The government will make it a crime to climb on Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, it will be announced today.
Offenders could face up to three months in prison and a £1,000 fine for desecrating the monument to Britain’s wartime leader.
The Churchill statue is not officially classified as one of the UK’s war memorials, but Home Secretary Yvette Cooper plans to add it to the list of statues and monuments which it will soon become a criminal offence to climb.
These will include the Cenotaph in Whitehall, the Royal Artillery Memorial in Hyde Park, and many other famous structures across Britain commemorating the service of the armed forces in the First and Second World Wars.
The new law is contained in the flagship Crime and Policing Bill currently progressing through Parliament.
Announcing Churchill’s addition to the list of protected memorials, Cooper said: “As the country comes together to celebrate VE Day, it is only right that we ensure Winston Churchill’s statue is treated with the respect it deserves, along with the other sacred war memorials around our country.”
Churchill was said to have personally picked the spot where he wanted his statue to stand when approving plans for the redevelopment of Parliament Square in the 1950s.
The bronze, 12-foot statue of the former prime minister was unveiled in Westminster Square in November 1973 by his widow Clementine, eight years after her husband’s death.
Queen Elizabeth II and the Queen Mother were in attendance at the ceremony.
Giving his backing to the new protection, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said: “Sir Winston Churchill stands at the summit of our country’s greatest heroes, and has been an inspiration to every prime minister that has followed him.
“The justifiable fury that is provoked when people use his statue as a platform for their protests speaks to the deep and enduring love that all decent British people have for Sir Winston.
“It is the least we owe him, and the rest of the greatest generation, to make those acts criminal.”
In recent years, the statue has become a regular target for demonstrators.
In 2014, a man was arrested after spending 48 hours on the statue plinth as part of Occupy Democracy protests in Westminster, but was subsequently acquitted of all charges.
The statue was infamously sprayed with red paint and adorned with a green turf Mohican during May Day protests in 2000, for which the perpetrator received a 30-day jail sentence.
The statue was also daubed with graffiti during Extinction Rebellion demonstrations in 2020, for which an 18-year-old protester was given a £200 fine and told to pay £1,200 in compensation.
During the Black Lives Matter protests earlier that year, the statue was again sprayed with graffiti, and was eventually boarded up and ringed by police officers to protect it from demonstrators.
Most recently, trans rights campaigners who occupied Parliament Square in late April in protest at the Supreme Court decision on the legal definition of a woman, climbed the Churchill statue and waved placards from its plinth, as well as daubing slogans on other statues in the square.
(BBC News)
