My friend Fred Shirley is a student at Bristol. He was texting me as the statue was being toppled. Everyone we knew was cheering and saying, “it’s about time.”

It’s no shock that the Tory government, even in the person of a minister who is herself a person of color, deplores the act of toppling a monument of one of the world’s most notorious slavers.

The racism and elitism of the Conservative Party are not at all hidden.

But when even the Labour leader cannot bring himself to applaud the statue’s removal, instead criticizing the action of a crowd fed up with racism and official complicity, then we know for sure the UK has a racism problem.

The man being honored by that statue, after all, transported 100,000 human beings into slavery. 10,000 of them died of disease en route, caused by the deplorable conditions in which they were held.

Of course that statue had to go. No man who did that can be honored.

Yet neither major UK political party have done anything to remove the statue.

If that’s not a symptom of racism, nothing is.