Delingpole: Only the State’s Useful Idiots Can Tear Down Statues

LONDON, ENGLAND - JUNE 08: A worker cleans the Churchill statue in Parliament Square that
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James Delingpole

There’s a truly hideous statue in Ilfracombe, Devon that I want to tear down and drag into the sea. ‘Verity’ is a 66-foot high steel and bronze sculpture of a pregnant woman brandishing a sword, with her flesh partially cut away so that you can see the skull beneath the skin of her head and the foetus in her belly. It’s by Damien Hirst and it manages to be crass, woke, nauseating, fatuous, ugly and insulting all at the same time.

Oh, and while we’re about it, let’s pull down the statue of Karl Marx in Highgate cemetery too.

So do you think when I destroy these monstrosities I’m going to get let off by the courts, as has just happened to four Bristol trustafarian types — the so-called Colston Four — who pulled down a statue of Edward Colston and dumped it in the city docks with the police looking on uselessly?

My guess is not, because there is now a two-tier legal system operating in the UK: one part of it rewards and applauds stooges of the Establishment; the other part crushes enemies of that Establishment. It is not about justice let alone equality before the law. It is about maintaining the status quo.

When that quartet of bourgeois milquetoasts pulled down the statue of Colston they were not engaging in an act of rebellion but licking the Establishment’s boots.

In 2021 (when the incident occurred), there was nothing brave or countercultural, let alone radical, about vandalising property in the name of combating racism or supporting Black Lives Matter.

How could it be when the entirety of the Establishment was committed to the same cause? BLM’s supporters included the MPs (included Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer) who grovelled before it in parliament; the policemen who took the knee in homage to it; the headmasters of all the ritzy private schools who incorporated its toxic critical race theory nonsense into their curricula; the legacy media, such as the Mail On Sunday, which rewarded one of its marches with a fawning double-page spread.

The same goes for Extinction Rebellion and its various offshoots. Sure, MPs might have pretended to deplore the vandalism, the disruption, the economic damage being committed by these eco-loons as they shut down public highways and city centres. But in reality, they would never have got away with these stunts if they hadn’t been given tacit official approval.

XR has been getting away with murder because the Establishment has allowed them to get away with murder. The Johnson regime needed to give the impression that its eco-fascist Net Zero policies had popular support. Those XR demonstrations provided the government with the fig leaf it needed. They said: “Look, Britain really cares about the planet. So when the government comes to confiscate your petrol car and your gas-fired boiler and deprives you of your holidays abroad it’s only doing what you asked it to do…”

Now imagine for a moment it had been anti-lockdown, or anti-vaccine-passporters who’d pulled down a statue or committed Extinction Rebellion levels of disruption and vandalism. The police would have come down on them like a ton of bricks and the sentences would have been brutal.

That’s because, unlike XR and the BLM crowd, people who oppose the bio-security tyranny slowly strangling Britain are not the stooges and useful idiots of the Establishment. They are its enemies – and will be treated by Britain’s biased and iniquitous justice system accordingly.

The jury that let the Colston Four of the hook, let’s face it, was the product of decades of Establishment brainwashing. All they needed to hear was the trigger word ‘racism’ and to be told to make sure their decision was “on the right side of history” to know that they had to let the Colston Four free because to do otherwise would have meant that they thought ‘racism’ was a good thing.

The same goes for the trial last year where six XR demonstrators were cleared of criminal damage. All their barristers had to do was say the magic words ‘climate emergency’ and, lo, the jury just knew like the pre-programmed drones they were that the only verdict could be ‘not guilty.’

So it really takes the biscuit to hear various government ministers lining up to say how appalled they were by the jury’s decision in the Colston Four trial. What else did they expect in a climate which MPs like themselves did more than anyone to create? MPs are forever draping themselves in the mantle of anti-racism, either out of opportunism or fear that if they don’t it might look like they are pro-racism. It was they themselves who stoked the divisive atmosphere in Britain whereby any race-baiting scumbag with a cheap point to make can do so confident in the knowledge that the system won’t hold them to account.

But things are actually even more sinister than I have just suggested.

Consider this statement, quoted in the Telegraph, from the noisome Grant Shapps:

Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, said it amounted to “mob rule” and that forthcoming legislation would “plug a gap” on the vandalisation of statues.

“We must live in a society where people can’t go around destroying public property and be able to walk away from it,” he said. “We are introducing, via the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, new measures which would potentially plug a gap and make it absolutely clear.”

Or this one from an MP whose surname must surely be some kind of rhyming slang.

Tom Hunt, another Tory MP, appeared to suggest jury trials should be abandoned in statue vandalism cases, saying: “If the jury is a barrier to ensuring they are punished, then that needs to be addressed.”

Do you see what’s going on here? In the guise of responding to public outrage about a court’s apparent endorsement of vandalising public property in the name of worthy causes, some of the dodgier, more authoritarian MPs are agitating for measures that will further criminalise public protests, and are even arguing for the suspension of trial by jury.

The British Establishment is pushing us ever closer to totalitarian tyranny. Incidents like the Colston Four trial verdict are just part of the smokescreen.

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