The Bremen Bod Blog

  I was very interested in to read recently that a couple of the statues currently removed from George Square in Glasgow, for restoration and repair as part of the Square’s renovation, will be returned without their swords. Glasgow City Councillor Graham Campbell explained - “They are the military figures Colin Campbell and Sir John Moore. I don’t think anyone in this lifetime will have seen the statues fully with their swords. I understand that these statues were restored with bronze swords constructed and added back to the statue. “I don’t understand why we just didn’t restore the statue and conserve it as was and symbolically disarm it. My question is who gave the instructions to restore it to its original condition because I don’t understand why that was felt as necessary as it would have added cost to this. “I am making the point that I want those statues not to come back as I don’t think we should be celebrating the military history of the empire massacring people who were en...

Once we Scots eventually get over the heinous crime of King Edward stealing our Stone of Destiny in the first place, there is then a controversial argument to be made for Scotland thanking England for keeping the Stone of Destiny safe for centuries. As you could argue that the only reason the Stone still exists today is because it was kept in England. This is because there is a reasonable possibility that the Stone may not have survived the destructive cultural revolution of Calvinism, John Knox and the fanatical Covenanters. For example, look around Scotland for all our ancient manuscripts, relics and shrines: they were mostly all destroyed during the iconoclast's year zero. We also forget that the Stone was used to crown our Scottish Stuart kings’ centuries after it was taken. Even when it was ‘heroically’ stolen in the 1950s, the activists managed break it by splitting it in two, it had to be repaired. The contemporary politicisation of this relic simply does not stand up ...