Woke Met Police list Cenotaph war memorial and Winston Churchill monument on secret list of 'contentious statues'

The Metropolitan Police have placed the Cenotaph on a secret list of "contentious statues” prone to attack because of their links to war, imperialism or slavery.

The former Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square and Nelson’s Column are also on the list.

The list of statues explains why they might be targeted by protesters including the Cenotaph, which it says “functions as the UK’s official national war memorial.”

Winston Churchill’s statue is also on the list of 'contentious statues'
Jacob King

Notes explaining Scotland Yard’s decisions claim Nelson “spent a large part of his career in the Caribbean and developed an affinity with the slave owner”.

The list has emerged in a report by the Policy Exchange think-tank through freedom of information requests as part of an investigation into what it claims is declining law and order and increasing crime around the Palace of Westminster.

Other memorials named on the list includes those to Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi and Earl Mountbatten, who was murdered by the IRA in 1979.

The document claims that Churchill's statue features because of his claims that British imperialism was for the good of the “primitive” and “subject races”, although he is wrongly accused in it of murdering three million Indians.

They also repeat disputed claims that Earl Mountbatten “oversaw the partition of several provinces which led to the deaths of nearly two ­million people and the displacement of nearly 20 million” in India.

The reasons for naming the Cenotaph have been left blank but it has been damaged by protesters in recent years.

Former Cabinet minister Simon Clark said: “There is a particularly bitter irony in thinking there is anything ‘contentious’ about the Cenotaph and our paying lasting respect to all those whose sacrifice means we live in freedom.”

Its report, Tarnished Jewel: The Decline Of The Streets Around Parliament, claims violent crime has increased two and a half times faster near Parliament than in London as a whole.

The report includes landmarks prone to attack
Aaron Chown

The report states that police have allowed serious potential security threats to spiral in the area, while extreme right and left-wing protesters have been able to threaten MPs, ministers and journalists.

The report’s author, Andrew Gilligan said: “Nowhere else in Europe, with the possible exception of the Eiffel Tower, is more famous, or more emblematic of its nation.

"Yet what should be a showpiece has declined into a degree of squalor and disorder."

He added: “The rise in offences coincided with the relaxation of rules on protest."