Welsh Government advice says statues of “old white men” such as Trafalgar hero Admiral Nelson may need to be removed or even destroyed to create the “right historical narrative” in an increasingly multicultural society.
In its current form, the studiously woke guidance, which should be finalised by the end of March, laments the fact that “powerful, older, able-bodied white men” are often depicted in public statues and memorials and that this may be “offensive” to Britain’s increasingly diverse population, according to The Telegraph.
Led by the Labour Party, Wales’ devolved government — roughly equivalent to a U.S. state government — sets out an ambitious framework for concealing, removing, or outright destroying various monuments as well as renaming various streets and buildings, in moves redolent of George Orwell’s vision in Nineteen Eighty-Four of a hard-left dystopia where “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.”
The guidance, which sees setting the “right historical narrative” — as defined by its woke authors — as its driving purpose, with men like Admiral Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, the heroes of the Battle of Trafalgar and the Battle of Waterloo, recast as “offensive to people today who see them in a different light”, and indeed as “aggressors who conquered peoples to expand the British Empire”.
The so-called “best-practice” document also complains that diversity is “hardly visible at all in public commemorations” — an unsurprising result of the fact that Britain in general and Wales in particular had very little diversity to speak of until the post-war era of mass migration — and that this could create a “perception that the achievements that society considers noteworthy are those of powerful, older, able-bodied white men” and perpetuate “racist colonial myths about white superiority”.
“Labour are intent on rewriting our history here in Wales,” said Andrew RT Davies, who leads the Conservative (Tory) Party in Wales, alleging they “have been captured by a hard-Left, anti-British mob who want nothing more than to topple our statues, tear up the works of classic authors and cancel our great orators, all in the name of virtue signalling.”
“Statues may well offend some people, but that does not make them any less a part of Wales’ rich history. What happened to remembering the mistakes of the past and learning the lessons?” he asked — tacitly accepting the statue-smasher narrative that some of those depicted in the country’s memorials should indeed be regarded as villains, but retain their memorials anyway.
“We should be punishing woke vandals for denigrating our history and damaging our monuments, not kowtowing to them by ‘concealing statues’ as this document suggests,” he added, alluding to a section of the guidance where it is suggested that statues not removed entirely could be “discretely box[ed]” or “enclose[d]… creatively in new artworks”.
However, the reality is that while the Conservative-led central government which has much the same role in England’s national governance as the devolved governments in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland has been good on rhetoric with respect to statues, it offers very little in terms of action.
London’s woke Metropolitan Police, for example, has been able to draw up a secret list of supposedly “contentious” memorials including a statue of Sir Winston Churchill and the Cenotaph, which commemorates the country’s war dead, under the noses of the government in Westminster, with no obvious consequences.
In Northumbria, meanwhile, the local police force took a break from its law enforcement duties to assist a rogue municipal government in conducting a “review of South Tyneside’s statues and landmarks to determine if any have links to slavery or oppressive behaviour,” with some of the landmarks flagged including a statue of two Vikings outside a shopping centre, which could supposedly have “connections / associations with far-Right symbolism and Nordic mythology”.
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