Will Cecil Rhodes survive the baying mob?

On 17 January the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities, and Local Government, Robert Jenrick, announced in The Sunday Telegraph that the government intends to “save Britain’s statues from the woke militants who want to censor our past”. The minister did not pull his punches.

[T]here has been an attempt to impose a single, often negative narrative which not so much recalls our national story, as seeks to erase part of it. This has been done at the hand of the flash mob, or by the decree of a ‘cultural committee’ of town hall militants and woke worthies. We live in a country that believes in the rule of law, but when it comes to protecting our heritage, due process has been overridden […] What has stood for generations should be considered thoughtfully, not removed on a whim or at the behest of a baying mob.

“We cannot—and should not—try to edit or censor our past,” Mr Jenrick continued. “At the heart of liberal democracies is a belief that history should be studied, not censored. We should apply the same scorn to the mindless destruction of statues as to the burning of books.” While it has been rumoured for a while that the government was planning on taking such a step, the timing of the Secretary of State’s announcement did not go unremarked in Oxford.

17 January was also the deadline of the latest extension for submissions that Oriel College’s Rhodes Commission had granted itself. The Commission was hastily voted into existence by Oriel’s Governing Body in June 2020, amidst the heat and noise of just the kind of “baying mob” deprecated by the Secretary of State.

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Setting aside the obvious question about the reasonableness of inviting teenagers to contribute to the policy direction of a multi-million-pound charity, is it really likely that the members of the Junior Common Room of Oriel have been unaware of the work of the body that their then-President and her standard-bearers effectively forced into being in June?

If the Commission continues to lack the sort of contributions that it might have expected to receive six months ago, it is because writing a proper and persuasive grown-up letter takes time, effort, and a genuine belief in the righteousness of a cause. Typing a signature at the bottom of an emotive email template sent by a JCR President, and sending it on to the individual Fellows whom one has been instructed particularly to bombard, takes a matter of thoughtless seconds.

As wise dons know, student politics is a fickle business: 40 per cent of an electorate does not represent an overwhelming majority in favour of change, whatever the way in which it may have been spun at the time. Furthermore, since the summer Black Lives Matter has been replaced by the new opportunities for virtue signalling presented on social media by renewed lockdown, Covid-compliance, Brexit, and Donald Trump.