Liverpool University shouldn’t cancel William Gladstone

After the fall of the statue of slaver Edward Colston in Bristol, it was only a matter of time before attention turned, once again, to England’s other great slave-trading city of Empire, and the figures behind it.

William Gladstone is one of Liverpool’s most famous sons. One of the great Liberal politicians of the age, he was prime minister on four separate occasions in the mid to late 1800s. There are a few reminders of this dotted across the city today, but the most notable are the halls of residence that bear his name, belonging to the University of Liverpool.

The university has now announced that it will rename the halls after receiving a letter from a group of students demanding it be changed. The petitioners demanded the university ‘stop normalising people like William Gladstone’ by naming parts of the campus after him.

Exactly how you can prevent the ‘normalising’ of the country’s only four time prime minister, who has been dead for well over a century, is one thing.