UK: Of Statues and Statutes

We British seem reluctant to honour our great men and women, as the absurd farce surrounding the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square tells us. Presumably with the approval of the mayor, Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson, it was thought appropriate to give a succession of people a brief time alone on the plinth to celebrate some crass pseudo concept like people-awareness, something which could be gained in concentrated form travelling on an underground train in the rush hour. There are many appropriate candidates for the empty plinth, my own favoured one being Edward Jenner, who invented vaccination and of whom there is a statue in London which, oddly, was once in Trafalgar Square. This is a man who has saved literally millions of lives and deserves our adulation. He won’t get it.

Here in Italy almost every street is named after someone, and not just Italian heroes Garibaldi, Mazzini, King Umberto and Queen Margherita (famous for her pizzas). Near me there is a via Marx, via Lenin and via Gagarin (it has been of old a communist area) but a also via Molière, via M.L.King and via M.Buonaroti.

In Italy, in America and in France they name laws after the parliamentarian who first promulgated them. In France a man called Toubon put forward a law making it illegal to use English words. It is known as ‘la loi Allgood’.

So it should be in England. The new law making it possible to resign a peerage (and therefore for a pensioned off minister to return to front line politics and even party leadership) should be called the Mandelson Law.