In the early days of this summer’s wave of Black Lives Matter protests, police in Glasgow put a statue under 24-hour guard.
The equestrian monument, first erected in 1735, was dedicated to “our glorious hero and deliverer (under God) from popery and slavery”; to William of Orange, the monarch revered to this day by Scottish Loyalists for guaranteeing, as they see it, their religious freedom from the Catholic Church.
By mid-June this horseback “King Billy” had been vandalised twice, his plinth daubed with pro IRA and Black Lives Matter graffiti.
