UK City to Change Statues Which ‘Over-Celebrated Empire, Christianity and ‘Great’ White Men’

An official review of statues in Leeds, England, concluded that they “over-celebrated Empire, Christianity and ‘great’ white men” and should be changed through the use of new public-facing plaques putting them a different context.

Leeds was the site of one of the more dramatic statue vandalisations in Britain as Black Lives Matter unrest swept the country, with an impressive monument to Queen Victoria being defaced with the BLM slogans and pejoratives including ‘racist’, ‘whore’, ‘slag’, and ‘slave owner’ — wholly inaccurately, as the British had abolished the slave trade decades prior to her coronation and spent much of her reign stamping it out globally, at great cost.

The local government responded by announcing a review targeting such British icons as the Duke of Wellington, hero of Waterloo, Sir Robert Peel, founder of the police, and the Black Prince, a medieval royal with no connection to the slave trade or colonialism.

That review, led by Labour politician Alison Lowe, had to conclude that Leeds did not commemorate any major players in the former slave trade, according to the Yorkshire Evening Post, but nevertheless found a way to taint them as what the newspaper called “beneficiaries of hereditary wealth and colonialism”.

None will be removed, however, as a public consultation found just 10 per cent of people wanted any change.

“I was surprised there were so few people wanted any change…  only 10 per cent wanted some active change. I know thousands did not [respond] but we had to take it that they were happy with the status quo,” Lowe told the YEP, perhaps more perturbed than she appeared to let on.

“There was a perception that lots of black people would write in and say ‘get rid of statue X or Y’. That was as a result of the Edward Colston toppling in Bristol which was as a result of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. There was a belief, no facts, that lots of black people were angry about statues but I had lots of conversations with Black Lives Matters groups and actually people were not really that interested,” she revealed.

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