Legal change to protect statues

BRITAIN should not try to edit or censor its past, the Communities Secretary has said, amid proposed amendments to laws to protect statues, monuments and other memorials.

Robert Jenrick said any decision to remove heritage assets in England will require planning permission and a consultation with local communities, adding he wanted to see a “considered approach”. He wrote in the Sunday Telegraph: “Our view will be set out in law, that such monuments are almost always best explained and contextualised, not taken and hidden away.”

The plans to change the legislation, to be revealed in Parliament today, follow the toppling of a Bristol statue of slave trader Edward Colston last year and a wider discussion on the removal of controversial monuments.

Mr Jenrick said he had noticed an attempt to set a narrative which seeks to erase part of the nation’s history, adding this was “at the hand of the flash mob, or by the decree of a ‘cultural committee’ of town hall militants and woke worthies”. He added: “What has stood for generations should be considered thoughtfully, not removed on a whim or at the behest of a baying mob.”