Thank you. We now move to item 11, which is today's scheduled short debate, and I call on Neil Hamilton to speak to the topic he has chosen. 

Thank you, acting Presiding Officer, and I'm delighted to be back in the Chamber for the first time since March, although I apologise to my old parliamentary colleague, the Minister, for detaining him so late in the day. But I'm delighted to see him, and I can't think of anybody better to answer this debate. 

This debate arises, as I'm sure everybody realises, from the politically motivated campaign by supporters of the Marxist pressure group Black Lives Matter to remove a statute of Sir Thomas Picton from Cardiff City Hall, and a war memorial obelisk from Picton Terrace, or just outside Picton Terrace, in Carmarthen. This campaign is nothing less than an attempt to erase an important part of Wales's history. The removal of either of these monuments, in my view, would be an act of cultural and artistic vandalism. Both of them are listed and protected by Cadw as monuments of historic, artistic and architectural significance. The statue in City Hall is a grade I listed structure, and the obelisk is listed grade II. The statue in City Hall is integral to the 11 statutes of Welsh heroes that are in the marble hall, and the marble hall is also listed grade I. And the ensemble—both the hall and the statues together—are also listed as being grade I and therefore of the utmost significance. Indeed, as Cardiff City Hall's own website explains, suggestions for the subjects of these statues were invited 100 years ago from all over Wales, and each statue is the work of a different sculptor. And it was a twentieth-century hero, David Lloyd George, who at that time was the Secretary of State for War, but would shortly thereafter become Prime Minister, who unveiled the statues, and a painting of that ceremony is displayed in the hall. The 11 heroes of Wales—and a very diverse collection they are—were chosen by the Welsh people in an open competition, a competition that was held by the Western Mail, and the statues were not paid for by the taxpayer; they were paid for by Lord Rhondda in a munificent gift. 

Now, a collection of politically motivated nobodies on Cardiff City Council wants to vandalise this artistic conception by removing the Picton statue. The other heroes include Boadicea and Henry VII, neither of whom, I think, by common consent was a twentieth-century woke liberal, and, indeed, both of them slaughtered their opponents without scruple. So, how long will it be before the nobodies move on to them to erect the statue of their hero in their place, career criminal and drug dealer, George Floyd? Why did the Welsh people choose in a free vote to commemorate Sir Thomas Picton as one of the 11 heroes? Well, he was the highest ranking officer to be killed in the battle of Waterloo. He was a lieutenant general, and as Wellington's despatch at the time recorded, 

'He fell gloriously leading his division to a charge with bayonets, by which one of the most serious attacks made by the enemy of our position was defeated.'

Picton was a man of fearless valour, and his last words leading the charge were, 'Charge, charge, hurrah, hurrah'. Amazingly, two days before, at the other important skirmish before the Battle of Waterloo, at Quatre Bras, he had been shot in the hip by a musket ball and was in considerable pain. But he concealed this. The only person he told about the wound was his servant. He didn't seek any medical assistance at all, he bandaged the wound up and carried on fighting.

His valour at Waterloo was matched in the preceding years, because he played a pivotal part in the road to Waterloo, through Spain, in the Peninsular war. And he was, I think, a very significant element in forcing the French out of Spain, where of course Napoleon had installed his brother as the king. And the battles in which Picton played such an important part are commemorated on the obelisk in Carmarthen: the battles of Bussaco, Fuentes de Oñoro, Badajoz—which was a very terrible engagement; he was severely wounded there as well. But he wouldn't leave the ramparts, and the day after, having recently inherited a fortune having won the battle, he gave every survivor under his command a guinea, which was a considerable sum in those days. He then was invalided home, but he returned later in the year to fight the battles of Victoria, and to fight through the Pyrenees. This was a very important part of forcing Napoleon back to, ultimately, Waterloo and his own personal destruction. Picton was awarded the KCB and he became the Member of Parliament for Pembroke Boroughs.

After he was killed at Waterloo, his body was brought home in state, accompanied by a regiment of soldiers, who took over a week to get from Deal, where they landed, to London, where he was buried first of all in St George's, Hanover Square, but a public monument was erected by order of Parliament in St Paul's Cathedral. When Wellington died, in 1852, a decision was taken to exhume Picton from St George's, Hanover Square, and he was then reburied in St Paul's Cathedral, which is where he lies today.

Of course, his life did have certain controversies in it, which were well known at the time, when he was Governor of Trinidad. But his defence to the charges that were laid against him was that he was acting under the orders of his superior officer, Abercromby, who said that he had to administer the law according to the laws of Spain, from whom Britain had recently taken Trinidad.

