there is a grey area here
Not any more
We have been living comfortably in the grey area for hundreds of years
And failing to do the bare fucking minimum for the people we transplanted over here against their will
It's hard
To not feel more than a little cognitive Dissonance
When your country tells you that racism is a thing of the distant past
While a monument to a professional racist
Stands towering over a major city with his chin resting lazily in his palm

It took me way too long to figure out that
Equality and fairness
Do not
Always equate to treating everybody exactly the same
Or to insisting that groups with competing interests work together to come to a compromise

Why should a Group whose primary interest is disempowering white supremacists
Be forced to compromise with groups whose sole goal seems to be to impede that progress

I have very little problem
It turns out
With saying Group A are allowed to take direct, destructive action
While groups B through KKK are not
When it becomes clear that Group A are right
And everybody else is fucking wrong

And believe me when I tell you
That it pains me to say that on some level
Because I spent my twenties
Like many people do
Trying in vain to piece together a coherent euclidean world-view that looks the same from every angle
Trying to understand where everyone was coming from
Arguing that morality is relative
That good and evil are primitive ideas
That there is no right and wrong
Besides the laws we agree to as a collective
Blah blah blah
Fucking undergraduate entry-level bullshit
And to hear myself today
Argue that property damage
And vigilante justice
Can be perfectly acceptable means to achieve particular ends
And are, in fact, sometimes the only way to get justice
In a system as fucked up as our's is
Goes against everything I used to believe in

The thing is
The young man who would tell you
With a straight face no less
"There's never an excuse for violence
Or for taking the law into your own hands"
Did not realise at the time
That that attitude came from a position of never having to so much as raise his voice to be heard
From knowing that almost everyone in a position of authority looked and sounded like him
He had never had to try to communicate his experience of being alive
To someone who saw him as different
And alien
His needs had never been anything other than inherently sympathetic and justified
By arguing that people should be able to fight for their rights while in the same breath denying them the right to fight
He was more than a product of the system
He was a dedicated defender of it
While self-identifying as progressive
And a liberal
Punk, of all things

You know
At the bottom of everything
I think
He was threatened
By the idea that someone might one day come along
And take from him what was never rightfully his to begin with
The steady march of social change is fine, and good, and should be encouraged, he thought
As long as he is not caught in the path of it
As long as he is not disenfranchised or inconvenienced in any way by it
Like
If, in the process of trying to have your voice be heard, the architects of your pain brought to justice, you so much as moderately delay my commute to work
Let alone ask me to do the emotional labour of recognising my privileged position within an oppressive power structure
And God forbid ask me to take some sort of personal responsibility for it
Then fuck you
And fuck what you stand for
Which
Of course
Is a roundabout way of saying
"I support your right to protest up to the point at which I become unable to ignore it"
Which,
Going further,
Is a roundabout way of saying I don't respect your right to protest at all

I'm getting way too wrapped up in the Peaceful protest debate, when I did not intend to
Which
I think
Is a large part of why the people in power are pushing that angle
So they don't need to address the actual reason people are toppling statues

Ask yourself what personal qualities do we encourage in this society?
And I don't mean what do we teach children
To share and be kind
And to respect authority
I mean what qualities do we actively reward in reality
The only way we can, with power and money
Dishonesty
Exploitation
And above all a pathological lack of empathy
These are the traits our society fosters
We stop just short of selectively breeding for them
It is very difficult to get any kind of power or money in this world without them
And the people who truly embody those values
The people most willing to lie to or take advantage of others
Are the ones who rise to the top
By virtue of their willingness to seize and protect that power by doing what others will not
They become the people who run our institutions
The people who plot our trajectories
They start our wars and they write our laws
And not coincidentally those are the people whom we enshrine in history
Those are the people who we erect statues of

Quote

"I do not admit that a wrong has been done to the red Indians of America or the Black people of australia
by the fact that a stronger race,
a higher-grade race
or at any rate a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way,
has come in and taken their place.
I do not admit it.
I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, 'the American continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here'.
They had not the right, nor had they the power."

End quote

That was Winston Churchill
A defacto saint in British lore for his role in the second world war
And there is no doubt that Britain under Churchill's government played a central part in defeating Hitler and the Nazi regime
Who were directly responsible for the deaths of 18 million people
Compared to
I don't know
The four million Bengalis Churchill killed
By taking their food away during a famine
A people he said he, and I quote, "hated"
And blamed their slow, agonising deaths on them 'breeding like rabbits'
He was a man who boasted of personally killing "Savages" in the Sudan
And got mad at others for their "squeamishness" when they objected to his suggestions that they shell "uncivilised tribes"
His words, not mine
With poison gas
And remember that
That others objected
These were not universally held beliefs at the time
His own secretary of state for India described his attitude as "not quite sane"
And that he couldn't see much difference between Churchill's outlook and Hitler's

When talk of removing his statue was brought up
His defenders had the gall to say
"Nobody is 100% pure"
As if "Wasn't a literal white supremacist" is an unrealistic benchmark to hold our heroes to
And this
If you don't get it by now
Is just one of ten thousand reasons people are saying Black Lives Matter
Because for decades upon decades the response to criticism of this fucking cretin
Who was voted by our country to be The Greatest Briton
Was to be told
With a patronising pat on the head
That to take his statue down
Would risk us forgetting our history
As if the records of the British Empire's atrocities weren't bundled into crates at the Empire's end and sent to the bottom of the sea
That it would be akin to photoshopping out our blemishes
As if anyone ever built a statue to someone as a monument to a single one of their misdeeds
As if Winston Churchill, and Edward Colston, and Cecil Rodes, and John Mitchell, and Oliver Cromwell, and Horatio Nelson, and the Roberts Milligan, Clive and Baden-Powell, were all uniquely complicated men
Who represent the very best of what it means to be British

And so
I say
If you refuse to take down these statues
If you are truly not in the least bit ashamed of these men
And what they stood for
Then you should ask yourself why that is
And what that says about you
And if the answer you get from your conscience
Is that these men deserve the symbolic power we have bestowed upon them
Then why not double down
Put busts of these great Britons up in every town centre
Their portraits hanging over every shrinking, dimly lit, grey family dinner
As we limp arthritically into our country's next chapter
Stamp their names and the names of every wealthy descendent of every proud British slave owner and slave trader and war criminal and concentration camp worker on every street sign and bank note and home office letter
To do otherwise
You see
Would be to allow us to forget
Who we are
And where we came from
That this
Is the foundation on which we built our shameless nation
This is, in the most literal sense of the phrase
Us