Bristol Council criticised for removing BLM statue within 24 hours yet keeping a slave trader up for 125 years

Bristol Council has come under fire for the "double standard" of keeping a slave trader statue up for over 125 years, while taking down a BLM statue within 24 hours.

It all started amidst global protests against systemic racism and police brutality at the start of last month when protesters pulled down the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol’s city centre.

They then rolled the statue down to the river and threw it into the water.

Cut to Wednesday and a new statue was erected – this time of Black Lives Matter protester, Jen Reid.

The statue came about after Reid had been photographed standing on the empty plinth right after the Colston statue had been removed. It's pretty incredible.

She said:

[The statue] is about making a stand for my mother, for my daughter, for black people like me.

But within 24 hours of the new statue being erected, it was taken down by Bristol Council in the early hours of Thursday morning.

Video shows workers using a crane to lower the statue into a skip on the back of a truck.

Photographers can be seen hovering around the truck.

When video of the moment made its way to social media, many people called out Bristol Council for allowing the statue of a slave trader to stay in place for over 125 years – it was erected in 1895 – but a statue in support of Black Lives Matter couldn’t be left up for more than 24 hours:

Bristol mayor Marvin Rees defended the decision to take down the BLM statue and said it was up to the locals to decide what to do with the empty plinth.

He told BBC Radio 5:

Running around provoking debate without any awareness of the potential consequences of that debate is not OK.

We have to approach things with wisdom, which is why we've set out a process that revolves around a history commission telling the full story of Bristol so that the city is much more informed and is in a better position to collectively decide who it wants to honour and where.

Rees said he would also “welcome a contribution” from the BLM statue artist, Marc Quinn, as it had cost the council money to remove the statue.