But history is a chequerboard, and we have to accept the good with the bad—the black squares as well as the white squares. Guy Gibson won the Victoria Cross for the dambusters raid, but, as everybody knows, he had a dog called Nigger, and would that bar him, similarly, from being commemorated today? Well, I think not. Nobody approves of using words like that any more, but we have to recognise that these men were men of their time, in their different ways, and that has, I think, to be accommodated.

It's very important, I think, that we should memorialise Welsh and British heroes, because the history of a nation defines that nation, and ripping up every reference that we find inconvenient today to our great history and heritage is not, I think, something to be proud of. History should always be judged in its own context, and the motives of those who judge history in today's context I think should be treated with suspicion, because more often than not, as in this case, the motivation will be for some kind of political objective and not revising an historical narrative.

These are great people who are being commemorated for the great things that they did during their time, and removing problematic statues will not, of course, wash away the painful periods of our past. It seems that no statue is safe. Picton I've spoken about, and the paradox of Picton is that the man he was fighting, Napoleon, had actually reintroduced slavery into the West Indies, in 1802, it having first of all been abolished by the Revolutionary Government in 1794. And so, the ultimate victory of Waterloo, in which Picton himself played a significant part, was responsible for the abolition of slavery in the West Indies. And so, is that not another reason why we should commemorate Sir Thomas Picton?

The contrast with France is very significant, of course. Whilst we have people in this country who want to get rid of monuments to Picton, Napoleon still lies in state in the Hôtel des Invalides, and is regarded as one of the great Frenchmen, even though he tried to enslave the whole of Europe.

The Welsh Government has also targeted Winston Churchill as somebody perhaps who is problematic—the man who fought against racism and fascism in the form of Nazism and whose great speeches in 1940 and afterwards inspired the nation to ultimate success and the destruction of Nazism. Lord Nelson, also. He's in the firing line, even though he had no meaningful links with slavery and paralysed French and Spanish naval dominance at Trafalgar. These three historical figures alone changed the landscape of Britain and, without their victories in the Napoleonic wars or the second world war, Britain would have fallen to European militarised dictatorial powers.

Welsh Labour, in my view—and it's not just Welsh Labour, but they are the Government, of course—is creating visible problems in today's society with their audit of these statues. It's no wonder that, in a recent survey, 55 per cent of UK adults believe that Black Lives Matter have increased racial tensions, and 44 per cent of ethnic minorities also believe that Black Lives Matter have raised racial tensions. And this feeds into the wider cancel culture that is taking over western society, as Brendan O'Neill, the editor of Spiked magazine, which I used to subscribe to, when it was called Living Marxism, describes as, 'The woke elites have launched a neo-Maoist war on the past.' We've seen the ultimate expression of that, of course, in Cambodia, where they turned the clock back to year zero, and the killing fields were the consequence. Well, of course, I'm not comparing the ambitions of those who want to remove general Picton with Pol Pot in Cambodia, but, nevertheless, I think it's a significant point that needs to be considered.

There is a toxic culture that has been brought on by the Black Lives Matter syndrome, if I can put it like that, which has meant that people can't express their views anymore safely online. They risk their jobs simply for taking pride in or standing up for their heritage. I can give you one example. There was a man who flew 'White Lives Matter' as a banner above Burnley football club. He lost his job as a result. Manx Radio took Stu Peters off the air after he questioned white privilege. I've had people write to me who have been threatened with disciplinary action at work for sharing content online, from mainstream political parties, on the subject of Black Lives Matter protests when war memorials have been vandalised.

This entire statue, streets and building names review that the Welsh Government is currently embarking on is completely down to Black Lives Matter. They acknowledged that in the announcement of the audit. This is an inherently Marxist body, which wishes to destroy our very way of life, which is why they're attacking our history and heritage. Their explicit aims are, and I quote, from their website, 'to dismantle capitalism', 'to 'defund the police',  'abolish prisons', and 'get rid of borders'. Is this what the Welsh Government really believes in? Well, anybody with an understanding of history must realise it's totally inappropriate to hold people of the past to the standards of today. We had a minute's silence in this place for George Floyd. When I asked that, shortly afterwards, there should be a commemoration for the three people who were murdered in a public park in Reading by an Islamic extremist, who was convicted only a couple of weeks ago for those murders, answer came there none, certainly not an affirmative one.

Well, I think this is an unfortunate way in which to proceed. But an essential knowledge of Britain's past, I think, is being replaced by politically correct topics in some of our educational institutions, and some of the most important influential historical events are ignored or downplayed—things like the English civil war, the industrial revolution, horrors of the Soviet Union et cetera. If children aren't taught about their history, they can't be fully conversant with it, and consequentially future generations risk being even more detached from their ancestors and, ultimately, their country as a whole. 

A great French philosopher and writer, Alexis de Tocqueville, once said that 

'as the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity'. 

And I think the removal of statues conveys a stark message that Britain's historical figures who shaped Britain into the country that it is today should be forgotten. And never let it be forgotten that we were the first country to abolish the slave trade itself, at a time when slavery was commonplace around the world. African tribes enslaved each other. The Ottomans enslaved occupied territories, and so on. We should be proud that we were the first country to outlaw the slave trade. In 1808, we established the West Africa Squadron to patrol the seas to eliminate any remnants of the slave trade. We captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 African slaves. Well, why shouldn't they be commemorated? Instead of tearing down statues, we should be erecting more of them to other heroes, who don't have appropriate commemoration.

So, I call upon the Government to abandon its campaign to take down these essential parts of our heritage. But the public, of course, are not buying the narrative. In the case of the Carmarthen obelisk, the culture committee this week received evidence about the consultation that Carmarthenshire County Council had engaged in and the public are overwhelmingly against removing the obelisk, two to one. And among three separate age groups, in which they've been grouped—16 to 24, 25 to 54 and 55 plus—consistently across the generations, the majority against removing the obelisk is the same.

Your time's nearly up now. 

I'm just winding up. We have to come to terms with our heritage and so I hope that this debate will be an opportunity whereby we can start this process of assimilating our past in a way that we can be proud of, but without disguising those parts of it that need to be known about and that we would no longer find acceptable today.

I call the Deputy Minister for Culture, Sport and Tourism to reply to the debate—Dafydd Elis-Thomas.

May I first of all acknowledge the wonder of the speech that we've just heard—one of the most staggering in the history of this Senedd? But I am not surprised, of course, because, as Neil Hamilton mentioned very kindly, we were both Members of another Parliament in Westminster. I won't seek to respond to the broad international and philosophical canvas he chose to paint for us. But I will, first of all, set out what the system is for scrapping statues, and this is entirely clear and based in law: if statues or monuments are listed, then you must have listed building consent in order to remove them.

Now, I won't comment on the individual cases that he has mentioned, because if there were a request to delist over the next four months, it would end up on my desk as the Minister with responsibility for this area. But it is important that I state that this process is administered by local planning authorities and that particular consideration will be given to how desirable safeguarding a listed structure would be, in terms of its location or any particular features of historical or architectural importance, before deciding whether it should be removed or taken down.

Now, particular historic consideration may be very pertinent in this debate, because history is not a process controlled by the past; history is a science that is understood and read in the present, hopefully with a view to the future, or at least that's how I was taught in a number of universities in Scotland and in Wales. And I want to make it entirely clear, therefore that, to my mind, if any Member of this Senedd has the desire to see any statutes or commemorations removed, then that request must go through the appropriate process. Cadw, on behalf of Welsh Ministers—it's a body that I'm responsible for—recommend which buildings and monuments should be listed or delisted, which is another reason why I can't respond directly to the individual cases that Neil Hamilton has referred to. But it's only in the light of new evidence that any request to delist any structure would be considered, and that evidence must relate to architectural or particular historical interest. 

And, of course, if one accepts that historical hermeneutics is the only way to understand history, then it's possible that we understand history differently now than the way we understood history a century ago, when some of the memorials mentioned were erected. And it is possible—I'm not saying it's desirable or undesirable—to make an application to ensure that monuments or statues are moved or removed. And Neil Hamilton hasn't been fair with the city of Cardiff in this case. As I understand it—and I haven't been there to look at it in detail—the particular monument he referred to hasn't been removed, it has been boxed. And if the government of this city and county of Cardiff decide that the historical aspects of Thomas Picton have changed to justify placing it in a box, then that is a matter for the city and county of Cardiff. It is—[Interruption.] Legally speaking, it is, unless someone leads a process asking for them to act differently.

Neil Hamilton also made specific reference to Black Lives Matter. Now, I have to say that, although he used the term 'Marxist', which is usually used in an accusatory way, about people who are on the left and are described as communist—. I was once called 'the Marxist from Meirionnydd'. Well, I certainly am from that area in terms of my family, but I wouldn't espouse an unreasonable Marxist theory in any sense in my public life, or my academic life previously. So, it is time that we had a better understanding of this idea of the future and our past. Removing statues is lawful, but that process has to be gone through. It's not a matter of having a rhetorical debate in the Senedd or some sort of brief academic lecture from the culture Minister—that should not be the process for that. 

Thank you very much, Minister. And that concludes today's proceedings.

The meeting ended at 19:37.