Speaker of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg has proposed the flattening of Stonehenge because of its ugly associations with human sacrifice.

He was responding to a proposal by his Conservative MP colleague Sir Desmond Swayne that all traces of the Roman occupation of Britain should be erased.

They were both joking but underneath was a very serious point about the utter hypocrisy of Black Lives Matters’ war on statuary: how much time needs to elapse before a historical crime is considered expiated?

Should the Italian government be paying Britain reparations for the indignities its legions and slave-keeping elite inflicted on our people from 55BC to 388AD?

Should the Egyptian government finally tear down those crumbling, pyramid-shaped eyesores — currently blocking potential space for affordable housing in the Cairo suburb of Giza — which were notoriously the product of slave labour?

And if we’re talking the evils of slavery, what about the compensation the descendants of the Barbary pirates must owe for all the innocent Europeans they captured and used either as galley slaves or incorporated into their harems?

Or does Barbary piracy not count because it involved North Africans enslaving white people who, being privileged, are legitimate targets?

All these questions are purely rhetorical, of course. We know what the answers are because Black Lives Matter has made it perfectly clear: slavery was only bad between roughly the 15th and 19th centuries, and when it was white people were doing it to black people, mostly.

There’s no discussion to be had when Muslims do it (as in parts of the world they continue to in the 21st century).

There’s no discussion to be had when Travellers do it (ditto).

There’s no discussion to be had when black people do it to other black people (as happened, of course, in the Ashanti Kingdom which owed much of its wealth to the people it captured from the African interior, brought in chains to ports like Elmina on the coast of what is now Ghana, to be shipped across the Atlantic by whites.)

Slavery is only bad when Black Lives Matter says it is bad.