Political Provocation

 Just a quick few observations about yesterday's post on the Colston 4:

1. There's a constant refrain from those defending Colston's statue that slavery was legal at the time, while ignoring that those who profited from it bought parliamentary seats to ensured its legality and why it took such a long time for abolition to come to fruition, and only then with massive recompense to the slavers. However, it certainly wasn't legal at the time the statue was erected - it was 1895, some 88 year after slavery had been abolished. 
2. It's probably no accident (cue my own conspiracy theory) that Colston's statue was erected only a year after the nearby statue of Edmund Burke, MP for Bristol from 1774 to 1780, who had criticised Bristol's role in slavery. Burke proposed a bill to ban slaveholders from being able to sit in the House of Commons, claiming they were a danger incompatible with traditional notions of British liberty (thus reinforcing the fact that while slavery was legal, it was considered repugnant at the time by many). 
3. Colston's statue was conceivably a deliberate act of political provocation by 19th century Culture Warriors who took exception to Burke's Woke attitude. How better to respond, than by commissioning a laudatory statue of a mass murdering slaver. As an aside, as an MP, Burke said; "Your representative owes you not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."

When you get shit like the following image and ministers criticising trial by jury - which is enshrined in Magna Carta as one of our basic rights - then you know there's something rotten at the core or the right-wing media and their ministerial puppets.

Much as I detest Rees-Mogg for his cherry picking of data to support his preconceptions, at least he has the decency to voice support trial by jury. 

It's starting to feel a lot like Weimar, as the song goes. We live in dangerous times for freedoms.