Shameful of university to pull the financial plug on slavery sculpture

This comes less than a year after a review of its own historic links to slavery and racism revealed that the university had received the equivalent of at least £30 million in “philanthropic gifts” that can be traced to the profits of colonial commodities like tobacco, sugar and cotton.

Based on present-day earnings, that is equivalent to £202m today, or as much as £845m based on the UK’s growth in overall wealth and productivity since then.

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The Edinburgh report found 27 specific endowments from donors directly linked to the slave trade and colonial profiteering. These were responsible for funding professorial chairs in music, agriculture, and engineering, as well as student bursaries, prizes, and scholarships. Funding also contributed to the construction of university buildings, including Old College, New College and the Medical School.

To put matters in context, in its most recent financial year, the university reported a surplus of £43m on a total income of £1477m.

It is quite disgraceful that a university that has benefited so extensively from the wealth created on the back of slavery is not willing to contribute what is a relatively paltry sum to deliver a memorial to mark this hideous trade.

Alex Orr
Edinburgh

I USUALLY find myself in total agreement with articles written by Professor Richard Murphy. However, while I mostly agreed with his recent offering (May 18) I also found something wrong, but I could not decide why that was. So I waited for some other letter-writer to help me. I found that help in a website comment by James Murphy (published May 19).

Of course! Neoliberalism is faulty and selfish. That is obvious and wrong, but it is not doomed to fail every time. Why should it just disappear altogether? I cannot see that. The basic failing is, I suggest, in all of us because we are all human beings with normal selfish, human failings. It is there. Some us have it in a small way. In some others it is a total way of life. I plead guilty.

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If a skilled tradesman offers to do a job for me but wants to be paid in cash, do I prevaricate? Or do I find some other way to pay tax on the sum involved? The temptation is almost overpowering not to be thought an inconvenient prude. So I am very afraid. Each generation will keep re-inventing neoliberalism over and over again. We can perhaps get rid of it temporarily but we need to pass laws to prevent it coming back again and again.

It is not just stupidity that keeps on recreating it … to a large extent, it is all of us being human that does that. It is like road traffic – we need strict rules to even things up between big powerful vehicles and invalid chairs.

Hugh Noble
Argyll

I WILL not be your only reader to be surprised by Richard Walker’s advice not to “listen to the claptrap about the need to concentrate more on what independence would look like than on how we would achieve it” (Whoever emerges to lead Labour will ignore fact that UK is effectively over, May 15).

As a strategy, this advice is neither compelling nor even sensible. The vision thing – what we shall do with independence and the ways in which it will be transformative – is crucial both tactically and strategically. Tactically because it seizes the agenda away from the doomsters, the gloomsters, the naysayers or the simply anxious: the emotional space where Unionists would gladly keep us. Strategically because we all need a long-term vision of where we are headed and a clear understanding of the staggering (even astonishing) opportunities independence will present.

Those like Lesley Riddoch, Robin McAlpine and Common Weal, Gordon Macintyre Kemp and Believe in Scotland are all in their different ways showing what this new reality will look like once we’re a properly functioning independent democracy. All else – the route – is tactics and process. And yes, these are hugely important. But we need both of these strands – process and vision – working together. Simultaneously. And both need equal respect.

Frances Roberts
Ardrishaig

ON reading the headline on May 15 “Farage ‘bought £1.4m house after gift’” I genuinely experienced a subconscious Freudian slip when I read it as Farage “bought £1.4m house after GRIFT.” But who knows – perhaps these headlines, both real and imagined, are completely interchangeable!

Bill Drew
Kirriemuir

ALTHOUGH English has become the dominant language in Scotland, a reminder of Scotland’s “pawkie” humour is worth an outing. The traditional Scottish saying is “A’ his buzz shaks nae barley.” Said of someone who says a great deal but whose words have no effect on the situation. “Oor Donald”, methinks!

Robin MacLean
Fort Augustus