Prime Minister Boris Johnson has confirmed that his government is looking at new ways to punish protesters who desecrate war memorials, after far-left Black Lives Matter agitators defiled London icons, including the Cenotaph.
Speaking during Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions, Prime Minister Johnson said: “I can tell the House any incident of vandalism or attack on public property will be met with the full force of the law and perpetrators will be prosecuted.
“I can also confirm that we are looking at new ways in which we may legislate against vandalism of war memorials.”
The announcement comes after 125 MPs backed a proposed Desecration of War Memorials Bill, set to go before the House of Commons on June 23rd.
It was also reported that Home Secretary Priti Patel, Attorney General Suella Braverman, and Justice Secretary Robert Buckland are looking to amend the Criminal Damage Act, exempting war memorials from the section that returns lower sentences for vandalism resulting in damages worth less than £5,000. War memorial vandals instead may receive prison sentences of up to ten years.
However, despite the talk of a tough new law, Mr Johnson has been criticised for not robustly defended Britain’s memorials, after authorities and police allowed BLM and Antifa thugs to vandalism statues across the country, including those of wartime leader, Winston Churchill.
Despite claiming to admire Churchill greatly, Johnson threw the greatest Briton in modern history under the bus to appease the far left, by saying that the former prime minister held “unacceptable” opinions.
As the statue of Winston Churchill was being entombed in a grey box to protect it from damage, Mr Johnson had said that while the statue served as a “permanent reminder” of the man who saved Europe from fascism, “he sometimes expressed opinions that were and are unacceptable to us today”.
While he condemned tearing down statues, he said that they were erected “by previous generations” by people with “different perspectives, different understandings of right and wrong”, implying that the country’s ancestors were morally inferior.
“But those statues teach us about our past, with all its faults. To tear them down would be to lie about our history, and impoverish the education of generations to come,” the Conservative prime minister added.
Mr Johnson’s moral surrender to the progressive left comes in stark contrast to that of French President Emmanuel Macron, who said in robust terms that with no uncertainty, no statues would be removed from France.
“The Republic will not erase any trace, or any name, from its history … it will not take down any statue,” Mr Macron had said.
The French president and British prime minister are set to meet in London on Thursday for the 80th anniversary of Charles De Gaulle, from exile, calling on the French to resist the Nazi occupation of France.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s statue is set to be unboxed for the occasion, though it could be reboxed shortly after the French leader’s visit if it is still deemed at risk of vandalism from the far left.
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