The violent removal of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol was a product of American cultural hegemony. The wave of emotional incontinence following the murder of drug addled wastrel, George Floyd, can only be described as mass hysteria.

The acquittal of the thugs who toppled the statue will no doubt shock and anger those who believe mob vandalism should be punished, but ultimately it was a jury verdict and essentially a local matter. Annoying, but legitimate all the same. Bristol has always had an anarchic tendency which gives it much of its youthful character.

The left, though, should take this minor win for what little it’s worth. We can rise above the immature acts of children in the grip of a social contagion (likely exacerbated by lockdown psychosis), but it must not and will not stand as a precedent. The madness of the moment has passed, and any attempt to further attack public property is likely to cause civil unrest. Though no legal precedent has been set, some may take the view that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander – and who knows where that ends?

Who and what Colston was is neither here nor there. It is not for the mob to decide what stays and what goes. That the police failed to act that day calls for a review of the police command in Bristol, and explicit Home Office direction to protect our heritage. Once is an oversight. Twice is policy. If as a society we roll over and let the minority mob decide sensitive matters for us then we’ve flushed civil society down the pan.

Though it’s probable the incident will not be repeated, of greater concern is the fact that our local authorities and public institutions are just as capable of cultural vandalism as the mob (with about as much accountability), and busybodies throughout the land are making lists of public monuments for review. The woke Gestapo is already purging our history from local and national museums and re-writing curriculums. Not even the Imperial War Museum or the National Trust is safe from the revisionist’s eye.

The moral panic about race in the wake of BLM has proven wholly malign and has done more to create and exacerbate divisions than heal them. The doctrine of critical race theory and its adjacent dogma is a thinly veiled far left authoritarian agenda that in truth cares nothing for the plight of “BAME” people. A political methodology that views issues primarily in terms of race begets only more racism.

There is a debate to be had about racism in the UK, but that is a different debate to the one the USA must have and the attempt to graft American political fads on to our own politics gets us no closer to understanding and resolving the issues. Arguably, America has systemic racism as a legacy of its racial segregation, and US crime and punishment, and unjust enforcement could be viewed as a legacy issue from that era, but that is for America to resolve in its own way. Britain has a history distinct from that of the USA, and our public debate should not borrow irrelevant US narratives.

Much of this social contagion can be traced to the drivel produced and funded by British academia, where rigorous social science has given way to ludicrous post-modern psychobabble, infused with classic post-colonial guilt and the Anglophobia of our elites as described by George Orwell. That Bristol’s kiddults are taken in by this demoralisation agenda is largely symptomatic of a corrupted education system which has long been captured by the wokerati.

Ultimately, this all happened because the police allowed it to happen – just as they let rioters to run amok in London, even kneeling before them in the hope of appeasing them. It’s happening for the same reason the authorities have failed to clamp down on Pakistani grooming gangs and it’s the same reason the police are waving the flag of the Rainbow Reich. The entire edifice of policing and justice has been captured by the left, and our spineless politicians won’t fight it. This isn’t about statues. It’s about the intellectual and moral collapse of the British establishment.