New Alternative News Channel "GB News" chaired by Andrew Neil launching - read OP before posting

Leaving aside the fact you literally just did what I chastened and turned this into an absolutist case - "anti-British attitude" as a means to shut down national self-review - I was hoping you wouldn't do it, and TBH suspected you might: you conflated the morality of the vandalism against the statue, with the moral stance against its existence, or the context in which it exists in the first - that is, to celebrate Edward Colston, noted Slave Trader.

And to your second point: show me where that statue was acting as a condemnation or solemn remembrance to Colston's turgid life and I'll take the "whitewashing history" argument, itself your own canard. History isn't set in stone; once erected, totems to controversial figures don't get historical immunity just because "they're there", or some clutched-pearl that removing something seen as a celebration of a shítty racist man who made money from trading slaves might somehow sully the British identity. If it's that fragile, maybe it's not worth keeping in the first place - or maybe you don't give people enough credit to actually extract the good from the bad - and parse the "complicated" figures. That you try to draw moral equivalence on an industrialised racist, hiding behind the argument of petty vandalism, is a poor reflection on your attempts at the "where do you draw the line?" argument; you draw the line at the statues celebrating slave traders. It's one scenario that is quite simple in fact.

But again, you clearly don't want to do that, and decide the easier path is to chatter about "self-loathing"; as if reflection on Britain's racist legacy is somehow a negative or psychological weakness. If national pride is dependent on its inability to either debate its own past, or be malleable in the face of a changing future - what value has it in the first place? If Scotland leaves the UK in the next 10 years, what will "British" mean then? According to you, exactly the same and beholden to no period of self-reflection.

Open a history book, to be blunt; plenty of figures, movements and peoples were organised against the Slade Trade, including our own patriots like Daniel O'Connell. Like much in life, the money earned and industry/jobs established by the trade made its removal difficult. But the moral objection existed and the "norms" argument doesn't wash.

If Farage's views were representative of the people, then clearly he would have been elected to Parliament at some point when he ran. He didn't, and in fact only ever held the position of MEP - presumably as something of a protest vote in elections with a notoriously low turnout

Who cares? People who would have been valid targets for Colston's slave trade. Is it really that difficult for you to reflect on why a Black Englishman might find it repugnant that his home-town has a statue, one that celebrates a man who literally objectified and commodified his ancestor's existence? But then you tried to dismiss those concerns as people who would vandalise and be violent - making it easy I guess to ignore said concerns. Magnificent cognitive dissonance really.

Stop trying to conflate the difference between often private homophobic views - views that are often mentioned in modern historical biographies anyway - and a pillar of the UK's then economy. Most modern textbooks and documentaries are careful to highlight figures whose personal opinions or lives were distasteful or deplorable.

And in any case, this wasn't your argument, as always the goalposts move a little. You were trying to imply that the British Identity depended on the continued existence of unapologetic celebrations of obviously and demonstrably malevolent figures. Not "ah he invented sliced bread but hated the gays", but someone who saw Black people as cattle. Objects.

History be complex. But it's not absolutist either.

Once again, for the umpteenth time, we are NOT TALKING ABOUT THE VANDALISM ITSELF.

I don't have a Time subscription but your own article deviates from your "who cares?" narrative. Black people do, they just don't care for the manner in which its expressed. Did you even read the article? Seems not cos you're obsessed with vandalism as a means of dismissal of cause and context.