"I've learnt in the last few days from the State Broadcaster, BBC, here of some other endowments with equally embarrassing financial origins. I've yet to hear anything about banks, insurance companies, galleries, or even churches. Or about Stately Homes. So, once the dust has settled on a few hundred demolished plinths, and some bronze and marble effigies laid to rest in various museums, galleries and Visitor Centres, these other beneficiaries of "Britain's Colonial Past" will quietly go on doing business as usual."

This is a good point and, if we're being honest, one that needs addressing. I could have accused you of whataboutery when you mentioned black people who benefited from the slave trade (I won't, because it would be hypocritical to ignore the fact that this happened). Ruthless and money-grabbing African chiefs were often complicit in rounding up and selling their men, women and children to white slavers who would then transport them. It's the case that the white slavers would generally have found the trade much more difficult to carry out without this assistance. It's another reflection of the fact that the world isn't, er, to be seen as black and white (that's not meant to be a joke). It isn't the thrust of anti-racist movements that black people are all saintly whereas white people are all the devil incarnate. But, in our own countries, we see the fruits of the slave trade in the shape not only of celebratory statues but also in the shape of grand public buildings and those stately homes you mention... There's also the non-racist exploitation in the shape of the cheap and hard labour need to build those grand houses, not to speak of magnificent cathedrals, etc. In my part of the Westcountry, children from the age of seven were used to crawl through horizontal flues to scrape off the condensed sublimate from the roasting of arsenic ore. The children typically died at around fourteen and the arsenic, shipped over the Atlantic to be used on cotton plantations against the weevil, caused the premature deaths of thousands of slaves. Good old Victorian values...   I guess that the super-wealthy and powerful (including the Church) didn't care who they exploited as long as they were increasing their wealth. We then have to take a step back and consider what we're prepared to lose "on principle" in addition to the statues. With regard to that, I'd just make the point that the stately homes and cathedrals are not explicitly there today to celebrate great and powerful men (though there's plenty of annoying commemorative stuff INSIDE some cathedrals...), whereas the street statues are. There's plenty of scope inside those buildings for explaining the history, and the history needs to be honestly explained. It's also right that the buildings should be accessible to the public, with entrance fees honestly set in order to raise money for their upkeep, which is a rather more modern difficulty for many of them. As for those street statues, they are not history. They are tendentious and superficial celebrations of one facet of a person's achievements, whilst sweeping under the carpet anything that's murky. That isn't honest history. In fact, it isn't any kind of history. I'm for keeping the grand houses and the cathedrals, but I'm for having a public conversation about the people depicted by street statues, with a determined view to removing some of them...

If you want to accuse me of being rather too fond of grand buildings, you could be right...