I predicted earlier today that the purging of statues and street names associated with figures from the past with slaving links, however tenuous, would soon see the great Liberal leader William Ewart Gladstone in trouble. It did not take long for bedwetters at Liverpool University to decide that their Gladstone Hall needed renaming.
I laid out the “case” against William Ewart earlier but the students who wanted his name erased from history did not bother with any research on facts about him, but merely noted that his father owned slaves. Natch’ the craven academics did not wish to be seen as racist and caved at once. The sins of the father being enough to make William Ewart a non-person.
I did not think that things would happen so fast. At this rate we will get to the book burning stage by the start of July as we try to erase any sense of balance or discussion about our national history. But before we get to that point, there are still statues to be destroyed and places and streets to rename.
In the current climate, I wonder how long it will be before the citizens of Melbourne Australia consider that it is shameful that their City is named after the 2nd Viscount Melbourne a British Prime Minister who described the 1833 Act which saw slavery abolished throughout the empire as a “great folly.” Melbourne was a staunch and vocal supporter of slavery. Even more so than the young Gladstone. Surely his days as a person, rather than a non-person, are numbered?
As I noted this morning, George Orwell predicted it all in 1984:
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. History has stopped.”