JACK ANDERTON: This middle-class white boy from Tunbridge Wells has succumbed to the sickness I've seen sweeping our universities
When I saw the footage of a keffiyeh-clad Samuel Williams screaming, ‘Put the Zios in the ground’ at a pro-Palestinian rally, I felt not shock, but sadness.
Sad that this young, earnest and clearly passionate British man had been indoctrinated into becoming yet another foot soldier in a cause that he is unaffected by.
Williams has now been suspended from his Politics, Philosophy and Economics course at Balliol College, Oxford, and arrested by the police.
But a glance at his Instagram shows this isn’t the end of it. Other troubling images show him clad in camouflage khakis, wielding a presumably fake gun. In another, he’s seen burning the American and English flags. That a student at one of the world’s most esteemed seats of learning can apparently behave in such a vile way might trouble us – but it shouldn’t surprise us.
I don’t know Samuel myself, but hearing of his background (he is a white, middle-class boy from leafy Tunbridge Wells) gives me a clue about his motives. He has evidently succumbed to the sickness that is plaguing all of this nation’s universities, especially the ‘elite’ ones, and has infected so many of its students.
It is a malady that convinces young, privileged people – particularly men – to feel guilty for simply existing and to atone for their ancestors’ ‘racist’ pasts.
Of course, students have always protested – in the early 1990s they marched against the poll tax, in the 2000s against the Iraq War, and more recently about spending cuts. And academia has long leaned Left.
But the unhinged levels of extremism we have seen on campus over the past few years are down to one simple fact above all others: universities are more international and diverse than ever, thanks to record levels of immigration and the courting of higher-paying international students.
I felt sad that this young, earnest and clearly passionate British man had been indoctrinated into becoming yet another foot soldier in a cause that he is unaffected by, says Jack Anderton
He has evidently succumbed to the sickness that convinces young, privileged people – particularly men – to feel guilty for simply existing and to atone for their ancestors’ ‘racist’ pasts
Today, 40 per cent of Oxford’s students come from overseas, and at my old alma mater, King’s College London, the figure tops 50 per cent.
By importing foreign students – including many from the Muslim world – we have inevitably imported their grievances and conflicts. This helps, I believe, to explain why we see such scenes across universities today.
The recent obsession on Britain’s university campuses with the Israel-Palestine conflict has also, of course, been stoked by the far-Left – just witness the activists’ parallel preoccupation with trans rights and climate change. In turn, home-grown students are being lured into waging this most intractable of conflicts.
Just last year, Oxford saw pro-Palestinian campus ‘occupations’ (supported by more than 500 members of staff), in which camps were set up in or around university property, to call for Oxford to ‘divest’ from Israeli companies. And only weeks before the Williams incident, another Oxford student, George Abaraonye, gleefully celebrated the shooting of Right-wing American activist Charlie Kirk in a WhatsApp message: ‘Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s f****** go.’
This wasn’t a random student – it was the president-elect of the Oxford Union: a man who, just months earlier, had stood face to face with Kirk for a relatively civilised exchange at that historic debating society. I met and had dinner with Charlie Kirk in Cambridge myself a couple of nights before – and saw what a decent man he was. Abaraonye’s message was obviously unpleasant – but the university’s failure to discipline him properly was in some ways even worse.
Which brings me to another symptom of the university sickness: an obsession with ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ that has devastated the application process. Meritocracy is increasingly dead, and ‘positive discrimination’ reigns supreme.
Abaraonye achieved the grades ABB in his A-levels – well below the stringent entry requirements for most other students. He should never have been at Oxford in the first place.
But a glance at his Instagram shows this isn’t the end of it. Other troubling images show him clad in camouflage khakis, wielding a presumably fake gun
When Tony Blair set the symbolic target of 50 per cent of young people going on to further education back in 1999, it was sold as a bright idea to push more young people towards prosperity and better education. The result has too often been an obvious decline in standards at even our most prestigious institutions.
In 2019, when I started my own undergraduate degree in Politics, Religion and Society, I wasn’t naive about what university would be like: I’d followed the ‘campus culture wars’ in America and Britain closely. But I wanted to move to the capital from my home town of Liverpool – and wouldn’t have been able to afford to live alone there, as I preferred to, without going to university and taking advantage of one of the few state perks that young Britons get: the student loan system.
University was a profoundly disappointing experience, from the stifling atmosphere to the social stigma against anyone who dared to challenge Left-wing dogma in seminars or lectures and frankly, to the utter absence of other Right-wing voices.
But even beyond the classroom, ideology was inescapable.
My inbox was filled with invitations to seminars like ‘A Conversation About Race’: a deathly two-hour session in a ‘safe space’ on subjects such as how to be a ‘white ally’.
Increasingly, I came to believe the university system is a giant scam: a government-backed jobs programme for Left-wing academics and a way to enforce a credentials-based economic system for young people, while also conveniently massaging the unemployment figures.
The promise Blair once made, that if you went to university, you would secure a good job and enjoy a better standard of living afterwards, has been broken.
Yet, rather than address this widening chasm between far-Left university life and the real world, academia only seems to have doubled down.
Just look at their websites. Manchester Metropolitan University boasts a ‘Decolonising the Curriculum Toolkit’ – for its Science and Engineering department, no less. Durham goes further still, publishing a manifesto to ‘dismantle the longstanding hierarchy of knowledge that has historically elevated the Global West’s knowledge system above others’.
Earlier this year my own alma mater, King’s, advertised an internship on ‘radicalisation and violent extremism’. Yet it ignored the main wellspring of these issues – radical Islamism – and instead focused inevitably on ‘far-Right/ideologically motivated extremism’.
Oxford and Cambridge have long pioneered ‘unconscious bias’ and race workshops for freshers, leading them to be crowned the wokest universities in Britain in 2023. Against this backdrop, is anyone really surprised that Samuel Williams behaves the way he does?
The British Right almost totally abandoned our university system for decades – and only now do they seem to realise that the fightback must begin.
That’s partly why I’m touring universities across our country, starting this Saturday at Durham, as part of my ‘A New Dawn’ Tour.
I want to talk to students, friendly or unfriendly, about their future, Britain’s future and how we can restore universities to their proper position as a free marketplace for ideas. Because if something doesn’t change, ever more deluded fools like Samuel Williams will be spawned from our once-great seats of learning.
Jack Anderton is a political consultant for Reform UK
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