Banksy's court art attack scrubbed

_{Slicing it off and flogging it would have paid for}_{the court reforms}

A Banksy mural which appeared on the side of the Royal Courts of Justice has been scrubbed off.

The artwork/grafitti (depending on your point of view) showed a protestor on the floor holding a blood-stained placard, while a judge in wig and robe appeared ready to strike him with a gavel (yes, a very inappropriate use of a gavel). It appeared on Monday on the wall of the Queen's Building, on Carey street.

Banksy included a picture on instagram with the caption "Royal Courts of Justice. London." Some commentators have stated that the image is a reference to activists who were arrested and charged with supporting Palestine Action, given that almost 900 people were arrested at a London protest last weekend, against its ban.

Labour peer Harriet Harman KC said she believed the work was a "protest about the law", but didn't specify a particular area. "Parliament makes the law, and the judges interpret the law," she said.

"I don't think there's any evidence, in terms of the right to protest, that judges have been clamping down on protest beyond what Parliament intended."

The mural was covered up by security guards initially on Monday with sheets of plastic and metal barriers, before being scrubbed off on Wednesday.

The HM Courts and Tribunal service said that the decision was made to remove the image in order to maintain the "original character" of the listed building.

The Metropolitan police are looking into the matter. Although some people may think the real crime was removing the image without putting it up for auction, given that Banksy's murals can fetch millions, when carefully removed, and the court could do with some cash.

The route to cashing-in was less obvious for Womble Bond Dickinson when its office was daubed in a pro-Palestine action earlier this year.

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Comments

Well done, Banksy. Championing idiots who are supporting an organisation that was proscribed for carrying out an inexplicable attack on British military materiel at a time of heightened global tension. Perhaps stick to what you're good at - hypocritically attacking capitalism whilst making millions out of your IP.

Audacious graffiti but fatally misplaced. If it was meant to refer to the arrest of PA proscription protesters, the irony is that it was the RCJ judge, Mr Justice Chamberlain, who granted permission to seek judicial review to challenge the then Home Office Secretary’s decision to make the banning order under the Terrorism Act 2000. The Judge said “ The evidence I have seen establishes that broad criminal prohibition can cast a long shadow over legitimate speech….”.

Well I'm as shocked as you are that we haven't allowed the walls of a listed building which happens to be a court of law, which is supposed to be a neutral forum in which disputes are fairly adjudicated, to be used as a billboard for ideological sloganeering. It's truly shocking that the graffiti has been removed in this way.

Clearly this is a grave freedom of speech issue and the progressive wazzocks wailing on LinkedIn about fascism are to be taken very seriously indeed.

Now obviously if Banksy had suggested that judges were 'Enemies Of The People' then that would have been an intolerable attack on the Rule Of Law, which is very important, and we would have hated it and would still be harrumphing about it in RoF threads to this day.

But picturing them beating people with hammers is absolutely fine. That's satire of course and nothing to worry about. There's no need to worry about The Rule Of Law here and coincidentally I think that it's a marvellous piece that insightfully studies the forces that move all our lives. Very clever. I am extremely sophisticated and smart and my world view makes lots of sense.

Auctioneers use gavels, not judges. Come on Banksy do your blo*dy homework!

Banksy crashes into the courtroom walls with paint and protest, only for the whole thing to be scrubbed out like it never existed—like history tidied up for polite company. But that’s the thing about disruption: it’s supposed to stick, supposed to jar. Erasing it just shows how deep it cut. Reminds me of ladder houses stepped into a hillside—awkward, precarious, yet impossible to ignore. They’re not neat, they’re not easy, but they tell you something about survival and stubbornness. That’s what the art was doing too—standing uneven, rattling the ground beneath it—until someone decided flat walls were safer.

Robin did another drawing. Bless.

I read in The Standard that a famously rich man in USA has offered his wise and insightful words that “The more they try to cover it up, the more it will appear”. I don’t know if he was referring to the Epstein files or a graffiti.

I am to understand that the lawbreaker going by the name of Banksy once attempted to graffiti a ladder house but became so confused by the floor distribution that he had to abandon him. Somewhere out there is a half finished work on an L6 floor, though only the most skilled can move the 100kg cooker blocking the relevant hallway without relentlessly banging on the Ventolin.

Absolutely ridiculous.

A British judge would use something like a cricket bat, a poker or a horsewhip. Never one of those vulgar little mallets.

“Championing idiots who are supporting an organisation that was proscribed for carrying out an inexplicable attack on British military materiel at a time of heightened global tension.”

