London mayor Sadiq Khan has suggested it is critics of his scheme to audit place names and historic statues in the British capital who are trying to “engineer a culture war”, rather than the would-be iconoclasts who have made memorials an issue of them in the first place.
“Some people are trying to engineer a culture war because it plays to the hinterland or it gets more listeners to LBC,” said Mayor Khan on the LBC radio station, after the host — former BBC presenter and fanatical anti-Brexiteer James O’Brien — said some people were suggesting he “spent more time worrying about statues than stabbed teenagers.”
“I don’t apologise for walking ’round my city as I do and not seeing many street names, murals, statues or names of buildings that reflect the contribution made by a diverse population,” Khan added — despite having earlier said he did not spend “a lot” of time worrying about public monuments.
The Labour politician announced a so-called Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm after Black Lives Matter disorder in the United States crossed the Atlantic in 2020, with many of the movement’s acolytes fixating on public statues and other memorials to the great men and women of British history as the main targets of their ire.
The commission’s members have proved controversial, with one having once had to be dragged out of Westminster Abbey for screaming at the Queen and threatening to “punch out” security during a religious service marking the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade.
Mayor Khan’s attempts to turn the tables on statue defenders and claim they are the ones trying to start a “culture war” by resisting leftist efforts to sweep away much of the country’s built heritage comes after Home Secretary Priti Patel told LBC she was firmly opposed to municipal politicians like Khan moving against statues after they were targeted by violent BLM supporters.
“We saw statues being brought down and some councils making, quite frankly, a stance around statues and street names,” she said on February 12th.
“There are other ways in which those discussions can take place and, also, quite frankly I didn’t support that attempt to re-write history. I felt that that was wrong,” she added.
She also said she was opposed to the kneeling gesture BLM has promoted, and denounced the movement’s often riotous demonstrations, held in defiance of anti-coronavirus regulations with little firm action from the authorities, as “dreadful”.
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