What’s wrong with saying ‘Rule, Britannia’?

In the age of Zoom lectures and distance learning, it is almost comforting to know that students’ unions are still up to their mad censorious antics. The new normal cannot dent their zealotry, as a recent story from the University of Aberdeen attests.

The Telegraph reports today that Elizabeth Heverin, a 19-year-old history and politics student, has been banned from all students’ union buildings, debates and services for two weeks for supposedly saying ‘Rule, Britannia’ during an online discussion in December.

She sits on Aberdeen University Students’ Association’s council, and they were discussing whether to renew the union’s ‘demilitarised campus’ policy, whereby the army is banned from recruiting students in union buildings or at union events.

International students had reportedly said the presence of the military on campus would ‘make them feel uncomfortable, due to links with colonialism and the British Empire’.