‘Let’s vote for who we put on a pedestal’

There were jubilant cheers, there was a loud clanking, there was one almighty splash.

In Bristol on Sunday, thousands of Black Lives Matter protestors celebrated as a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston was hauled down from its plinth, rolled through the streets and pushed into the harbour. An effigy that had provoked years of debate was disposed of in a swift act of collective outrage.

There have been similar incidents in the US and elsewhere in Europe. In Montgomery, Alabama, a statue of the Confederate leader Robert E Lee was torn down. Across Belgium, statues of King Leopold II (who created a brutally exploitative colony in the Congo) have been attacked.

Statues are obvious targets because they are such powerful symbols. They are put on plinths so that we literally look up to the people they commemorate. Pulling them down sends a strong message of change: when communism collapsed in the USSR, multiple statues of Lenin bit the dust.

All this begs the question: who decides on putting them up in the first place?

In Britain, councils approve plans for them, but organisations or members of the public have to propose and pay for them – and others can object. The fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square has been without a permanent statue for 180 years because nobody has been able to agree who should go on it – or how it should be paid for.

Westminster Council insists on subjects “whose legacies will endure”. The problem is that views about individuals often change with the passage of time, either because new facts emerge about them, or because later generations have different values, or because they had both a good side and a bad one.

Mahatma Gandhi has long been revered as one of the world’s greatest civil-rights leaders, but his statue in New York was vandalised last weekend because some see him as a racist.

Edward Colston was honoured in Bristol because he gave large sums of money to schools, hospitals, churches and almshouses; now, however, two centuries after his death, his sins have come to be seen as worse than his merits.

So, should we vote for our statues – just as we do for our elected leaders?

Set in stone

Some say, of course. If statues can only be put up by those who can afford to pay for them, then the subjects will only ever be chosen by a very small minority. But since they are objects for public display that everyone has to look at, we should all help decide on who deserves to be commemorated – and also which sculptors are chosen for the task.

Others argue that social media makes it is easy to manipulate the outcome of a vote. When a poll was held to name a new polar research vessel, it was won by a joke suggestion, Boaty McBoatface. And many people are badly informed: one statue targeted this weekend was that of Abraham Lincoln, who led the fight against slavery in America and was assassinated for promoting black rights.