ANARCHY RULES! Whoopie, I’m off to burn down the BBC because they sometimes say things that I don’t like.
Apparently it’s allowed now.
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In seeing the “Bigger picture” who decides where the cut off line is, probably 99% of people who passed the statue didn’t have any idea who it was or the history behind him.
So by all means petition and campaign to get the statue removed, but it was criminal damage pure and simple and should have been treated as such.
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But meanwhile, back in the real world, there’s no such things as ‘criminal damage pure and simple’. There is no law, nor can there ever be any law (except in a kafka-esque nightmare authoritarian state) that is entirely abstract, and operates regardless of real cicumstances.
The case in fact turned on the Criminal Damage Act’s exact wording of ‘lawful excuse’ - the circumstances that render lawful what in other circumstances could be regarded as ‘criminal damage’.
The prosecution (very foolishly) tried to argue that the circumstances didn’t matter - in effect that damage to property can never be justified - an untenable position (just think about it) that also flies in the face of the actual Act, and legal precedent, case law, etc, and the English common law. Not surprisingly, the jury decided, having actually heard all the evidence and legal argument, that in this case there was indeed a lawful excuse for the damage.
Do away with trial by jury, and the other basic principles of the rule of law that were involved in the decision, and what are you left with? - a kafka-esque nightmare authoritarian state.
I have to say, all the people I know who live in the area knew EXACTLY who it was and the history behind it, of all ages and political persuasions I should add. This sort of thing has been said before, possibly further up the thread, and I tried to point out then that this had been a 20+ year thing in Bristol. The massive redevelopment of broadmead into theCabot Circus shopping centre was originally going to be called… Merchant’s Quarter? something like that anyway, and there was a significant local grassroots campaign at the time, which the Bristol Post then got on board with, to change the name due to the merchant’s connection to slaves, which eventually only once amplified by the national press caused the company, Abrdn, Hammerson, one of those vast shopping centre owning companies, to change it. Bristol’s part in the slave trade has been a considerable issue locally as I say for a couple of decades at least, and while some may have not known who it was, i don’t think it’s the case at all that the statues, and the wider issue, is some minority thing that’s only known to a few lefties political students in the city, my experience has been that locals have been saying for YEARS that the issue needs to be looked at and discussed, even if ultimately people decide to do nothing, but that the one thing that needed to change was the ‘sweep it under the carpet and pretend it doesn’t exist’ that had been happening for decades beforehand.
I’m not from Bristol but my time there made me realise very quickly that it’s a very complex place. Nor is my comment a suggestion that what was done to the statue was necessarily correct, but rather just commentary that in fact this certainly wasn’t a few idiots doing something the entire city was against, but was far more complicated than that, and tbh I’m surprised it took as long as it did given as I say the council etc has very much taken a ‘look the other way’ attitude for centuries despite growing anger and frustrations from some, but of course not all, residents and other stakeholders locally.
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Geoff I do live in the real word daily, so please don’t be so patronising.
Anyway where do you stop, take all the statues down, hiding them all away and you are in a way sweeping everything under the carpet again
Put up large plaques telling people exactly who the person was, educate them on how they made their money in the slave trade, why it was so unacectable, tell the people the truth behind the person and don’t end up hiding it all away again , as you end up with everything being forgotten with no discussion about how terrible their actions were.
Out of sight and out of mind.
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My comment on ‘the real world’ was not about you Griffin - the point (which I thought I had made clearly) was that it’s not possible - or legal - to consider damage to property as a matter of abstract principle only, out of its real world context. Think about - oh, I don’t know - somebody breaking and entering because they are concerned about an elderly neighbour. In other circumstances, the same act would be criminal damage - it’s precisely the context, not the act itself, that is important - a judgement is involved, and that’s the jury’s job…
@kirsteastevenson - your view here of the importance of local context is very much in line with the ‘topplers’:
Obviously I don’t think that this verdict means we should start pulling down all the statues in the UK. Really, it’s not about statues at all: it’s about that statue, in this city, at this time. It really is a very particular backdrop, and the jury obviously came to an understanding of that nuance. The legacy of all the people who have protested against the statue and campaigned to end the “cult of Colston” in Bristol gave us legs to stand on – groups such as Countering Colston and Bristol Radical History Group. Without all those who have dug deep into history, we wouldn’t have stood a chance – our actions would have been seen as criminal damage by the jury.
