Statues of Limitations

Satire on a State broadcaster? Whose idea was that in the first place? The Mash Report was not the first to prove what a very bad idea it was.

Charlie Hebdo was also effectively nationalised, at around the time that it was the subject of a State-organised demonstration featuring assorted African and Eastern European despots alongside a British Prime Minister who was given to having hecklers arrested.

This week, that rag, which is mercifully unimaginable in Britain, has done what it always does. Suddenly it is not so popular among our own extremely belated converts to the cause of free speech, people who were all in favour of cancellation when they were the ones doing the cancelling. Even now, they demand the unchallenged propagation of a laughably inaccurate version of British history, down to and including the hilarious idea that the National Trust had Tory roots.

These ostentatious protectors of unthreatened statues are described as "social conservatives". But what, exactly, do these Baby Boomers wish to conserve? Lifelong marriage? Regular churchgoing? All right, then, ethnic homogeneity? Well, the Empire Windrush docked in 1948, before most of them were born or any of them can remember.

In any case, groups that were present before that, and which have been reclassified as somehow part of a pre-War Anglo-Saxon monolith, were certainly not regarded as such at the time. Indeed, Pontins blacklists Irish names and accents to this day. Among those who are guarding statues of Churchill and Cromwell against no one, does anyone have a name that appears on the Pontins blacklist? I bet that someone does, you know. I bet that someone does.