U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is set to give Housing Minister Robert Jenrick the ability to veto the removal of the country’s historical statues as part of his effort to combat the Black Lives Matter-aligned war against history that sees the Left calling for the removal of monuments and memorials.
Johnson’s proposed provisions would give Jenrick the final decision on the removal or dismantling of statues or monuments, differing from the current system in which local councils are given autonomy to make such decisions.
According to the Telegraph, a senior government source said, “The Labour Party has given the green light to cultural and historical vandalism across the country. Statues of Britain’s heroes from Sir Francis Drake to Admiral Nelson are under threat from Marxist militants, working hand in glove with Labour councillors.”
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The source said the prime minister’s plan would “protect Britain’s heritage, and ensure all planning decisions are made with due process and due consideration of historic heritage guidance.”
The effort to take away local control on the matter of statues and monuments is reportedly being considered because ministers of the current Conservative government believe Labour councils will not follow due process before removing the statutes.
Johnson told Tory members last week, “We are proud of this country’s culture and history and traditions; they literally want to pull statues down, to rewrite the history of our country, to edit our national CV to make it look more politically correct.”
The battle for Britain’s history mirrors the struggle taking place in the United States, where Black Lives Matter activists and other radical left-wingers have repeatedly targeted monuments and statues they deem racist, such as ones representing historical figures with ties to the Confederacy.
On other occasions, however, the targets of the vandals have not even had Confederate ties, as in the recent case of agitators in Portland who toppled statues of Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
Such ridiculous acts are not only a sign of ignorance on the part of the vandals, but show that the overarching agenda of the current “social justice” movement is to make war on all of Western history in order to replace it with an alternative Marxist history. It’s the same agenda that fueled the toppling of statues in the Soviet Union and during Communist China’s Cultural Revolution.
And in many cases, left-wing (or cowardly Republican) mayors and city councils have made the work of the extremists easier by removing the monuments themselves, often in the middle of the night to prevent peaceful dissent by concerned patriots.
In St. Augustine, Florida, known as the Nation’s Oldest City due to its founding in 1565, the city commission recently bowed to the demands of Black Lives Matter activists to remove a memorial to fallen Civil War soldiers that had stood in the city since 1872, despite widespread local support for the monument and the fact that the BLM protesters were largely out-of-town activists.
Johnson’s proposal aims to prevent such caving on the part of complicit or fearful local politicians. His government’s take on the monument issue differs vastly from the Labour Party’s. As Breitbart notes:
In June, the far-left Stop Trump Coalition activist group published a “hit list” of supposedly racist British monuments that should be targeted for removal. The Labour Party quickly followed suit, announcing that all 130 local councils controlled by Labour would review statues for removal.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan also jumped into the act, announcing the creation of the Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm in order to review every monument and statue in the British capital.
Unfortunately, the Left’s assault on history goes beyond statues. The National Maritime Museum was revealed on Sunday to be reviewing the “heroic status” of Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson in order to challenge the “barbaric history of race and colonialism.”
According to internal documents reviewed by The Telegraph, the museum will seek to take advantage of the “momentum built up by the Black Lives Matter movement” in order to change displays, including those commemorating the British war hero’s legacy, in favor of highlighting “aspects of slavery relating to the Royal Navy.”
The museum said that Nelson displays might see “wholesale changes” in order to highlight the “more complex” vision of his heroic life, notably the support he voiced for slaveholders in the British Empire.
The collections team said, “We are in the process of rolling out our new strategy and part of this is looking specifically at the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement. All museum collections are partial, and history is often told from a particular perspective.”
