BLM urges Oxford to give back ‘tainted’ Mosley donation
Anti-racism group joins protests over university accepting millions of pounds from family trust
OXFORD should hand back “dirty” Mosley money, a Black Lives Matter group has said as they became the latest campaigners to heap pressure on the university over the donations.
No university should take money from “violent racists”, the BLM UK group said. It has written to Oxford’s vice-chancellor and to the master of St Peter’s College to protest.
“We have written in protest laying out what we rightfully and morally expect Oxford and St Peter’s to do,” a spokesman for BLM UK said.
“We wrote ... to tell them both in essence that the Mosley money should be returned. No university should touch money belonging to fascists and racists, especially violent racists.”
The group is now encouraging its supporters to follow its lead and write to Oxford to demand that the “tainted and dirty” money is returned.
It is the latest organisation to raise concerns over the Mosley family donations. The Daily Telegraph disclosed last week that Oxford University was given £6 million from a charitable trust set up by Max Mosley, who died earlier this year, to house the fortune he inherited from his father, Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists.
Two of Oxford’s colleges – St Peter’s and Lady Margaret Hall – have also accepted cash from the Mosley family trust totalling more than £6.3 million.
BLM UK said: “Max Mosley was a racist and fascist. His father, titled Sir Oswald Mosley, was the leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s. Max Mosley published racist and abusive election literature about the Windrush generation.
“In total, Max Mosley made donations of £12 million to the University of Oxford and to St Peter’s in the years before his death in May 2021. His violent and racist past was public knowledge from 2018, but the University continued to take race hate money from him, nonetheless.” The donations have been made from the Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust, which Max Mosley set up in the name of his son, an alumnus of St Peter’s, who died of a heroin overdose in 2009. The £6 million donation to the university will be used to set up the Alexander Mosley Professor of Biophysics Fund, while the £5 million donation to St Peter’s will be used to build a new block of student accommodation.
A coalition of Jewish charities has also condemned Oxford’s “extraordinary” decision to accept “fascist cash” and urged the university to drop the Mosley name from a professorship.
In a letter to the university vice-chancellor and the master of St Peter’s, the charities said they were “at a loss” to understand how a Jewish student would feel comfortable being taught by a professor bearing the Mosley name. The letter was signed by several leading Jewish charities including the Campaign Against Anti-semitism, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Holocaust Education Trust.
Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary said that Oxford should explain to Jewish students why it took money from the Mosley family and that the university’s leadership must attempt to repair its relationship with them by “making sure they consult and explain the decisionmaking process”.
Oxford University, St Peter’s College and Lady Margaret Hall all said that the funds they received from the Mosley trust were cleared by an independent committee, which reviewed donations in a “robust” manner, taking “legal, ethical and reputational issues into consideration”.