‘Straight from the totalitarian playbook!’ Neil Oliver slams Mark Drakeford’s plan to cancel Winston Churchill

Historic British figures such as Winston Churchill and Horatio Nelson face erasure, with addresses such as Caerphilly’s Churchill Park and Nelson Street in Chepstow possibly set to change.

An “audit of commemoration” identified 204 “persons of interest”, 57 monuments, 93 public buildings and 442 street names with “red-amber-green colour-coding”.

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GB News presenter Neil Oliver has blasted the proposal, saying it is “straight from the totalitarian playbook” in a scathing rant.

“We need to treat it with the contempt it deserves. It’s nonsense”, he said.

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“It’s absolutely bizarre, it comes straight from the totalitarian playbook, it’s about seperating people from the past.

“It’s about making people have contempt for the past, as if it is something to be ashamed of.

“Once you get people to feel contempt for the past, you can push them forward to believe in some sort of perfect future.

“It’s easy to sell the future, because it doesn’t exist yet.”

Oliver added that there are signs of a pushback from Britons against draconian moves from those in authority, evidenced by signs of mutiny against Ulez.

“What we’re seeing with the Ulez infrastructure and cameras being deactivated is the beginning of people reacting in the face of officialdom that doesn’t listen to them and seeks to impose upon them that which they do not agree with.

“I would say that we should take a page out of that book and see it when it comes to suggestions like, ‘we’re going to rename parks and streets and houses and your public buildings because we want to separate you from your collective past’.

“We should just treat that with the contempt it deserves and ignore the idea and ignore the people pushing the idea.”

In a scathing assessment of the World War leader, the audit claims Churchill was “widely hated in South Wales mining communities for his actions as Home Secretary during the Tonypandy riots”.

It adds he “expressed a belief in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race and was opposed to dismantling the British Empire, taking a romanticised view of its achievements”.

The plan states: “The terms of reference for this project separate the audit stage from issues arising, which might form the basis for a second stage. The present document seeks to capture information, not provide a set of answers.”

In 2020, Parliament Square’s Churchill statue was defaced, with Black Lives Matters protesters adding the word “racist”.