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London's famous Nelson's Column should be toppled because the country's best known naval hero was a "white supremacist", a writer has claimed.

Afua Hirsch, a journalist and broadcaster, described how Admiral Horatio Nelson "vigorously defended" slavery while many around him denounced it.

She said figures like him "immediately spring to mind" following the recent news of "offensive" confederate statues being torn down in various US cities.

It is time, she said, that Brits "look again at our own landscape".

Nelson's Column has stood at nearly 170 feet in the capital's Trafalgar Square for more than 150 years after being constructed between 1840 and 1843.

It was built to commemorate Nelson, who died at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

(Image: @afuahirsch/Twitter)

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But in an opinion piece for the Guardian, "Toppling statues? Here’s why Nelson’s column should be next," Afua claimed the monument should be removed.

She described how "one of the obstacles" slavery abolitionists "had to overcome" was the influence of the Nelson, who was born in Norfolk in 1758.

She said the naval hero "was what you would now call, without hesitation, a white supremacist", who defended slavery as others condemned it.

"Britain’s best known naval hero – so idealised that after his death in 1805 he was compared to no less than “the God who made him” – used his seat in the House of Lords and his position of huge influence to perpetuate the tyranny, serial rape and exploitation organised by West Indian planters, some of whom he counted among his closest friends," she wrote.

She added that while Britain has been "almost entirely condemnatory of neo-Nazis in the US and of its president for failing to denounce them... when it comes to our own statues, things get a little awkward."

"The colonial and pro-slavery titans of British history are still memorialised," she wrote in the piece, published on the Guardian website yesterday.

Afua, a Sky News journalist with Ghanaian and Jewish heritage, claimed that the UK "has no equivalent site of glory" to mark the achievements of black people in the country at the time.

Her comments were slammed by some social media users, with one writing on Twitter that Nelson's Column is a "part of our history".

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(Image: Getty)

Another user, Andy Fleetham, posted: "History can't be changed, but you can learn from it. Social opinions 200 years ago won't be erased by kicking over statues #Nelsons Column."

And a third, Rob Howland, said: "Removing Nelson's Column in case he was a 'white supremacist' is ridiculous.

"He was of his time, judging him by today's values is absurd."

LBC's Maajid Nawaz claimed Afua's suggestion was "puerile".

“Where do you draw the line?" the presenter asked.

“Let’s start tearing down Richard the Lion Heart because he participated in the crusade and that offends me too.

“Why stop there? Queen Victoria, she reigned over the British Empire and colonised large parts of the world including South Asia.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

“Let’s stop calling it Victoria Station, Victoria Hall, let’s remove everything with Queen Victoria’s name on it - including all the Navy ships we named after her.”

It comes as cities across the US are debating what to do with hundreds of statues, plaques and other monuments to the slave-holding Confederacy.

Some statues have already been removed this year in cities like New Orleans and Baltimore, Reuters reports.

Earlier this month, a "Unite the Right" rally was called to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The rally was organized by white nationalists and drew members of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

It was also attended by left-leaning counter-protesters.

The rally quickly erupted into violence, with a 32-year-old woman killed after a car ploughed into a crowd of counter-demonstraters.