Tory grandee and David Cameron’s former right-hand man George Osborne has backed the BLM radicals who destroyed Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol.
“British jury system again acquits itself brilliantly,” the former Chancellor of the Exchequer and Brexit fearmonger said of the so-called Colston Four being found not guilty of criminal damage despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, after the judge instructed jurors to consider whether the statute of the long-dead Christian philanthropist and parliamentarian — transfigured into a hate figure over then-unremarkable business ties to the slave trade — was “indecent or abusive”.
“Would have been stupid to convict those who pulled down Colston statue. Thomas and Oliver Cromwell pulled down many more statues,” Osborne said, referring to the former Lord Great Chamberlain of Henry VIII who helped to drive the destruction of swathes of England’s architectural and religious heritage during the so-called Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the infamous Member of Parliament who rebelled against Charles I and ultimately had him beheaded.
British jury system again acquits itself brilliantly. Would have been stupid to convict those who pulled down Colston statue. Thomas and Oliver Cromwell pulled down many many more statues. What’s dumb is setting up bureaucratic statue commissions after the fact
— George Osborne (@George_Osborne) January 6, 2022
Both the former Cromwell, ultimately executed by his king as a traitor and heretic, and the latter Cromwell are strange figures for an alleged conservative — and member of Her Majesty’s Order of the Companions of Honour, no less — to invoke as role models.
Even those who believe Oliver Cromwell was right to defend the privileges of the House of Commons against a king accused of having absolutist tendencies generally regard him as a prime example of the dictum that “absolute power corrupts absolutely”, given he ultimately assumed the essentially dictatorial role of Lord Protector for himself and passed it on to his son, like the modern-day Kim family in North Korea.
In addition to being part of a movement that saw many royalist statues and much religious iconography including monumental crosses and stained glass windows destroyed, Cromwell banned Christmas and Easter and waged a bloody campaign of repression described as “genocidal” by some in Ireland, with his regime proving so unpopular that after the monarchy was restored he was dug up and posthumously hung in chains and decapitated, with his head displayed on a pike alongside those of other regicides.
When you’re defending criminals by crying in aid a genocidal regicide you really do have to stop and ask whether you’re on the right side of this debate. https://t.co/OR4v0T5k4i
— Marcus Walker (@WalkerMarcus) January 8, 2022
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