Living off immoral earnings is always an interesting subject. Our government has refused numerous offers from high earning call girls and prostitutes wishing and willing to pay their taxes, on the grounds that the government would be living off immoral earnings, which is a crime. Prostitution is not illegal here but apparently its sufficiently immoral that the exchequer want nothing to do with it. In their office hours at least. After work, who knows? Or cares. Most of the staff there sticking to far more reasonable rent boys around Piccadilly Circus.

Are nations which are stinking rich from selling their oil likely to be lambasted in the coming decades as being responsible for the entire climate change situation? Will we be tumbling statues of Mohammed bin Salman into the sea? Oh, we don’t have any. Not yet, anyway. Not until he can prove that he isn’t a murderous, war-mongering, Yemen-ruining son-of-a-whore.

Cecil Rhodes has had his personal history removed too. On that basis that his actions in South Africa were imperialistic. And a bit racist. Just a bit. But he made his money from diamond mines. Then used it for all manner of good causes including the Rhodes Scholarship which is still sending 32 bright kids a year to Oxford University.

The Sassoon family left their native Iraq and moved to Mumbai. Where they donated fortunes to the City in their benevolence and charitable enthusiasm. They built hospitals, schools, housing for the poor, community centres, Mumbai today is a testament to the wealth of one family. Yet that wealth came from opium. Grown in China, shipped to India, the Sassoons were a one-family drug cartel. The Pablo Escobar of their day, without the violence. Who basically laundered their money by funding the building of an entire city.

So what about Edward Colston? The man whose statue tumbled into the river Avon on Sunday night. The man who built half of the city of Bristol. All funded by his ‘business’. Which was the slave trade.

I’m never big on judging historical actions by today’s standards. People are part of their own zeitgeist and react accordingly. They can’t act according to standards which won’t be even mentioned for 300 years. And the slave trade was always endorsed by the Church as some part of ‘God’s will’. There were obviously dissenters in the clergy but as funding has to come from somewhere, God was obliged to turn a blind eye to catastrophic racism, so St Marks could replace its leaking roof.

The problem was not the trashing of the statue, but the fact that the statue was still there. The city’s failure to consider its ongoing reverence to a slaver (because that was not only his sole trade, but he was the big boss of the industry) was an error of judgment. And in the recent escalation of anti-racism feelings worldwide, the years of missed ‘debate’ about its acceptability led to this ‘act of vandalism’.

So, sorry Ed, it had to go. The council dragged its heels, the people spoke. Loud and clear.

They can replace it with a statue of Harry Kane. That’s morally acceptable.

Happy riotous days

A xxxx