h yes, statues: the only subject powerful enough to wrestle the news focus away from the pandemic, the oscillating UK infection rates, the Dominic Cummings road trip movie, the global Black Lives Matter movement and the looming prospect of a second coronavirus wave. As the statue of the slaver Edward Colston was toppled into the harbour in Bristol, a sort of statue-shaped bat signal went out to Britain’s patriots, a special pheromone that somehow can only be picked up by those blokes who are always in the audience on Question Time: Our Statues Need Saving. Now the patriots are going in to bat for mediocre town centre statues that would otherwise collect hot, white streaks of bird shit. You’re right, they are the real heroes of the hour. In case Statue Discourse has passed you by, a refresher: over a weekend of nationwide BLM protests, two whole statues were treated badly. I know, I know. The first was Bristol’s much-petitioned-about Edward Colston statue, which, after years of prevarication, was toppled into the waters where his slave ships used to dock. The second, the Churchill statue in Parliament Square, was amended with a squiggle of spray paint that read “was a racist”, and was quickly licked clean again the next morning by an army of Conservative MPs. (Hard to know who cleaned the Churchill statue, to be fair: I’ve seen at least three photos of people who say they got up early to clean it, out of Respect, but only one photo of a hi-vis-wearing council worker with an actual wet sponge and some soap. So maybe there is some false valour being claimed here.) Either way, we are talking about statues – both for, and against – more than at any time in history since maybe the peak of Ancient Greece. The pro-statue crowd have gone for the familiar line that tearing down statues is “erasing our history”, as if history books cease to exist the second a statue goes splish – and as if celebrating brutal slavers is in any way good or honourable anyway (we really have to start teaching British history in schools). In defence of this, a subsection of the populace has emerged, a brave heroic army of defenders, whom I am loosely calling “Statue Simps”. As statue demolition gained traction, clots of lads started standing outside war memorials with their arms folded. They started in Plymouth, where a group of 35 stood menacingly outside a memorial so robust a bomb couldn’t topple it, then moved on to Bristol, where topless men in wet socks gamely attempted to prize Colston out of the abyss with nothing more than a big pole. Various groups of “men who communicate only via Facebook Messenger” were moved on from loitering around the Churchill statue over the weekend, and have been keeping a roving guard there ever since. But we’ve got a taste for destroying statues now, and no matter how many caffeine shampoo ultras stand in the way of them, more will come down. As Colston was getting his first swimming lesson, Belgium was busy defacing a statue of King Leopold II, who oversaw an unimaginably brutal regime in Congo that led to the death of millions – his Antwerp statue was taken down for public safety this week. On Tuesday, Sadiq Khan unveiled a new commission to review the diversity of London landmarks, and 11 hours later a statue of Robert Milligan was being removed from West India Quay. BritBox, iPlayer and Netflix have done their own statue-toppling this week, removing Little Britain – a series we should also, as a warning, teach in schools – from their services, though as yet no gangs of lads have started a rousing chant of “YEAH BUT NO BUT” in the faces of the woke militia. One rule for centuries-old statues of slavers left without question to stand firm in Bristol’s streets, another rule for the only comedy we were legally allowed to watch in 2003. I’m still trying to get my head around the idea of responding to widespread protests calling for human dignity and fairer policing with “yeah but what about our statues, though”; the idea that in the midst of all of this, the inanimate objects that most weekends get urinated on by town drunks are somehow more important and worthy than social justice and human life. But then I suppose we are living in 2020 – and it is naive of me to be surprised by anything any more. Tommy Robinson is fuming, obviously: on Sunday, he released a video in which he raged necklessly on his sofa, shouting of the Colston statue: “Who gives a shit what it’s about and what the man’s done? It’s part of British history.” He’s right: it is part of British history. So we should learn about and confront that, rather than let it stand, memorialised and unbothered, in our various town centres. If you impulsively care about protecting our dark history so much, you’re probably on the wrong side of it. As of this weekend, Britain has two fewer heads to try to throw traffic cones on top of. That’s about the net loss of this entire escapade. • Joel Golby is the author of Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant