Boris Johnson has said removing statues of controversial figures is “to lie about our history”, as he argued that national protests in the wake of the death of George Floyd in the US had been taken over by extremists, The Guardian writes.
In a lengthy Twitter thread in response to the boarding up of the Cenotaph in Whitehall and Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, the prime minister expressed anger at the targeting of monuments.
Johnson claimed the Black Lives Matters protests “have been sadly hijacked by extremists intent on violence”, and he called attacks on police last weekend “intolerable” and “abhorrent”, The Guardian specifies.
