Thangam Debbonaire's virtue signalling is already outdated

Telegraph

3 days ago

It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall of Keir Starmer's holiday villa as he reads about the latest attempt by one of his own appointees to the House of Lords to resurrect the culture wars back home.
Will the Prime Minister welcome the intervention by the Baroness Debbonaire of De Beauvoir Town in the London Borough of Hackney, who has called for the statue of Clive of India to be removed from its plinth outside the Foreign Office?
Or will he have the political nous to recognise that the last thing this Government needs is a rehashing of the interminable and pointless arguments about statues that characterised the very weird summer of 2020?
Baroness Debbonaire is a former MP for Bristol, where Black Lives Matter protesters physically removed a statue of Edward Colston, the slave trader, and dumped it into the city's harbour. The same Left-wing people removed Debbonaire herself from elected office at last year's general election, though she at least managed to avoid being similarly dumped into the sea. Instead she was elevated to the Lords, from where she now pontificates.
Debbonaire has more of a stake in the fate of the Clive statue than most: she has Indian heritage on her father's side, and her claim that the statue's removal would improve relations with India cannot be immediately dismissed. On the other hand, with a historic trade agreement between Britain and India just agreed, relations don't seem to be being undermined by Clive's continuing presence in Whitehall.
The whole debate about statues, like so many divisive culture war topics in the UK, began in the United States, where the legacy of slavery and the civil war continues to reverberate across American society. But British activists simply could not have allowed the Black Lives Matter bandwagon to pass by without some vigorous attempts to jump aboard. This has come with illogical, though entertaining, consequences for the English language.
Protesters in London took to the streets demanding 'Defund the police!' and 'Hands up, don't shoot!' These phrases were relevant in America but utterly absurd in a British context.
Now safely ensconced in the Lords, from whence she cannot be evicted by the displeasure of voters, Baroness Debbonaire wants to step back in time to resurrect old battles about which very few people still care.
Like many who abhor even the memory of the British Empire, she risks pretending that individuals like Clive played no part in Britain's activities on the sub-continent, or at least allowing the current generation not to have to face the reality of the historical record. Once we have removed the statues and portraits of everyone who had a questionable role in the British Empire, it will become harder, not easier, to point an accusing finger at what was done to foreign peoples in our name. 'Clive who?'
Alas, this looks suspiciously like virtue signalling on Baroness Debbonaire's part. Which raises a question over the whole point of appointments for life to the Lords: isn't a life in ermine supposed to relieve its denizens of having to suck up to voters?