Unedifying squabbles over who merits a statue

SIR – Daniel Hannan (Comment, August 27) says that “local communities in the American South have every right to take down Confederate memorials, some of them recent and gimcrack.”

What about those in the local community, in many cases probably the majority, who do not wish these memorials to be taken down? Do they not have rights too?

It is worth noting that the ringleaders of the organised mob which last month pulled down the statue of a Confederate soldier in Durham, North Carolina, have made no secret of their membership of the Workers World Party, a group which split from the Socialist Workers Party on the grounds, among others, that the latter was insufficiently supportive of North Korea. The sight of them kicking and spitting at the statue as it lay on the ground, their faces contorted with hatred, was a deeply unedifying one. Just how representative are they of the local community?

As for artistic merit, if this were indeed required to ensure a statue’s survival then the statues in Parliament Square of both Sir Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela might well be at risk in the future. Charles Priestley

Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire

SIR – It is unfortunate that the proposals to erect statues to commemorate Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett in the environs of the Houses of Parliament appear to have taken on a somewhat competitive nature (report, August 27).

There is already a memorial to Emmeline Pankhurst in Victoria Tower Gardens, adjacent to the western end of the Parliament buildings. There even exists a photo of her friend Dame Ethel Smyth, the composer and suffragette, conducting a police band at its unveiling in March 1930.

A possible solution which might appeal to both factions could be to erect a complementary memorial to Millicent Fawcett nearby in the same gardens. This spot could hardly be closer to the Houses of Parliament and is not plagued by the same degree of traffic as Parliament Square. Lewis Orchard

Woking, Surrey