Rustat's real legacy is truth

In attacking Rustat's old legacy, they have now created a far more important one.

This week’s verdict in the Rustat case has the potential to be a hugely significant moment in the campaign to protect our heritage. The government’s Retain and Explain policy may have its problems (fuelling the propagation of bad history through biased plaques), but it has helped halt the destruction of England’s public statuary. However, the Church of England – custodian of so many of our listed buildings and memorials – has its own independent planning system known as Ecclesiastical Exemption, which, when combined with the woke direction of its leadership, spells bad news for heritage.

Archbishop Welby has transformed the Church from a timeless rock to a fragile reed, blowing in the political winds and bending with every passing “progressive” movement. One day, it will blow over.

The Archbishop of Canterbury long since sold his soul to the woke devil, personally intervening in this case at the very moment of judgement with the agonised cry: “Why is it such agony to remove a memorial to slavery?” It is, of course, a memorial to philanthropy, but delivering the perfect hand-wringing soundbite was all that mattered. Archbishop Welby has transformed the Church from a timeless rock to a fragile reed, blowing in the political winds and bending with every passing “progressive” movement. One day, it will blow over.

Caught up in the hysteria of June 2020, the Church commissioned a report on “contested heritage”, which, though veering towards a version of Retain and Explain, crucially did not rule out removals. It was based on assertions high on emotion, low in fact, such as "the effects of enslavement continue to impact the lives of many UK minority communities." The evidence for such a statement remains unclear.

Rustat was destined to be the test bed. It was the first time that any appeal to remove a monument had been subject to legal due process. Yes, we had the Colston case, but that was after the event and quite different. The defence counsel went for Colston, but the Crown – naively believing it a trial of the accused and not Colston – offered no defence. “Expert witness” David Olusoga was thereby given free rein to establish his one-sided view of history and the jury – intimidated, as the judge acknowledged, by warnings about being on “the wrong side of history” – went along.

With Rustat, however, the defence finally went on the offensive. And it’s remarkable how little scrutiny was needed before their “false narrative” fell apart. At the core of the case – and, indeed, the entire culture war - was the question ‘Do emotions trump facts?’

“Most college witnesses seemed a little unsteady on the Rustat facts. The Master herself barely addressed them, preferring to make an emotional speech as if shaped for “anti-racist” learning materials rather than the issues before the court. Unless Rustat went, she said, she would not – could not – pray in the chapel.”

Charles Moore, The Telegraph (25th March 2022)

The judgement decreed that Dr Véronique Mottier, chair of the College’s Legacy of Slavery Working Party was “untruthful”, being “firmly wedded to her own entrenched opinions and unwilling to recognise any views other than her own”. It’s an argument that relies, as David Abulafia put it, on a “sloppy research” and a “distorted view of the past”. Quite simply, they were factually wrong. Not one penny of Rustat’s Cambridge legacy came from slavery.

Just as important as exposing their lies, is exposing their motives. Dominic Sandbrook put it succinctly when he said "They wanted to parade their virtue, and he was the perfect scapegoat,” continuing:

They claimed that Rustat’s money was tainted by slavery, but it wasn’t. They claimed his memorial was causing students ‘harm’, but it wasn’t. They claimed they wanted an honest debate about history, but they didn’t. And they claimed they care about victims of oppression, but they don’t."

Dominic Sandbrook, Daily Mail (24th March 2022)

And then there is the hypocrisy. In the last five years, Jesus College has taken nearly £1.5m from sources aligned with the CCP – a regime that not only stands accused of genocide, but is also home to 3.8 million modern day slaves.

Revisionist history relies on emotion, propaganda and a culture of fear, where even questioning the narrative means being branded a racist.

In coming to court, the Rustat case has blown the whole con wide open. And if every case against every statue came to court, exactly the same thing would happen. Revisionist history relies on emotion, propaganda and a culture of fear, where even questioning the narrative means being branded a racist. These things form the life-support system of their hateful agenda. Left alone in this poisonous culture that has now diffused throughout the West, the revisionists win. They are untouchable and “their truth” triumphs over “the truth” every time. But if you take it inside a court room and divorce it from that life-support system, it dies.

In principle, of course, any right-minded person should object to the idea of historical figures being metaphorically exhumed and put on trial under a modern day moral code they never knew. But perhaps, after all, cornering these bad faith revisionists in the witness box and shining the light of justice in their eyes - and on their lies - is the best way to beat them.