TWeaK

And they each charge ten grand a day.

on the other hand, it reveals their irresponsibility: They are willing to spend such a large sum to silence criticism of their actions

It’s even worse than that, they basically poured the public purse into their favourite contractors’ hands, all so they could then pin liability for that expense onto the artist who criticised them.

£50k to clean a small section of wall. Even with it being a listed building and even if they couldn’t figure out how to clean it off right away, that’s a ridiculous figure for what likely amounted to little more than 2 skilled workers over 3 days. Ten grand a day.

Hey now, they only paid £50k.

Seeing as the BBC is basically trying to sensationalise this, I’ll break down the figures.

• First, it’s across two works, not just the protestor one but the statue with the guy marching holding a flag that’s blowing in his face.
• For the judge & protestor the government spent £50k trying to remove it, and £35k in overtime and securtity, total £85k.
• For the flag guy the government spent £60k on fencing and security.
• Total overall is £145k. The BBC rounded this up even though it’s literally the same character count, which further points to their sensationalism.

£95k of their “£150k” was spent on security, which no one and nothing called for. £50k on cleaning is also crazy, even for a listed building.

The government’s careless spending should not be blamed on activists, especially in response to the activists criticising the government.

The UK is full of these public decency laws that have a lot of vagueness to them, meaning they can be broadly applied even in situations where they shouldn’t (not saying this is one of those situations, this guy did more than just stand on a roof).

The ridiculous thing is that “making a youtube video” or something similar could potentially be considered a “reasonable excuse”. Probably easier to get away with it if you’re a network TV show, at least that’s generally been the case over the last few decades…

Sack all the politicians, they fail at the key part of their jobs: representing the voters. Instead, they represent the biggest donors to the party LLC.

Let everyone vote on everything an MP votes on themselves, directly. We don’t need a “representative” to travel to Westminster and vote on our behalf, communication technology makes them obsolete.

The original criticism of the .gov petitions was that it was a distraction from meaningful social action that forced the government to change.