Climbing on Winston Churchill statue to become a crime

It will be a crime to climb on Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, the government is set to announce on Wednesday.

Offenders could face up to three months in prison and fined £1,000 for desecrating the monument to the former prime minister.

This is a part of a movement to make it a criminal offence to climb certain UK war memorials. While the statue is not classified as one of the UK’s war memorials, home secretary Yvette Cooper plans to add it to the list of statues and monuments it’ll become illegal to scale.

The new law, contained in the flagship Crime and Policing Bill, is currently progressing through Parliament. Other monuments will include the Cenotaph in Whitehall, the Royal Artillery Memorial in Hyde Park, and other tributes to the armed forces across the country.

Ms Cooper told The Sun: “As the country comes together to celebrate VE Day, it is only right that we ensure Winston Churchill's statue is treated with the respect it deserves, along with the other sacred war memorials around our country.”

Prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has given his backing to the new policy. He told the newspaper: “Sir Winston Churchill stands at the summit of our country's greatest heroes, and has been an inspiration to every prime minister that has followed him.

“The justifiable fury that is provoked when people use his statue as a platform for their protests speaks to the deep and enduring love that all decent British people have for Sir Winston.

“It is the least we owe him, and the rest of the greatest generation, to make those acts criminal.”

The 12-foot statue of the World War II leader was unveiled in Westminster Square in 1973 by his widow, Clementine, eight years after her husband had died. Both Queen Elizabeth II and the Queen Mother attended the ceremony.

It’s understood that Churchill personally chose the spot where he wanted the statue when the redevelopment for Parliament Square was being approved in the 1950s.

The statue has been targeted by demonstrators over the years. During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, the statue was daubed with graffiti.