Tag Archives: Gladstone

There is controversy around the decision to rename Gladstone Hall at Liverpool University, citing the fact that Gladstone’s family earned their wealth on the back of the slave trade and that as a young Tory politician, in 1831 Gladstone spoke in favour of compensating slave traders for the loss of their income.

It is my understanding that the decision to rename Gladstone Hall was taken democratically within the rules of the Liverpool University, and I find myself on the same side of this debate as the Gladstone Library who have stated that:

… if it is the democratic will, after due process, to remove statues of William Gladstone, our founder, we would not stand in the way. Nor, we think, would Gladstone himself – who worked tirelessly on behalf of democratic change.

That said, it is important that we do not in this act, or in calls for the removal of other statues, fail to acknowledge that people can change; indeed the cause of Black Lives Matter is entirely dependent upon that ability for people to change if we are to eradicate both the conscious and unconscious bias in our society today.

For that reason it is important that we reflect on the fact that Gladstone’s politics changed under the influence of people such as Richard Cobden and John Bright, so much so that by 1841 he opposed the equalisation of the duty on foreign and colonial sugar in the belief that that equalisation would aid the slave trade.  The evidence is that he was by this time campaigning against slavery, indeed by 1850 he was a changed man when in Parliament he described slavery as “by far the foulest crime that taints the history of mankind in any Christian or pagan country.”