Sandy Stoddart, the sculptor who created the new likeness of Adam Smith, has branded Edinburgh City Council a “tin-pot dictatorship” governed by “philistinism” over its plan to take down George Street's most famous statues.

The proposal to remove the monuments to William Pitt, George IV and Thomas Chalmers, revealed this year, was said to be a temporary measure to accommodate roadworks associated with the city's tram system. However Mr Stoddart fears that once removed, the statues will not return.

“It would be perfectly tin-pot to remove them. Tin-pot dictatorships take down statues. This is the end of the culture which Edinburgh is so proud of,” said the artist who has been commissioned by the Royal Society of Edinburgh to create a statue of the physicist James Clerk Maxwell for the east end of George Street. The sculptor has already completed statues of David Hume, on the Royal Mile, and Robert Louis Stevenson, at Corstorphine.

“As far as these people are concerned, the city is not big enough for both cars and statues. Statues get in the way of cars - so statues must go - but I say that cars must defer to statues and then the world will be calm.”

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