http://rt.com/uk/238125-marx-gloucester-gnome-tory/

Published time: March 05, 2015 18:00

Reuters / Thomas Peter

Reuters / Thomas Peter

 

A Tory council has refused to display a commemorative statue of the philosopher and revolutionary Karl Marx. The sculpture was gifted to Gloucester by the German town of Trier, Marx’s birth place, which is twinned with the English city.

The statue of Marx has ended up in a back garden where it is currently functioning as a radically left-wing gnome.

Four feet high and made of bright red plastic, the statue was one of a batch of five hundred produced in Trier, west Germany, and originally gifted with the intention of marking Marx’s 195th birthday.

However, the local Conservative council did not think the statue deserved a prominent place and told the Daily Mail that doing so “would not be appropriate.”

Local resident Chris Yates is part of Gloslink, the cultural liaison organization which deals with ongoing relations between the two towns.

He put the spurned statue in his garden, telling the Mail: “It needed a home and my wife and I were quite happy to have it here. He is stood in the garden quite happily.”

“It is the sort of statue that guests will always make a comment about. It deserves a home somewhere in Gloucester. This whole thing started because the German people asked us what we had done with it.”

Conservative councilor Paul James explained to the paper: “It would not be appropriate to put it anywhere more prominent unless, perhaps, to warn people of the dangers of voting for [Labour Party leader] Ed Miliband.”

Born in 1818, Marx settled in the UK after being ejected from France for his dissident activities. He died in March 1883 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery in North London.

Visiting the father of communism’s grave costs adults £4, arguably lending some ironic weight to the arguments he made during his lifetime.

It is unclear whether the arrival of Marx in the Gloucestershire garden has influenced the revolutionary consciousness of Mr Yates’ other garden gnomes.