Talking Telford: Horrors in far-flung places mean a row over coloured lights in Telford
The global news headlines this week have been dominated by rockets, misery and the indiscriminate loss of human life thousands of miles away. Here in Telford, the horror of the last few days’ news has meant a lot of talk about coloured lights on a building.
In the wake of Saturday’s surprise Hamas attacks that killed hundreds of people in Israel, and the retaliatory Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip killing hundreds more, politicians across the world and the left-right spectrum have been sharing messages of support and solidarity for the people of Israel. So far, so standard - this chorus of the much-memeified “thoughts and prayers” has become part of the grim routine when the latest horrific news from afar is beamed into our TVs and our smartphones. It’s only natural - when we feel so remote and so unable to do the truly human thing, to ease the suffering of people who could have been us but for a quirk of geography, what else can we do but give what we can to relief efforts and in the meantime, yes, send them our thoughts and our prayers?
Among the local politicians sharing their own were the Labour leader of Telford & Wrekin Council, Shaun Davies, and the outgoing Conservative MP for Telford, Lucy Allan, both of whom used Twitter/X to express solidarity with the Israeli people and condemnation of the “shocking” (SD) and “barbaric” (LA) attacks by Hamas.
What happened next was stranger. On Sunday Ms Allan shared a photo of Southwater One, a prominent council building in central Telford, lit up against the night sky in red, yellow and green. The building was at the time illuminated in the pan-African colours in celebration of Black History Month, observed in October - but the photo Ms Allan shared was actually one Mr Davies had posted two days earlier, prior to the Hamas attacks. Ms Allan’s post on Sunday said “this is our main public building in Telford tonight” and accused the council of “a terrible error of judgment”.
She expanded on her thoughts the following day in a letter to Mr Davies (a photo of which she shared), in which she said the colours projected on Southwater One had “caused offence and confusion at this time” and that the lights had been a “misstep”. She asked for “immediate action to correct this”. It is not clear who the Black History Month colours were supposed to have “offended and confused”, or why Ms Allan had posted the same photo Mr Davies had used two days prior. In any case, Southwater One was lit up in Israeli blue on Monday night after all, and a bizarre episode in Telford politics was (hopefully) over.
