Heavyweight boxing champion Tyson Fury has told Boris Johnson to “grow a pair” after seeing Sir Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square repeatedly vandalised at Black Lives Matter protests.
The wartime prime minister’s statue has been defaced with graffiti branding him a racist and slogans such as “BLACK LIVES MATTER” and “ACAB” (“All Coppers Are Bastards”) at Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the United Kingdom, which have quickly moved on from protesting the death of George Floyd in the United States to demands for the removal historic monuments and memorials whose activities and views are considered problematic by the standards of the 21st-century left.
BLM protests attendees have also vandalised statues for other former prime ministers, such as Lord Palmerston and Sir Robert Peel — the founder of the police, who had his statue defaced with “ACAB” graffiti and the communist hammer and sickle symbol — and even foreign leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, whose statue was badly vandalised despite the fact he was assassinated for leading the war to free the slaves in the United States.
Fury’s intervention, amid an atmosphere of general appeasement of BLM supporters by fearful authorities, appears to have been prompted by the decision to imprison Churchill’s statue in a grey box ahead of this weekend’s protests — other statues have been similarly entombed — which veterans and other groups branded “far-right” by the mainstream media have vowed to attend in order to protect the country’s monuments.
“RIP #worldsgreatestleader”, the British-Irish boxer posted on social media.
“[Boris Johnson] grow a pair. Do not let anyone desecrate our great leader’s monument. #ILOVEYOUENGLAND”, he added.
Boris has been relatively silent throughout the ongoing crisis, making only occasional, not particualrly robust comments on the violence being done to the country’s monuments and police officers by BLM supporters, usually after a significant delay, and an eleventh-hour intervention on the question of historic statues on Friday morning was similarly tepid.
The Tory leader said that should a be a “permanent reminder of his achievement in saving this country – and the whole of Europe – from a fascist and racist tyranny” and that “We cannot now try to edit or censor our past” — but this completely ignored the fact that the statue had already been erased from public view by its confinement in a coffin-like box, and that other statues are already being removed or considered for removal by local governments such as that of London mayor Sadiq Khan, who has established a Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm to replace existing statues with ones celebrating ethnic minority and “LGBTQ+” figures.
Incredibly, Johnson also appeared to concede that critics of Churchill — who was born in the 1870s — may have a point about him, saying that he “expressed opinions that were and are unacceptable”.
This approach contrasts sharply with that taken in Australia, for example, where the authorities have not taken statues down or boxed them up but deployed police officers to actively defend them from the mob.