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I do love being Scottish sometimes. So, essentially, there's a statue of Wellington in Glasgow city centre, and there's a long-running and popular tradition of drunken students climbing up it to put a traffic cone on his head, occasionally also the head of his horse. It's a wee laugh, people appreciate it, it even got used by the city's tourist board and put on postcards.

On Monday, the city council announced that they planned to spend £65,000 to remount the statue on a much higher plinth to stop this "depressing vandalism", but a massive outpouring of hilarious images and cone-based puns on Twitter and Facebook turned it into such an issue that it actually got a mini debate segment on STV's Scotland Tonight show, and the council have been forced into an embarrassing climbdown. Here's a wee selection of some of the pics;





Attack of the Cones;




And pretty soon, images of other landmarks showing "solidarity" with the Wellington Cone appeared;







I won't list the puns here, some are truly truly cringe-inducing, but if you fancy a good laugh look up #conegate on Twitter

What's the reasoning behind the new plinth? If they were doing it to match the ones in George Square (which is 30 seconds away) I could understand. I'm sure somebody would have still been able to get the cone up. If the only reason is that somebody in the council doesn't like it that's pretty stupid, it's a tradition and it hasn't spread to any of our other monuments.

I know Donald Dewar had to be put on a larger plinth because dick heads broke the glasses off the statue, I take it damage wasn't an issue as these things are expensive to repair?

There talk of doing the same thing to the Dickie Bird (famous cricket umpire) in Barnsley. The differance is that the DB statue is attracting rather less salubrious items than cones....like knickers or condoms?

 Medium of Death wrote:
What's the reasoning behind the new plinth? If they were doing it to match the ones in George Square (which is 30 seconds away) I could understand. I'm sure somebody would have still been able to get the cone up. If the only reason is that somebody in the council doesn't like it that's pretty stupid, it's a tradition and it hasn't spread to any of our other monuments.

I know Donald Dewar had to be put on a larger plinth because dick heads broke the glasses off the statue, I take it damage wasn't an issue as these things are expensive to repair?

There is damage to this statue, but it's due to it not being repaired for years and years, it needs a resurfacing, and the original work was planned to have a sheathed sword that was never added so they wanted to put that on it. They used that as an excuse to try and sneak in the new plinth by(erroneously) conflating the corrosion on the statue with the cone tradition - the plinth's sole stated purpose was to make it harder to put the cone up there.

Having now watched the STV discussion on the matter on catchup; ugh, where on earth did they find that colossal bell-end to argue against the cone? I mean I know people usually become hyper-sensitive and OTT around Remembrance day, but trying to claim putting a cone on a statue of a general from the bloody Napoleonic War is somehow "disrespectful" to soldiers...?

I saw that as well, every time he opened his mouth I was thinking how he managed to get his head stuck so far up his arse.
He's is literally the only person I've hear attack it apart from the person who set up the petition