It is surely not plaques and statues that matter but the lives of people who suffer in slave-like conditions today.
The debate over the future of Tobias Rustat's memorial at Jesus College Cambridge is an important one, for it perfectly illustrates the growing split between those who claim to be offended by the past and wish to cancel it and those who believe we should live with the past and learn from it.
No sensible person doubts the fact that slavery was abominable. The question here is whether attempts to cancel any reference to historical figures who had links, however tenuous, to the slave trade does anything to change our actions today. Removing a memorial, whether it be to Rhodes in Oxford or Rustat in Cambridge, might allow us to feel better about ourselves for a fleeting moment, but does it change us for the better? The evidence, I'm afraid, is that it doesn't.
Look, for instance, at our response to the actions of the Chinese Communist Party, which is committing crimes against humanity today, rather than hundreds of years ago. A recent tribunal report, chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice, concluded that the President Xi’s government was guilty of widespread, systematic attacks against the Uyghur people, which amounted to genocide. This involves slave labour on an industrial scale.
Collectively, Cambridge and Imperial College have taken many tens of millions in Chinese money since 2015, and this is without factoring in the fees paid by individual Chinese students. At the same time, some of the academics at Jesus College stand accused of dismissing criticisms of the Chinese government's human rights record.
Other British universities including Nottingham, Queen Mary, and Liverpool, have opened branches, campuses, and joint-ventures in China. It has been reported that that some of the teaching in such institutions takes place under the supervision of the Chinese Ministry of Education, and that some degrees require students to take mandatory courses in the philosophy of Chairman Mao.
In the last five years alone, academics at British universities have jointly published over 10,000 papers, articles and books with academics at Chinese universities with the closest ties to the Chinese military and security apparatus. Westminster University's China Media Centre has made a healthy return training future Communist Party propagandists on how to navigate the European press.
Around ten universities – including Imperial College, UCL, Sheffield, Manchester, and Liverpool – earned more than a quarter of their fees from Chinese students. In 2020, figures by the Institute for Fiscal Studies showed that our universities earned some £7bn from fees alone.
It seems that the more we obsess over memorials, the more we miss the lessons of history. We should focus our efforts on learning from people like Olaudah Equiano, Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, who believed slavery to be a monstrosity and in their day were determined to stamp it out through boycotts and other means. They took action to counter inhumane acts – as we should do today.
Our universities remain shackled to a country practicing systematic slave labour and genocide, while our Government talks of deepening trade ties with China, British businesses utilise supply chains containing slave labour, and some British banks act as apologists for the CCP. When future generations look back, what will they make of this bizarre paradox in which we argue passionately about past atrocities while ignoring those occurring live, before our eyes?
It’s surely not plaques and statues that matter but the lives of people who suffer under the yoke of such brutality. For unless we apply the lessons of the past to change the future, trying to cancel the past surely becomes as bad as ignoring it.