A GIANT vs A PYGMY

He was arguably our greatest PM. Yet students want to remove his name from a university building for that of an achingly pious, Left-wing TV presenter on a minority channel

WHEN I write about history, I am often struck by the fact that it is the little things — silly, even ridiculous, things — that tell us most about the anxieties and obsessions of our society. No story could be more ridiculous than the fuss this week in Liverpool, where dozens of students have signed an online petition to remove the name of William Gladstone, that giant of Victorian politics, from a university hall of residence.

Yet no story is more revealing about the modish obsessions, the blind ignorance, the strident intolerance and sheer authoritarianism of the student activists who are now so distressingly prominent in our great universities.

You might, of course, think that since Gladstone served four times as Prime Minister between 1868 and 1894, championed political reform, home rule for Ireland and working-class rights, and even campaigned against the excesses of British imperialism, he would be safe from the lynch mobs.

Indeed, when I first read the story in yesterday’s Mail, I thought it must be a spoof, for no satirist could invent some of the details.

It all began with a student, Alisha Raithatha, 20, from Birmingham. She spent her first year at Liverpool University living in the Roscoe and Gladstone Halls, apparently without ever wondering much about Gladstone.

But then — disaster! After visiting the city’s slavery museum with friends, Ms Raithatha discovered that Gladstone, born in Liverpool in 1809, was the son of a local merchant, Sir John Gladstone.

As the owner of large sugar plantations in the Caribbean, Sir John was compensated with the equivalent of about £83 million today after slavery was abolished in 1833. It is worth noting that the slaves were Sir John’s, not his son’s.

But, as a young man, William opposed abolition — not surprisingly, you might think, since his father’s business was bound up with slavery. And as a young MP he helped to get his father compensation from the government — again, not very surprisingly, since he was a loving and dutiful son.

To Ms Raithatha, however, all this came as a terrible shock. ‘I didn’t realise — I don’t think anybody did,’ she told the Liverpool Echo.

‘I looked it up and realised William Gladstone wasn’t in favour of abolishing slavery. I was a bit disgusted to live in the building without realising that history.’

SOSHE began a petition on the Liverpool Guild of Students’ website, explaining she was ‘horrified’ by the news about Gladstone’s past.

‘We believe,’ the petition says, that ‘ someone with this controversial background should not have a university hall named after them, especially in a city where we try hard not to forget the atrocities that took place on our docks.’

Where on earth do you start with all this?

For instance, hasn’t it occurred to Ms Raithatha that times were different then? Has it not struck her that people in the past did not live with the same values as us? Does she not realise that thousands of otherwise decent people participated in and profited from the slave trade, which we now regard as so abhorrent?

Above all, can she not see that this is merely a footnote in Gladstone’s mighty career — one which made him a friend of the weak, a sworn opponent of cant and bigotry, a critic of imperialism, a voice for reform and one of the greatest Prime Ministers in our history?

If Gladstone is not safe from the fanatics who want to rewrite history, then no one is.

Indeed, it is only a few weeks since a former BBC producer, writing in the Guardian, called for Lord Nelson’s statue to be pulled down from his famous column in London’s Trafalgar Square on the grounds that he ‘used his seat in the House of Lords’ to support his friends who ran slave plantations in the West Indies.

How long, I wonder, before they come for Churchill?

But back to Liverpool. For not content with calling for Gladstone’s name to be removed from the student hall, Ms Raithatha offered a suggestion that is too glorious even for fiction.

The hall, she said, should be renamed after somebody more appropriate — namely that titan of our history Jon Snow, the Channel 4 newsreader and darling of the virtue-signalling chattering classes, who was kicked out of Liverpool University as a young man for protesting against apartheid.

I confess that when I read those words, I laughed so much I choked on my porridge. And even now I have a nagging suspicion Ms Raithatha is simply a parody invented by my Mail colleague, the sat i r ist Craig Brown.

But when I switched on Radio 4’s Today programme, who should be discussing the Gladstone fuss but Mr Snow himself! To his credit, he batted away the presenter’s attempts to compare him to Gladstone. But as a man of achingly pious opinions, he could not stop himself from a little virtuesignalling of his own.

The hall should be renamed after the hurricane-blighted Caribbean island of Barbuda, he said, explaining that it was inhabited almost entirely by the descendants of slaves.

ANDthen he threw in another, no less right-on, suggestion. The students, he said, could also consider the BBC presenter Mishal Husain, ‘who is a wonderful example of somebody who’s become part of our multicultural society’.

How patronising can you get! As it happens, Ms Husain was born in Northampton, so she has not ‘ become part of our multicultural society’ but is as English as Mr Snow himself.

She was educated at the feepaying Cobham Hall School, located in a picturesque Tudor manor in Kent, and then at Cambridge University.

Her grandfather was an officer in the British Indian Army and helped to launch a coup against Pakistan’s civilian government in 1958. So it would surely not be long before student activists tore her nameplate off the hall, too.

All this stuff is pretty risible, of course. And although academic authorities are among the most spineless creatures in the animal kingdom, surely not even the University of Liverpool would be so weak as to ditch one of the greatest and most progressive Prime Ministers in our history. But there is a serious point here.

For what this story reflects is the sheer extent of the liberal activists’ self-righteousness, their obsession with race and their utter lack of historical knowledge and perspective.

For the new liberal authoritarians, it is not enough to change the present. Like the totalitarians who ran the Soviet Union, they want to erase the past, too.

To George Orwell, the greatest of totalitarianism’s critics, all this would be depressingly familiar. In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, he imagined a Britain where dissent is punished as ‘thoughtcrime’ and history is rewritten by the ‘Ministry of Truth’.

Today, the self-appointed liberal activists in our Ministry of Truth want the statues to come down. They want to ‘decolonise’ Cambridge University’s English degree by turning it into a gigantic exercise in antiimperialist self-mortification.

They even cast television adaptations such as the BBC’s Howards End, now running on Sunday nights, with black characters who never appeared in E.M. Forster’s novel.

‘Who controls the past,’ runs the slogan in Orwell’s book, ‘ controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.’ The message could not be clearer or more chilling.

If we let the historical vandals win, then we will not only lose control over our own past. We will lose our present; and we will also lose our future.