Churchill Statue Imprisoned In Box to Protect It from BLM Vandals
The monument to England’s wartime leader, which stands opposite the Palace of Westminster in Parliament Square, has previously been defaced with graffiti branding him “racist” and denouncing all police as “bastards” at several of the illegal mass protests which have taken place in England in recent weeks. With more protests liable to come, the memorial — and several others in central London — has now been boarded over.
The destruction of a statue of Edward Colston, a merchant and philanthropist born in the 1600s now predominantly known for his links to the slave trade, began the trend, with the Stop Trump Coalition drawing up a national hit-list of supposedly offensive monuments — and the authorities are already moving swiftly to remove some voluntarily, and establishing diversity commissions to erase more.
Members of the public including scouting leaders turned out to defend a statue of the founder of the global scouting movement, Robert Baden-Powell on Thursday.
There are strong indications that veterans, football fans, and others — denounced as “far-right thugs”by the mainstream media — intend to show up in the capital to defend them at the weekend.
This development has forced the state to somewhat change its tactics — not by guaranteeing that statues and memorials will be guarded by police officers or other public officials, but by erasing them from public view, fully or partially, by encasing them.
The image greeted with the most shock is the one of Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, which has been entirely imprisoned within a featureless grey box.
Boarding has also been erected around statues of U.S. founding father George Washington and former monarch James II, among others, as well as the base of the Cenotaph war memorial, where wreaths are placed to honour the fallen, and which was the subject of an attempted arson last week.