Patrick Christys: The people who want to tear statues down would be better served trying to make some history of their own

Another day, another statue. I was going to say do the woke brigade not have anything better to do than relentlessly overanalyse British history and obsess about a bit of concrete, but it’s not as if they have jobs to go to is it?

The latest nuttery to come out of the ‘let’s burn our country to the ground’ crew is that Goldsmiths University in London is considering removing statues to Sir Francis Drake and Admiral Lord Nelson. They were involved in the slave trade and therefore they must be cancelled. Sir Francis Drake was born in 1577 and Admiral Lord Nelson was born in 1758. They were hardly going to be avid members of the LGBTQ+ community or keen advocates of critical race theory.

It wasn’t too long before that that people thought the earth was flat and on their maps there were parts of the sea that had ‘here be dragons’ written on it. Obviously it’s not great to be involved in the slave trade, don’t get me wrong. But Sir Francis Drake also circumnavigated the earth, the people who want to tear his statue down have barely circumnavigated Islington. He defeated the Spanish Armada, the anti-statue lot think that’s the name of a gastro-pub. Lord Nelson won the Battle of Trafalgar, he lost an arm and an eye fighting for this country.

What have the Goldsmiths Anti-Racist Action group done for this nation, apart from try to desecrate its memory. They spent 137 days occupying the Deptford Town Hall in 2019 to show their anger at a statue of Robert Blake. Get a life. Can you imagine racking up student debt to the tune of around £20,000 just so that you can sit in a town hall it Deptford and shout at a statue. It’s pathetic. And where does it end? Do they go an occupy the pyramids and then tear them down because they were built by slaves?

You know, Great Britain didn’t invent slavery. Slavery originated in Mesopotamia, before being adopted by China and India in 221BC. At the time of Drake and Nelson many countries were involved in the slave trade such as France, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, vast swathes of the middle east, most African nations had an internal slave trade.

The woke lot are very quiet about figures like Gandhi – he had sex with underage girls and was friends with Mussolini. There’s a statue to Gandhi in parliament square – shall we drag that into the river? Nelson Mandela was head of the military wing of the ANC, which let off bombs in public and killed innocent civilians. He’s also in Parliament Square, we could pop him in the river next to Gandhi. Who else is in Parliament Square? Churchill. The madness of wanting to tear down Winston Churchill’s statue – he defeated the Nazis for goodness sake. We would literally be living in Hitler’s colony today if it wasn’t for old Winston.

I’d have had to have goose stepped to the studio today past giant swastika flags if Churchill hadn’t existed. In fact, the greatest irony of it all, is that the people who now have the privilege and luxury of wasting their time throwing red paint over statues can only do so because of people like Churchill – they wouldn’t have free speech and freedom of expression if it wasn’t for him. And what gives this lot the right to re-write our history?

Lord Nelson won wars, so did Churchill, Drake sailed a rickety old ship around the world. I feel like the people who want to tear statues down would be better served trying to make some history of their own, instead of trying to abolish the one we already have.