Jewish students tell Oxford: Hand back Mosley cash
OXFORD University is facing fresh criticism for accepting ‘tainted and dirty’ money after taking £12million from the family fortune of fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley.
Oxford and other institutions including Imperial College London and UCL are being urged to return funds to the Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust.
The charity was controlled by Max Mosley, the controversial privacy campaigner and one-time supporter of his father’s racist policies, who died in May aged 81.
Jewish student groups have said it was ‘inconsiderate and inappropriate’ for Oxford and two of its constituent colleges, St Peter’s and Lady Margaret Hall, to have taken money from the trust.
The row comes amid accusations that the sector has lost its ‘moral compass’. Yesterday Oxford don Professor Lawrence Goldman, emeritus fellow in history at St Peter’s, told Sky News that universities should not accept ‘tainted and dirty money’.
Oxford has faced multiple funding controversies recently, including a botched attempt to rename a physics professorship after Chinese firm Tencent, following a donation.
Meanwhile the graduate-only Linacre College wants to rename itself Thao College after being offered £155million by a Vietnamese budget airline tycoon. The university says major donations are examined by its ‘Committee to Review Donations’, but there is little publicly available evidence of its work or examples of rejected donations.
Imperial College London has also been under scrutiny over lucrative funding links with China, which critics say leave it at risk of intellectual property theft.
Max Mosley was a former student of Christ Church College. His son Alexander was an alumnus of St Peter’s College and died of a heroin overdose in 2009. Thanks to the money, there is an Alexander Mosley Professor of Biophysics Fund.
Imperial said all gifts ‘are subject to thorough due diligence’.
In 2018 a Daily Mail investigation exposed Max Mosley’s racist past after uncovering a bigoted election pamphlet from 1961.
UCL was contacted for comment. The Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust could not be reached.
IF degrees were awarded for rank hypocrisy, some of Britain’s leading universities would graduate with first-class honours.
For years, these hotbeds of Left-wing sanctimony have sought to erase any trace of long-dead figures they feel did sinful things, such as colonialists and those linked – however peripherally – to the slave trade. In this woke frenzy, statues have been toppled, buildings renamed and curriculums decolonised.
But those self-same universities are happy to pocket money bequeathed by fascist Sir Oswald Mosley to his racist son, Max.
If these pious institutions truly believed in principle, they would repay every immoral penny.