Nominal Liberty

The last educational establishment in Bristol to commemorate the dunked and de-pedestalled slave trader Edward Colston is to change its name, despite an overwhelming majority vote against the move by people who have nothing to do with the place. Of the two and a half thousand responses to a consultation on the matter, two-fifths were from concerned citizens with no connection to the school; and more than eighty per cent of these altruistic persons were in favour of retaining the name. Whether these crusaders against the censoring of history are also the kind of people who squeal woke totalitarianism whenever the Atlantic slave trade replaces Who Won the Bloody War Anyway on the history curriculum, remains as yet unclear.