He didn't side with Patel.
What he said was this:
- Starmer said that, although the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol should have been removed years go, the manner in which it was pulled down was “completely wrong”. Asked for his reaction to what happened yesterday, Starmer said:
It shouldn’t be done in that way. Completely wrong to pull a statue down like that.
But, stepping back, that statue should have been taken down a long, long time ago. You can’t, in 21st-century Britain, have a slaver on a statue.
A statue is there to honour people. And you can’t have that in 21st-century Britain. That statue should have been brought down properly with consent and put, I would say, in a museum.
This was a man who was responsible for 100,000 people being moved from Africa to the Caribbean as slaves, including women and children who were branded on their chests with the name of the company that he ran. Of the 100,000, 20,000 died en route and they were chucked in the sea.
- He defended the decision of the police in Bristol not to intervene. He said:
I was very struck by Superintendent Andy Bennett, who was the police officer, the superintendent, on the ground who judged the situation. And he said he was really disappointed by the vandalism and the bringing down of the statue. But he didn’t think it was the right thing to intervene, because it might make the situation worse.