The UK prime minister Boris Johnson has said it is “absurd and shameful” that the most prominent statue of Winston Churchill, the wartime prime minister, is “at risk of attack” from violent protesters, after the monument was covered in hoarding ahead of a weekend of anticipated disorder.
The prime minister made the statement on Twitter after the statue, which stands in front of the Houses of Parliament, was shrouded in wood and a hoarding was erected around the base of the nearby Cenotaph war memorial to protect them against vandalism. Both monuments were defaced when tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters took to the streets last weekend.
There were fears that the monuments would be the focus of violence on Saturday, when rightwing groups vowed to “protect” the statues during fresh protests over discrimination against black and ethnic minority people.
The Black Lives Matter campaign group responded by bringing forward the protests by a day and asking protesters to stay away from central London because of the potential for confrontation.
Mr Johnson also called on protesters to stay away from the demonstrations, saying they had been “sadly hijacked by extremists intent on violence”.
But several hundred protesters gathered in Hyde Park on Friday afternoon in defiance of the request. Speakers led the crowd — far smaller than the many thousands who attended events last week — in shouts of “Black Lives Matter” and “Say her name — Belly Mujinga.” Ms Mujinga, a black ticket office worker who died of Covid-19 after a passenger spat on her, has become one of the focal points of the UK Black Lives Matter movement.
In a break with their hands-off approach at previous protests, police went into the crowd and arrested some demonstrators, taking them to a line of waiting vans.
Mr Johnson wrote in a Twitter thread that the Churchill statue was a “permanent reminder of his achievement in saving this country — and the whole of Europe — from a fascist and racist tyranny”. Before he took office, the prime minister in 2014 published a biography of the wartime leader.
“It is absurd and shameful that this national monument should today be at risk of attack by violent protesters,” Mr Johnson said.
Churchill has been controversial among some anti-racists because of his views about black people and imperialism. Mr Johnson acknowledged that the wartime prime minister sometimes expressed opinions that were and are “unacceptable to us today”.
But he went on: “He was a hero, and he fully deserves his memorial.”
Mr Johnson’s remarks are his first intervention after a week marked by a rapid rethinking of the place of some memorials in UK public life after a 10,000-strong crowd of demonstrators on Sunday pulled down a statue in Bristol of Edward Colston, a 17th century figure associated with the slave trade, and threw it in into the river.
Tower Hamlets council in east London on Tuesday removed a statue of Robert Milligan, a slave owner, from West India Dock, while Bournemouth council in Dorset has temporarily removed a statue of Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the scouting movement, for fear it might be attacked.
In his tweets, Mr Johnson made clear that he was against removing all statues of controversial figures, saying the UK should not try to “edit and censor” its past.
“The statues in our cities and towns were put up by previous generations,” Mr Johnson wrote. “They had different perspectives, different understandings of right and wrong.”
The statues taught people about the past “with all its faults”, he added. “To tear them down would be to lie about our history, and impoverish the education of generations to come.”