She also points out that the statue’s ‘value has increased by up to 50-fold since we pulled it down. In that sense, how can it be said that we damaged anything?’ and that the 'statue is a far more useful tool for history and learning than it ever was before, which negates any of the arguments made about us “erasing history”.
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The ‘increase in value’ argument is interestingly of course also often applied to Banksy - another Bristolian that supported the ‘topplers’. Nobody regards his street art as graffiti, since he can turn an old shed wall into a million-pound work of art.
Very interesting legal view here too - on the current draconian Tory ‘culture war’ on protest: increasing possible sentences will make more choose jury trial, and make juries even less likely to convict.
So where do you draw the line and stop, Churchill in Parliament Square 
with enough bollocks you can justify anything nowadays.
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Well here’s an idea: how about randomly selecting a panel of the accused’s peers, getting them to listen to all the evidence and legal arguments, then they decide the issue.
Old fashioned idea, I know (over 800 years old in England) - but maybe in this case it has survived because nobody has yet come up with a better idea?
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Geof, is there any chance that you can write a post that is understandable by “the man on the Clapham omnibus” rather than to a bunch of pissed up university professors at a dinner party?
I remember hippies wearing Kafkas (or something) & don’t understand the relevance to it when discussing what appears to be a legal tolerance of wilful destruction of property by an angry mob.
It seems that you approve of this behaviour which would in turn indicate support for legalised mob rule.
I’m already in training for this new found freedom & have been reading up on things. I hope you approve although it will be some time before I can write verbose replies.
In the meantime I am studying methods of not causing criminal damage to property. I hope you approve!
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Interesting response Mark. Generally, my own approach to things I have difficulty understanding is to try to find out more, think about it more, etc. Here’s a starting point:
Good new book review here too - highly relevant to this whole thread:
So Kafka wrote similar stuff to George Orwell, Athur C. Carke & Terry Gilliam (of Monty Python) but without the “hippy” badge.
See? I am learning!
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Kafka worked mainly in the 1910s-20s - it’s hard to think of an important novelist, or really artist of any kind in the second half of the 20th century that wasn’t influenced by him - certainly in film Terry Giliam’s Brazil comes to mind.
He was in at the birth of modernity and nailed it in much the same way as Shakespeare nailed early capitalism - if you’ve ever experienced, say, being passed around officials or ‘advisors’ at some anonymous call-centre, none of them willing or able, under some mysterious ‘rules’, to grasp your individual situation, until you finally end up exactly where you began - then you’re living in a kafka-esque world. I know I am!
I often think that ‘intellectuals’ try to convince the rest of us that life is more complicated than it really is in order to justify their existence. 
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He can, but if you try to profit from his work by taking the shed down and selling the wall without permission he will refuse to authenticate the work, leaving you with - to all intents and purposes - a bit of displaced graffiti.
As someone discovered to their cost a few years ago.
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I know. And as for all that relativity theory and quantum mechanics - those physicists love over-complicating things that are really simple, don’t they?
I mean, time going more slowly if you go up a hill, particles being in two places at the same time - it’s all obvious nonsense, isn’t it?
If they did it, and I think they admitted it, then they are guilty. Their reasons for doing it could be called mitigating circumstances and would be taken into account during sentencing. It would have been better if they had been found guilty and received absolute discharges. The problem now is that this verdict may be seen as a precedent.
You might have a point but in this case the jury decided they were not guilty.
Once you get into the territory of telling jurors which way to decide a case based on political preferences you are on a very slippery slope indeed.
Jury verdicts do not set precedents in English law.
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