[The attack, primarily involving spilling paint on a ‘plane, was vandalism of course; and, as such, ought to have been dealt with under the normal criminal law. But, unless you live in a right-wing media bubble, it was far from inexplicable. The obvious political motive for the vandalism was to protest against RAF surveillance flights providing target information to Israel. The proscription was disproportionate, and, given that the vandalism could have been dealt with under existing criminal law, it’s not unreasonable to infer that the proscription was not intended to deal with the vandalism, but primarily intended to stifle dissent and to de facto create a new category of thought crime, namely criticising Israel.]

“Perhaps stick to what you're good at - hypocritically attacking capitalism whilst making millions out of your IP.”

[Er, no. He was not attacking capitalism. He was attacking ethnic cleansing, which Moshe Ya'alon, former defence minister under Netanyahu, recently admitted is what Israel is doing. Unless you consider that ethnic cleansing is an intrinsic and inevitable part of “capitalism”. Perhaps you’re right about that, given Jared Kushner’s praise for the “very valuable” potential of Gaza’s “waterfront property” and given his suggestion that Israel should permanently remove all civilians while it “cleans up” and “develops” the strip. I guess that’s capitalism, Trump-style, but not all capitalism is similarly tainted.]

"unless you live in a right-wing media bubble, it was far from inexplicable"

Just because we can physically understand and explain the political motivations for a group of peoples' attack on UK military assets (and/or their ramming a van into the fence around a factories, etc etc) doesn't mean that it wasn't an act of terrorism for them to do so.

I'm sure many of us also technically understood why someone decided to blow up an Ariana Grande concert in the name of Islam. That too was terrorism.

Likewise, murdering a thousand Israeli civilians in cold blood and then keeping another couple of hundred hostage in underground tunnels for two years, and stubbornly refusing to give them back while crying that it's unfair that Israel refuses to stop being at war with you until you do. I understand it. But it's still terrorism.

Like other terrorist groups around the world, Palestine Action and its fans need to understand that just because they think that their political violence is justified doesn't make it so. If you want people to stop what they're doing and agree with you then you need to persuade them, it's not acceptable in a civilised society to give up on dialogue and to instead try and intimidate and persecute them until they give in to your demands. Doing that is terrorism. We send terrorists to jail.

The fact that you can't win a vote and that the electorate thinks you are fringe cranks isn't a free-pass to engage in violence until you get whatever it is you want that you failed to get by voting.

Isn't it weird to think that absolutely anyone could hold up a sign saying 'I Oppose Genocide' and/or 'I support the Palestinian Cause' wherever they like and it would be absolutely fine.

But some people are so determined to be martyrs that they hold up signs supporting a terrorist group instead and then cry that they're victims and that their freedom of speech is under threat?

Crazy times.

Social media has a lot to answer for.

The Banksy was painted on the side of the Queen's Building which is listed, but only Grade II. It is not included in the Grade I listing of the main court building.

See https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1469797

Harriet Harman's spin on the interpretation is whitewash. Its a very clear image of a protestor being bludgeoned not by a police officer but by a judge. the actions to remove the image from existence rather than profit from the art work is not a surprise, rather ironic as that is exactly what the message of the image was - crushing of protests.

A few months ago I was up at the RCJ. Met a lay witness outside who was very critical about the state of the railings, amongst other things. Vox populi

Pretty sure Banksy created it knowing (or strongly suspecting) that it would be scrubbed off...which only strengthens the message. Agree or disagree with the sentiment of it but it's a hell of an execution, as always. A+

Just waiting for the zionist crows to settle on this post and set their bots to "obfuscate genocide" mode again.

"Just waiting for the zionist crows to settle on this post and set their bots to "obfuscate genocide" mode again."

Everyone who disagrees with me is a bot!

After all, only a heartless bot could disagree with the suggestion that it is morally acceptable to insist that Israel to sit down at a table with terrorists and talk about how much they are willing to give to those terrorists in order for them to release the hostages they took in their latest act of terror.

We clear eyed morally virtuous types do usually insist that nations reward terrorists by letting them use the fruits of their terrorist actions as bargaining collateral. So it's very important that we don't ever mention the hostages or call for their release.

Commit terror = Get concessions. It's the only rational way to deal with the situation.

Only a bot could think that was an irrational approach that rewarded and legitimised terrorism and hostage taking. So that's what disagreement with me must be.

Papercuts, there is much in your post that marks you out as a moron, not the least of which is your complete misinterpretation of my point about him sticking to making hypocritical daubs attacking capitalism from which he then makes much money.

Maybe YOU should stick to what you're good at, which apparently is licking windows.