Member

The other difficulty of basing a list on historical or architectural interest is that it produces something very different from a list of those memorials that we know are frequently targeted in political protest. The people of Newcastle, being well brought up and proud of their community, do not need legislation to tell them not to clamber on memorials to their forebears who died in the Great War. If they ever climb on a monument, it tends to be the one to the second Earl Grey which looms over the city centre, but whether that is because they share the view taken by your Lordships’ House about the Reform Act 1832, I would not like to say. If the Government had simply started by compiling a list of memorials at risk along common routes of protest, they might have included some of the other war memorials and statues of military leaders that line Parliament Square and Whitehall and that are targeted, sadly, more often than those listed in the current schedule.