Extremists shouldn’t dictate which historical figures are cancelled

How many statues will we pull down? How many roads rename? How many fine institutions denigrate? How many towering figures erase, Soviet-style, from our history? I ask because George Floyd’s

death in America last May, the rise of Black Lives Matter and the subsequent dispatch of the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston into Bristol harbour seem to have panicked many

British local authorities and public organisations into decolonising themselves without, it appears to me, serious reflection or consultation. If this bandwagon were truly being driven by

public demand I would be the first to cheer, but I don’t think it is. Indeed I am starting to find the knee-jerk haste and opaque methods surrounding the “cancelling” of tainted historical

figures disquieting if not downright sinister. It seems triggered more by panicky concerns about polishing corporate images than by genuine outrage about what happened several centuries ago.

Case in point? Consider how the name of Sir John Cass is being suddenly erased from London’s history. In the early 18th century Cass was one of the capital’s greatest benefactors. He

founded and funded schools, almshouses and hospitals that transformed thousands of East End lives. And the foundation bearing his name has carried on that good work to the present day,

thanks to the fortune he bequeathed. A statue of Sir John Cass in London GETTY IMAGES Only there’s one snag: that fortune largely derived from Cass’s position as a director of the Royal

African Company, which controlled the transatlantic slave trade. That dark fact hasn’t exactly been covered up all these centuries, but only since last summer has it provoked an

extraordinary scramble to hide Cass’s name from public sight. Within the past year two state schools and two university faculties named after Cass have changed their titles. Last week the

City of London Corporation announced its startling intention to purge from its grade I listed Guildhall a renowned statue of Cass by Louis-François Roubiliac, the finest sculptor working in

18th-century Britain. City University has declared that the Cass Business School will be renamed, much to the anger of graduates who value the name’s global reputation. And even Sir John

Cass’s Foundation is shunning its benefactor. On Wednesday it announced that it will henceforth be called the Portal Trust, and has plonked its own statue of Cass into storage. Advertisement

Three disturbing things strike me about this stampede. The first is that it has happened suspiciously fast. I have just looked up the speeches given at the July 2019 annual service of

commemoration attended by pupils of Sir John Cass’s Foundation Primary School. They were told to remember Cass’s “good deeds during his lifetime and the way his fortune is used for the

people who live here in London”. Not a word about slavery. Yet just one year later this prolific philanthropist was apparently deemed so evil that the school banished all reference to him

and renamed itself the Aldgate School. We have swung from one extreme of historical blindness to another. To its credit, the City of London Corporation did run a consultative exercise last

autumn in which the public was asked whether “items of contested heritage” should remain where they are. To its shame, the Corporation then ignored the result — 71 per cent of the 1,580

participants said they should remain — and decided to dump Cass’s statue anyway. That strikes me as hypocritical and undemocratic. Neighbouring Hackney council has also got into

bash-the-Cass mode. It has decided to rename Cassland Road Gardens (built on land bequeathed by Cass) after a review by “local historians and community leaders”. The most outspoken of those

on the subject of Cass is Toyin Agbetu, founder of a “Pan-African human rights-centred organisation” called Ligali. Out of curiosity, I looked up Ligali’s website. It’s refreshingly

forthright at least. Ligali wants “total socio-political revolution”, believing western democracy is “fundamentally corrupt”. To counter the “racist” Tory government, it declares, “it’s now

time to go back to being ungovernable”. I admire this frankness, but don’t believe it reflects what most people in Hackney want, and don’t see why extremists should now be playing a leading

role in deciding who can or can’t be commemorated in London. What should be a nuanced, civilised and scholarly debate has been turned into a slanging match between far right and far left.

Where will it end? Handel, the composer of _Messiah_, invested in the slave trade. Elihu Yale, the founding benefactor of Yale University, was an infamous slave trader in India. There are

dozens of other notable examples. Do we erase their names too? History isn’t that simplistic, and neither should we be. Renaming institutions and removing statues solves nothing, improves

nobody’s life, and actually covers up the historic crimes it’s supposed to denounce. It’s mere gesture politics, nothing more. Advertisement WHERE ARE THE UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE WOMEN? I love

nearly everything about _University Challenge_, even my own humiliating inability to answer more than two questions in any programme. If it were otherwise I would immediately conclude that

standards were slipping woefully in higher education. But that gender imbalance! It’s rarely 50:50, and frequently 6:2 or 7:1 in favour of blokes. In fact no women at all appeared in last

year’s final. That’s astonishing. Just because the programme hasn’t changed its format in 60 years doesn’t mean it should still reflect the male-female ratio of universities in the early

1960s. What’s the underlying problem? Feminists and chauvinists, psychologists and sociologists have all waded into these murky waters without providing definitive answers. I’m told by

students I know that a fear of being trolled on social media, usually lewdly, deters many females from applying. If true, that’s disgraceful, and hard to combat. Even so, I wonder if the

BBC, so concerned about equality elsewhere, needs to instigate a 50:50 rule here too. Otherwise bright teenage girls might look at all those line-ups of nerdy men and think: “Hmm, maybe uni

isn’t for me after all.”