We are living in a post-truth society

Activists wish to change the name of a school in north London because it is named after a road which was named after a dairy farmer who had the same name as someone the activists dislike. This is the Rhodes Avenue primary school in Wood Green, named after Thomas Rhodes, a great-uncle of Cecil Rhodes who died when Cecil was three. According to the activists, Thomas cannot be ‘disentangled’ from Cecil despite the fact that they are totally different people separated by two generations.

These genii would like the school to be renamed Oliver Tambo school, after the popular South African murderer and politician. It would not hugely surprise me if they got their way, seeing as the Labour leader of the council, a halfwit called Joseph Ejiofor,has said that schools shouldn’t be named after the relatives of ‘white supremacists’. Perhaps we should also cease calling roads roads because of the phonetic distress occasioned to too many activists.

The confected outrage possessing these truly stupid people devolves from the equally stupid Black Lives Matter protests, before which, once again, our spineless and woke institutions collectively cringed. It does not matter that virtually every complaint made by BLM activists is demonstrably fallacious. It does not matter that white American police officers are no more likely to kill black suspects than officers of non-white heritage (as shown last year in a study by the University of Michigan and the University of Maryland); or that the people most likely to murder black people are, by a huge margin, other black people. None of these realities — truths — which tend to disprove the BLM thesis prevent the activists from wallowing in specious victimhood or succeed in convincing virtue-signalling institutions that they are paying obeisance to an easily refutable series of lies.