Emma Webb

In his curious little book about Flying Saucers, Carl Jung took an interesting detour into the psychology of modern art.  His contemporaries, he said, had 'taken as their subject the disintegration of forms'. Their pictures, 'abstractly detached from meaning and feeling alike, are distinguished by their "meaninglessness" as much as their deliberate aloofness from the spectator'. Artists 'have immersed themselves,' wrote Jung, 'in the destructive element and have created a new conception of beauty, one that delights in the alienation of meaning and of feeling.

What should we make of the clamour for more statues to meet the same fate as Edward Colston's? One thing to say is that the toppling of monuments is rarely historically literate. During the French revolution, Parisians destroyed twenty-eight statues of biblical kings from the west façade of Notre Dame Cathedral. In their zeal, it didn’t matter that the 500-year old statues didn’t actually portray the kings of France. Countless pieces of art, books and historical artefacts have been lost to this kind of ideological erasure. Finding themselves in the illustrious company of the Taliban and Islamic State, it is wrong to describe this weekend’s iconoclasts as mere vandals.

Don’t let off your celebratory party poppers just yet! Anjem Choudary may be facing jail, but he is a slippery man - an ex-lawyer always careful to push the boundaries of the law he despised without breaking it - so don’t think he won’t try to play a bad hand to his advantage. There's a phrase about 'never wasting a good crisis'. And I have no doubt that is precisely what Choudary will do. The judge could order him to be suspended, David-Blaine-style, in a glass box and he would probably find a way to radicalise people using semaphore. A forthcoming study by The Henry Jackson Society think-tank has found that between 1999 and 2015, 23 per cent of all convicted Islamist terrorists in the UK had direct links with Choudary’s now proscribed al-Muhajiroun.