Please remember that you must not express your feelings about the Belfast atrocity until the political establishment has told you exactly how you are supposed to feel. That's how it works now.
A serious country does not swap its greatest leader on its banknotes for little animals
Imagine India ditching Gandhi for a monkey. Or the USA dropping Washington for a racoon
This is the rot that is eating away at our confidence, identity and cohesion:
Bank dropped Churchill after being told he was ‘elitist’
https://t.co/SuovuH1DEU
On this day in 2020: The corrupt BLM protests continued worldwide amid widespread unrest, and in Bristol, England, a mob toppled a statue of Edward Colston.
Edward Colston (1636–1721) was a Bristol-born Tory MP, merchant, and philanthropist. He is historically remembered as one of the city's greatest benefactors for his extensive charitable giving.
His philanthropy was rooted in devout High Church Anglicanism and Tory principles. He focused on education (especially for poor boys with Anglican instruction), care for the elderly and poor, church repairs, and moral/social reform. He gave generously during his lifetime and left a large bequest upon his death. Estimates of his total charitable contributions (lifetime + will) reach around £71,000 or more; equivalent to many millions (roughly £16+ million in modern terms, though exact conversions vary).
In 1691, he founded Colston's Almshouses on St Michael's Hill, Bristol, at a cost of about £8,000 (a huge sum then). This provided housing for 24 poor men and women. He also endowed merchant sailors' almshouses in King Street. Endowed a foundation to clothe and teach 40 boys (with instructions for Anglican-leaning books, "no tincture of Whiggism"). He later spent £1,500 rebuilding the schoolhouse.
Endowed and expanded Queen Elizabeth's Hospital (a school for orphan boys) added places for boys, donated £500+, and proposed further increases.
Built and endowed Colston's Hospital (also known as Colston's Boys' School) on St Augustine’s Back in 1708–1710, at a cost of around £30,000–£41,200. This provided education, clothing, maintenance, and apprenticeships for 100 poor boys. It opened with great ceremony and remains a legacy institution (though sadly renamed in modern times).
Donated to Temple School for Boys (1710) and other educational efforts. His trusts and societies (e.g., via the Society of Merchant Venturers) continued supporting schools long after his death.
Gave regular and substantial gifts for the repair, beautification, and adornment of many Bristol parish churches (e.g., St Michael, St Mary Redcliffe, St Werburgh, St James) and Bristol Cathedral. Supported sermon readings, prayers, and Anglican institutions to promote what he saw as moral stability. Donated to churches in London and elsewhere. During times of scarcity, he sent large sums (e.g., £20,000) to relief committees in London. Lent money to Bristol Corporation and supported civic projects.
Colston was praised in his era and for centuries afterward as a model of "Christian liberality" prudent, extensive, and well-regulated charity. Bristol's Corporation and citizens honoured him with streets, halls, schools, and the 1895 statue (erected explicitly for his philanthropy).
These acts helped many poor Bristolians with education, shelter, and faith-based support at a time when public welfare systems were limited. His endowments created lasting institutions that operated for generations. That said, like many historical figures, his record includes complexities (wealth sources), but his positive contributions, were real, substantial, and widely recognised in his lifetime and beyond, and should be today.
His statue (erected 1895) stood in his honour for over a century. Demonstrators used ropes to pull down Colston's bronze statue, rolled it through the streets, defaced it, and dumped it into Bristol Harbour. Similar protests occurred across the UK (including London) and globally. This was part of a massive wave of George Floyd protests that spread to over 2,000 cities and towns in 60+ countries. The unrest involved significant violence, looting, arson, and property destruction. Estimates placed insured damages in the US at $1–2 billion (the costliest civil disorder in insurance history), with Minneapolis alone seeing around $550 million in losses. Over 14,000 arrests occurred nationally, and at least 19–25 deaths were linked to the unrest.
The toppling of Colston's statue was an act of mob vandalism, not reasoned historical reckoning. It exemplified the worst of 2020's protests: selective outrage weaponized to erase parts of the past; a crowd took the law into its own hands, cheered the destruction, and treated a public monument like a piñata. This wasn't isolated. Statues and memorials across the US and UK faced similar fates during the summer; often with little regard for historical nuance.
The death of George Floyd, a man with a lengthy criminal record including multiple drug convictions, theft, and a 2007 aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon (home invasion), became the spark. Floyd's killing was wrong and led to Derek Chauvin's conviction, but portraying him as a flawless martyr while excusing widespread rioting turned a specific tragedy into a blanket pretext for chaos.
