Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Mob justice is no justice

It doesn’t matter how good your intentions are, it’s your process that counts. The push to topple a statue of Edward Colston did not begin at the spur of the moment this weekend. Campaigners have argued for years that the Bristolian slave trader was not a man to be lionised. You don’t have to be especially woke to wonder why a monument to a man who made his fortune off the brutalised backs of human beings was still standing in a British city in 2020. Reconsidering those we memorialise and whether they ought to be honoured seems a timely task.

But the just and proper way to go about it is debate followed by democratic decision. The resulting discussions would draw attention to historical injustices and give the public an opportunity to meditate on them before putting the matter to a vote in town halls or local referendums. Where a removal resulted, it would be an explicit rejection of past wrongdoing and an implicit resolution to do better.

The just and proper way to go about it is debate followed by democratic decision

Those who tore down Colston have denied us that debate and denied themselves too. The liberal press will run a few columns about his villainy and Newsnight will put on a panel but otherwise the conversation will be about the actions of the vandals. Very little mention will be made, incidentally, of George Floyd. His name does not even appear in the Guardian report on the statue.

One of the reasons mob justice is no justice is because it disdains rules and process and an iconoclasm without either will quickly run into trouble. To rework the old relativist saw, one person’s icon is another’s graven image. It’s all very well the police standing by while left-wing protestors yank down Colston because he was a slaver, but what happens when a far-right rabble comes for Nelson Mandela’s statue on the pretext that he was head of uMkhonto we Sizwe? Radicals might say that different standards ought to apply to racist and anti-racist rioters, but even if a law-based order could tolerate such caprice, it would require those radicals to invest rather a lot of confidence in the very police they want abolished.

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