The category was applied correctly. That is the problem.

The story

An artist has criticised street cleaners who scrubbed away a mural honouring a suffragette. Shannon Jackson's artwork depicted the activist Edith Rigby being arrested for campaigning for the right to vote. Days after it was painted on an exterior wall of her Preston studio, council workers washed away the mural of the local figure. They deemed it graffiti, and have since apologised for the error. Ms Jackson, 30, intends to repaint a larger mural.

The reframe

Start with what the council workers did right. They encountered unauthorised paint on an exterior wall in a public street, applied the category their job gives them for unauthorised paint on exterior walls, and removed it. That is the procedure, and there is nothing in the procedure that requires or enables the person holding the pressure washer to determine whether a given piece of paint is art, whether the person who applied it owns the wall, or whether the subject is a woman from Preston who was arrested for the same category of offence a century earlier. The classification was made in seconds, by someone with no authority to make it any other way, and it was almost certainly consistent with the guidance they were given.

The mural was destroyed anyway, and the destruction is not recoverable. The apology is.

That asymmetry is the whole mechanism. When an institution applies a category wrongly to an individual, the institution's exposure is an apology, issued afterwards, at no cost, from a position where the error can be described as an error. The individual's exposure is the loss of the thing itself. Ms Jackson now has to repaint, and has said she will repaint larger, which is a good answer and does not alter the accounting: she absorbs the cost of the council's mistake in labour and materials, and the council absorbs it in a sentence. Neither party did anything wrong in the ordinary moral sense. The consequence structures simply run in opposite directions, and they do so before anyone has decided anything about fault.

What makes this case worth recording rather than merely irritating is that the category doing the work here, graffiti, has no stable definition. It is not a description of a physical act, since the physical act is identical whether the paint depicts a suffragette or a tag. It is a description of permission. Paint applied with authorisation is a mural. The same paint applied without it is graffiti, and becomes a mural retrospectively if the right people say so afterwards, which is precisely what happened here in reverse. Preston has murals. Preston has commissioned public art. What separates those works from this one is not their appearance, their quality, or their subject, but a piece of paperwork, and the paperwork is invisible to the person on the street holding the equipment.

Once you notice that, the ordinary experience of walking through any British city changes slightly. Every painted wall you pass is in one of two legal conditions that are indistinguishable by looking, and which condition a given wall is in depends on decisions taken by people who will never be identified, applied by other people who cannot evaluate them, and reversible by a third group only if the resulting story is embarrassing enough to reach a newspaper. The rule is not being broken here. The rule is being applied, exactly as written, and the outcome is still one that everybody involved agrees should not have happened.

The subject matter closes the loop without any assistance from this record. Edith Rigby was arrested for campaigning. Her portrait was removed for being unauthorised. The point is not that the council is comparable to the Edwardian state, because it plainly is not. It is that the same structure appears at both ends of the century: an act is defined not by what it is but by whether it was permitted, permission is granted by an authority that does not have to explain itself, and the person on the wrong side of the line finds out where the line was only after crossing it.