Michael Mosbacher | The Spectator columnists & writers

Christ’s Hospital shouldn’t lecture pupils on white privilege

Students and teachers at Christ’s Hospital, a £36,600-a-year boarding school in Horsham, West Sussex, are set to be given ‘diversity training’. The plans, announced in June 2020, mean lessons will be given on ‘micro-aggressions and stereotyping’. Christ’s Hospital is far from the only public school to march headlong down this route; they are following a path previously trodden by the United States’s private schools. But this doesn't mean they aren't making a big mistake. The narrative of those who welcome Christ’s Hospital adopting the post Black Lives Matter fad for universal inclusivity training is that it is precisely the privileged pupils of Britain’s leading public schools who are desperately in need of discovering why they need to check their privilege.

Why Jesus College shouldn’t have returned its Benin bronze

Jesus College Cambridge can claim a world first. It is the first institution, at least in the twenty-first century, to return a so-called Benin Bronze because it was looted in a British punitive raid in 1897 on the historic Kingdom of Benin, now part of the territory of Nigeria. The College’s Master Sonita Alleyne has today handed over its Okukor – a brass statue of a cockerel that took pride of place in the college’s dining hall peering over generations of students – to Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments. Germany announced in May that its public museums would return their hundreds of Benin artefacts; Dan Hicks — Curator of World Archaeology at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum and a professor at the university — is itching to return that museum’s 145 Benin items; the Church of England is ‘in discussions’ to return its two Benin bronzes, even though these were gifts sculpted in the 1980s so could not possibly have been looted.

Bullfighting and the fight for Spain’s future

Being sanctimonious about foreigners and their cruelty to animals has long been a British tradition. The taste for dog meat in parts of Asia seems to incense many who perhaps should have matters closer to home to worry about – such as our collective addiction to cheap, factory farmed meat. When I was a child in the 1980s, ghoulish Spanish practices usually involving donkeys at some out of the way fiesta were a mainstay of Esther Rantzen’s unfathomably popular Sunday night programme, That’s Life. But sentimentality about animals has a way of catching on: South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in has suggested banning the consumption of dog meat and Spain is now debating whether children under the age of 16 should be prohibited from going to bullfights.

In defence of cruel foods

Fishmongers are an endangered species in London. Thankfully, 15 minutes walk across Westminster from The Spectator’s offices there is an excellent fish stall on Tachbrook Street market in Pimlico. Jonathan Norris’s stall — much frequented by 1990s Tory politicians — does a thriving trade in live lobsters. He will happily boil the crustaceans for you in his lobster kettle, but buying them alive is more fun, especially if you have children in tow. At this time of year the lobsters are Cornish; in the winter live lobster flown in from Canada will have to do. Buying — and then boiling — live lobsters is a sure way of getting children interested in their next meal, at least it is with my two boys. Seeing the crustaceans turning from dark blue to vibrant red and then the process of splitting the beast in half and cracking the shell offers more entertainment — the pleasures of lobster for adult and child alike are as much to do with the animal’s aesthetics as the actual taste of the flesh.

Who really owns the Benin bronzes?

Statues must fall. Bronzes must be ‘returned’. The artefacts in question are the famous ‘Benin bronzes’ taken by the British from the royal court of the Kingdom of Benin in 1897. The present demand is that they be returned to Nigeria; confusingly the kingdom’s former territory is now part of Nigeria, not the modern day Republic of Benin. In 2016 Jesus College, Cambridge announced it would be discussing the return of a bronze cockerel. In May, Germany agreed in principle to the return of the Benin objects in its public collections — Germany holds nearly 300 of the most prized items. In June, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art stated it would be returning two plaques. With the Benin bronzes (which are actually made of many different materials) we have a useful exemplar of the fashionable narrative of dastardly colonialist deeds by dead white European males.

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