Monuments to Our Enemies, Pt 2: Lloyd George

If I keep this one up I should still be updating it in a couple of decades time. But aside from the odiousness of the politician in question - a man who prefigured generations of liberal imperialists by presiding over perhaps the most squalid and pointless war of mass murder in history, rightly remembered for an unguarded comment that 'we reserve the right to bomb niggers!' - what is interesting in this recent statue is how it exhibits the astounding, if occasionally amusing, decline in the public plastic arts under Social Thatcherism. There are loads of these things about, sculptures made by seemingly Jeff Koons-damaged supermarket decorators, scattered around the occupied metropolis. Most are distinguished by an icky sentimentality: 'Animals at War', 'Women at War' (incurring the ire of Private Eye's 'Piloti' for its placing next to Lutyens' minimalist, pre-kitsch war memorial on Whitehall), the Lawnmower Man canoodling colossi at St Pancras, etc. Seemingly shifted from a place on one of the eaves of Bluewater, this is a compendium of the style's mannerisms: cartoonish features, a hint of 'drama' (the tails of his jacket billow in the wind as he throws his biting rhetoric at Asquith!), the over-buffed Disneyland sheen. This is the public sculpture the age deserves - monuments to moralist mass murderers modelled by the artists of an idiot consensus.