Vocal Voices

So the vandals who toppled the statue of Edward Colston have been cleared of wrongdoing. This is a disgraceful decision and is a licence for vandalism. It reminds me of the vandals in the Middle East who relentlessly destroyed treasured relics and monuments of historical importance which can never be replaced, wiping out the history of the region which belongs to us all. Whilst we all have the right to make a point nobody should be exonerated from wilful destruction. There are times when action most definitely does not speak louder than words.

Completely agree. Wonder if they would like to tear the concert hall down and the schools all built with Colston money? No? I thought not

An unbelievable decision by the jury.

I can understand how these things can be an affront to modern values, but we cannot eradicate history. For me it is far better to understand it, what caused it and what drove the things we did rather than erase it all.

We need history, to know the people within it, how they worked, what made them think and act the way they did - and to learn. The way Henry VIII, Bloody Mary, Genghis Khan, Stalin, Hitler, Caesar, and ever so many others all operated in ways we now find abhorrent. What should we do? Write them out as if they did not exist?

We are lost if we do.

A statue need not be an accolade or acceptance, it can equally be a warning. Should we only remember the good guys? Will that make us feel better?

I think those who are offended by this vandalism should tear down all their Woke statues they put up on place of our historical figures.

Then, when taken to court, there is a precedent set that expressing group sentiment that something is wrong, by tearing it down, is not vandalism.

Let's see how they like the boot on the other foot. Especially as there are a Hell of a lot more people who don't like what they do than do like what they do.

cromwell wrote:An unbelievable decision by the jury.

.... which is what actually concerns me the most about this case, and does nothing to dissuade me from my view that the English justice system is criminally not fit for purpose. It would have been very interesting to be a fly on the wall in the jury room - were there one or two loudmouth sympathisers among the 12 who bullied and browbeat the rest into a not guilty verdict? It could easily have been straight out of a John Grisham novel.

Judging from the previous posts on this thread, if the jury had been "randomly selected" from members of this forum, for example, I doubt those four defendants would be walking free tonight. It gives weight to the argument that we need carefully selected panels of sensible-thinking professional jurists - or quite honestly, get rid of trial by jury for cases like these, period, as this verdict shows it's now demonstrably becoming an end to political means.

Personally, I'd have had the four of them dunked upside down in the Bristol Basin before sentencing them to a minimum of a year's penal servitude ....
But hey-ho, we live in a society today where a Black Lives Matter activist gets a New Year's Gong, so whadda I know?