"Between 1912 and 1914, a group of British suffragettes called the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) launched a campaign of militant action. Lead by Emmeline Pankhurst, they avoided harming people but committed various crimes to draw attention to their demands and put pressure on the government.
The frustration women experienced when their peaceful protests and participation in parliamentary enquiries failed to get the desired results. Faced by a government that seemed bent on denying suffrage to women indefinitely, the WSPU decided that more radical forms of protest were necessary.
Militant suffragettes destroyed contents of letterboxes and smashed the windows of thousands of shops and offices. They cut telephone wires, burned down the houses of politicians and prominent members of society, set cricket pavilions alight and carved slogans into golf courses. They slashed paintings in art galleries, destroyed exhibitions at the British Museum and planted bombs in St Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and near the Bank of England.
It is estimated that their campaign of destruction caused between £1 billion and £2 billion worth of damage to property in 1913-1914.
Pankhurst, a canny political operator, knew that their cause had to be kept in the news if it were to succeed:
"You have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, fill all the papers more than anybody else if you are really going to get your reform realised."
The militant acts of the suffragettes filled the papers but many supporters of the suffrage movement thought they were counter-productive. Public support for women's suffrage declined even though many people deplored the way suffragettes were treated in prison.
The prominent politician Lloyd George, generally a supporter of votes for women, thought that the actions of the militants were ruinous to their cause. Some members of parliament declared that the militant acts proved that women were unstable, hysterical and not to be trusted with the vote.
The parliamentarians who declared the militant actions of the suffragettes showed that these women were unfit to have a vote were, of course, serving their own political purposes and pandering to the prejudices of many of their constituents."
Yet we fondly remember the suffragettes for their protests and it leading to the female vote.
I'm okay with losing a few statues if it leads to much needed change.
I think the protestors are very much on the right side of history