It was 30 years ago that I received my Oxford degree. This day is one of my proudest moments. However, when I think about my Alma Mater now, it makes me feel ashamed.
The revelation yesterday that the university and two of its colleges have accepted a £12 million bequest, derived from the fortune of the late British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, should sicken any right-thinking person.
But it is especially offensive to all of us in Britain’s Jewish community.
Mosley, a Hitler-worshipper and racist, was rightly interned in the Second World War.
Would Oxford be willing to take money from Stalin’s heirs? Kim Jong-un’s North Korean government? Perhaps a new library, endowed by Pol Pot
The new grants have been made from a trust set up a decade ago by Oswald’s late son, the Formula 1 tycoon Max Mosley, himself a thoroughly questionable character and – thanks to a seminal Daily Mail investigation – a proven former racist.
The revelation yesterday that the university and two of its colleges have accepted a £12 million bequest, derived from the fortune of the late British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, should sicken any right-thinking person
The new grants have been made from a trust set up a decade ago by Oswald’s late son, the Formula 1 tycoon Max Mosley, himself a thoroughly questionable character and – thanks to a seminal Daily Mail investigation – a proven former racist
Since the trust is founded on Max’s bloated inheritance – the tainted money of his fascist father – it is Oxford’s disgrace to have accepted it.
Oswald Mosley’s racist bigotry is well-known. He spent decades leading one crackpot far-Right sect after another: his pre-war British Union of Fascists became the so-called ‘Union Movement’ throughout the 1950s and 1960s. He was largely repulsed by the British in his wisdom.
However, one particular rotten apple was not too far away from the tree.
Max Mosley, who died earlier this year, was very much his father’s son. We aren’t concerned about his dubious sexual proclivities.: suffice to say that sadomasochistic orgies, including whipping prostitutes dressed in striped pyjamas while counting in German, are not to everyone’s taste.
Max Mosley, who died earlier this year, was very much his father’s son. His dubious sexual proclivities are not our concern here
His politics are more important than his views. Max Mosley spent much of his last years trying to suppress the press and hide his racist past.
In the end, not even he could hide the fact that, during the 1960s, he was an active supporter of his father’s movement.
On one march through a Jewish district of east London in 1962, Max Mosley went shoulder to shoulder with his father’s acolytes as they chanted: ‘Jews out!’
The Mail spoke to him about his fight against Jewish protestors, who were some veterans from the Second World War. The Mail spoke with one person who had relatives at Auschwitz.
In 2018, the Mail revealed the sordid details of Max Mosley’s racist history, including a leaflet he produced for a Manchester by-election in 1961, claiming that ‘coloured immigrants’ were spreading tuberculosis, venereal disease and leprosy, and threatening children’s health.
He refused to apologize for the appalling act until his final breath.
Today, Oxford University insists that it has taken ‘legal, ethical and reputational issues into consideration’ when accepting the donation from the Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust, named after Max Mosley’s son who died of a heroin overdose in 2009.
It could not have done it with the required rigour. One thing is that the Mosley grant can be used for the Alexander Mosley Professor Of Biophysics Fund.
I’ll say it again: the Mosleys supported Hitler, who murdered six million Jews – among them members of my own family.
The Mosley name will now be visible to Jewish students at Oxford every day. It is woven into the university’s fabric.
What are the ‘ethics’ of that?
Yet perhaps even worse than taking the money – and don’t forget, Oxford and its colleges have a combined endowment of over £6billion, so they are hardly struggling – is the context.
Oxford was forced to surrender for many years before being purged by a small group of awake students.
Curriculums have been ‘decolonised’ amid tortured debates about tearing down statues of long-dead figures such as the Victorian mining magnate Cecil Rhodes.
Peter Conrad, an internationally respected English don, bemoaned recently how ‘the academic study of literature’ has been ‘reduced … to an annexe of identity politics’, while calls have been made for buildings associated – however peripherally – with the slave trade to be renamed.
Oswald Mosley’s racist bigotry is well-known. He spent decades leading one crackpot far-Right sect after another: his pre-war British Union of Fascists became the so-called ‘Union Movement’ throughout the 1950s and 1960s
Sir Oswald Mosley (founder and leader of British Union of Fascists & the Blackshirts), inspects womens+ sections prior to a march up Victoria Embankment
Oswald, Max Mosley and Rhodes are figures of the distant past.
There are people alive today who bravely stood up to Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts during the 1930s.
I was a child at the time Max Mosley was viciously campaigning for his father’s Jew- hating Union Movement.
To their credit, several prominent Oxford academics protested the donation and are encouraging students to do the exact same.
Indeed, where are those oh so woke students now, demanding that ‘Mosley Must Fall’?
They are both hypocrites and the university’s.
Oxford, however, has a long history in this particular area.
Only last week we read how one Oxford college has accepted an eye-watering £155million from a self-made Vietnamese billionairess airline tycoon, with alleged links to that country’s tough communist regime, and who has been fined several times for using semi-naked stewardesses to promote her flights.
Linacre College is even changing its name in Linacre’s honor. It is nauseating to see double standards.
Since years ago, I’ve made a monthly contribution to my college. With a heavy heart, I’m now going to think very carefully about whether I keep doing so.