Statues In General

I'm not much of a lover of statues and i don't buy for a second the argument that those of the people currently standing around in parks and city centers should be left there as a reminder of our past indiscretions.
They were built and prominently placed to honour them, i doubt many people knew the dark stories behind Colston or Rhodes until the furor blew up about them but leaving them in place just seems to condone them, literally placing them on a pedestal.
Apart from racists and slave traders, many of our statues are of long dead military personnel and i am with the pigeons on what we think of celebrating them.
Brits do have a strange compulsion to put things on Statues, usually wigs and traffic cones, the nearby Charles Dickens statue is a regular recipient of a comic relief red nose and is currently sporting a face mask but if we are going to have statues, pick people who have benefited mankind such as Darwin, Newton, Watt, Fleming, Shakespeare or Nightingale, all people who made enduring contributions to our existence and should be celebrated front and center on 40ft high columns, not some Admiral who mowed down Johnny Foreigner a few centuries ago.
I say a rule of thumb should be if your ships transported 84,000 men, women and children to slavery then the statue is probably not of someone who should be celebrated and to say it was a different time then, it was, but doesn't mean it was right then, just means people were more able to get away with it then.