The events reeked of the era's woke ideology and critical social justice frameworks; ones that reduce complex history to oppressor/oppressed binaries, encourage collective guilt, and justify destruction as "punching up." Pulling down a 125-year-old statue of a flawed 17th-century figure in England because of a criminal's death in Minnesota wasn't justice; it was performative theatre by activists (and opportunists) treating Western history as uniquely villainous while ignoring slavery's global reality across cultures and eras.
Much of it fed into grift: organisations raised hundreds of millions (e.g., BLM Global Network), with questions later arising about finances, luxury purchases, and limited tangible community outcomes. The "defund the police" push correlated with crime spikes in some cities, while "mostly peaceful" framing downplayed billions in damages to businesses (often minority-owned) and lives disrupted. History isn't a clean slate for rewriting by whoever shouts loudest; preserving statues with context is how societies learn, not by mob erasure that signals "our narrative now rules."
Colston's statue was later recovered, and shamefully left with the damage and graffiti, and is now in a museum. The episode remains a stark reminder of 2020's excesses: riots, cultural vandalism, and ideological overreach that did little for any supposed cause.
SUPERB! Trevor Phillip's BEAUTIFULLY exposes David Lammy and Labour's sickening hypocrisy.
He shows him the receipts of them ALL saying it's ok to feel "fury" and "anger" over George Floyd, while they criticise Farage for saying the same about Henry Nowak.
Satisfying to watch.
A kebab manufacturer has been fined £500,000 after an investigation found that products marketed as lamb contained little actual lamb and were instead made up largely of fat, skin and other meat products.
https://t.co/d3qRDVC0wf
Wtf!
In a section about British history, instructors told the officers that Caribbean migrants had been forcibly rounded up and marched aboard the now-famous ship the Empire Windrush.
https://t.co/RyPTexyqrz
Only the green blob could decide the way to 'save nature' is to wipe out a 3,000-year-old native herd. Dartmoor's wild ponies are now at risk ....
https://t.co/kWiPcVVyll
This is deeply troubling. I hope my union - @fbunational - will explain to fire service bosses that firefighters must be free to express their political views without fear of sanction by their employer. @manchesterfire has seriously overstepped the mark here.
Calling UK student loans a "loan" is a scam
It's a lifelong graduate tax
Because interest rates are tied to RPI inflation, the balance grows faster than most graduates can ever pay it off
The majority will just watch 9% of their pay vanish every month for 30 or 40 years until it’s written off
It's a permanent drag on young wealth creation
Hampshire Police DID NOTHING when they received reports of the Digwas firing potentially illegal weapons in their garden. Now it emerges that even after they arrested Digwa for murder they wanted to release a statement saying Henry Nowak was the aggressor.
Ask yourself: what kind of force drafts an official statement three days after a teenager’s death that effectively paints him as the aggressor — and only rows back when the family’s fury makes it politically impossible?
What kind of chief constable signs off a culture where the priority, in the immediate aftermath of a fatal stabbing, is not “how did we fail him?” but “how do we protect ourselves?”
The IOPC has already confirmed it is investigating the officers’ contact with Henry, including the use of handcuffs and first aid, yet Hampshire briefed The Telegraph that there is “no indication of misconduct” and that all officers are merely “witnesses”.
This looks less like accountability and more like an early attempt to lock in a “nothing to see here” narrative before the watchdog has even finished.
When a chief constable presides over a force that handcuffs a dying boy, drafts victim‑blaming lines, meddles in a live trial, and then rushes out exonerating briefings for his own officers, the problem is not rogue PCs — it’s the man at the top.
Richard Hermer - Labour’s Attorney General - has lied to the BBC, claiming Reform wants migrants to “drown” in the Channel.
Hermer used lawfare to hound British troops who had done nothing wrong, in one case pushing him to attempt suicide.
He is a traitor to his country.
I have no interest in anything he has to say other than a full apology to the British veterans whose lives he ruined and turning himself in to authorities.
Reform will secure our border and deport all illegal migrants.
I’m stunned. The Sunday Times is reporting Hampshire police wanted to portray Henry Nowak as the aggressor in an official statement three days after his death, but changed their wording following outrage from his family.
I’ll be covering this shocking and contemptible revelation from the hosting chair on The Late Show Live. @GBNEWS 12am.
The Chief Constable must resign. Alexis Boon must take responsibility for what has happened on his watch.
The police knew what was on the body cam from day 1.
Hampshire Police 'tried to smear Henry Nowak as aggressor' just THREE DAYS after his murder.
They tried to cover it up and influence the trial.
Alexis Boon, the Chief Constable of Hampshire police should be sacked and lose his pension.
ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING!