Tainted money

Something is very rotten at the heart of some of the UK’s leading universities. Oxford has been accused of breathtaking hypocrisy after it accepted a multi-million pound donation from the Mosley family. Two Oxford colleges – St Peter’s and Lady Margaret Hall – accepted substantial donations too. Today, this newspaper reveals that other universities – including Imperial College London and University College London – have also received money from the family.

Academics and university administrators usually have no compunction about moralising on the past, renaming buildings, threatening to pull down statues, curtailing free expression and “decolonising” the curriculum based on a reading of history that accords with an extreme woke worldview supposedly motivated by “anti-racism”. Yet apparently, in the case of these institutions, they are happy to accept money that was inherited from Sir Oswald Mosley, the notorious fascist and anti-Semite, and given by a trust set up by his son, Max, who also took up his father’s fascist cause.

In recent years, universities have made efforts to investigate the source of bequests made to them, particularly in relation to the profits of slavery. The argument that the money may have been put to good use – to the benefit of students and researchers – is usually dismissed as irrelevant. So it is perverse to hear the same argument used to justify accepting money from fascists.

If universities are so committed to diversity and inclusion, are they now prepared to give the money back? If they do not, any future efforts they make in examining their pasts will rightly be dismissed as mere virtue-signalling.