Universities need to teach lessons in life Victoria’s clothes just don’t cut it

BRITAIN is in the grip of a demented hysteria. It’s mob rule with knobs on and every day the mob claims another scalp – or statue. Last week it got Edward Colston. Then it went after Churchill but didn’t get him. This week it wants, and looks like it’s getting, the Cecil Rhodes statue at Oxford’s Oriel College.

I wonder how history will judge these irrational, illiberal idiots whose violence these past weeks has led to what they stupidly kid themselves is a cultural revolution with them demanding everything they don’t like be erased – history, statues, books, TV shows. The angry little darlings actually believe once they’ve burned and banned everything that offends them it’ll be like it never existed.

Every day we wake up to more of the Anti-Culture Cult’s idiotic demands and worryingly whole areas of society are caving in to them for fear of being called that terrible word – racist. Universities are doing it, banks are promising to make slavery reparations, TV stations are apologising for programmes they made 40 years ago, entertainers are cravenly begging for mercy because of jokes they made 20 years ago. All of which achieves nothing – and has got sod all to do with the murder of George Floyd.

But still, the cult is determined to have its way and those who dare to have a different opinion to it are publicly targeted, crushed and destroyed on the altar of social media. The Cult demands that your view of history tallies with theirs – if not you’re trashed as racist scum or white supremacists who don’t deserve to exist.

How will future generations judge The Cult’s puerile attempts to fight racism when it is too stupid to see it is actually escalating it? As black social commentator, Mo Kanneh, tweeted over a photo of John Cleese as Basil Fawlty:

“This is all going to negatively impact on black people who didn’t ask for or want this cultural purge.” As will Oxford University’s decision to tell students that if their performance in exams has been affected by the trauma of Floyd’s death they can claim mitigating circumstances.

University vice chancellor, Professor Louise Richardson said: “We are determined to support black students in every way possible.” I wonder if she’s determined to patronise and infantilise them as well because that’s what she’s doing by suggesting that a murder 4,000 miles away will somehow affect black students more than white.

YES, Floyd’s brutal death was indefensible but why should a murder in another country render students here unable to work? This is the logic of a victim cult which is increasingly infecting universities. And frankly it’s racist. Universities are supposed to prepare students for their future. How – when they are incapable of accepting not just the past – but the present? The world can be a bad place where terrible things happen.

It’s the job of educators to equip them to cope, not tell them they’re victims entitled to feel destroyed because they’ve had to look at a statue they don’t like and hear opinions that offend them. Young people need to be stronger than that. But, no matter how much they stamp their little feet The Cult can’t and won’t be allowed to ban or erase history. It happened and these two-bob revolutionaries screaming racism and colonialism need to get over it.Their belief that tearing down statues of people who lived hundreds of years ago (and achieved a damn sight more than they ever will) will somehow erase racism makes them look as naïve and stupid as they are.

WHAT PRICE Victoria Beckham’s ego? Posh is set to take a £6.4million loan from a London-based investment company to save her ailing fashion business – presumably because husband David refuses to throw any more of his cash at his wife’s vanity project which has already racked up £42million in losses.

Why does Posh persist in pouring good money after bad into a business that’s a dead duck? And if she thinks keeping it alive is preserving her name and her reputation in the fashion world, she’s deluded. She’s actually embarrassing herself reminding everyone that her clothes and her business just don’t cut it.

She needs to call it a day and go back to what she’s good at. Just remind me what that is again?

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IF THE removal of offensive statues is so important to the BBC (and judging by their biased coverage of the recent protests, it is), I’m wondering why it hasn’t yet torn down the statue of Prospero and Ariel by Eric Gill that stands in front of Broadcasting House.

In his own diaries Gill revealed he abused his two daughters AND the family dog. He also had an incestuous relationship with his younger sister Gladys.

So, is the fact this paedo raped and abused his children, his sister and the family dog not offensive enough for the BBC?